Legal News

Prop 8. Trial Opens With Emotional but Uncontroversial Testimony

By Ashby Jones

On Monday, one of the more controversial and high-profile trials to hit the federal courts in some time opened with the presentation of some uncontroversial evidence, testimony meant to show that gay people, yes, exist, and feel discriminated against.

The testimony of two lesbians and one gay man took up most of the opening day of a bench trial before San Francisco federal judge Vaughn Walker. The trial is the first in any federal court over same-sex marriage, and is the first step in a case that could reach the U.S. Supreme Court. Click here for the WSJ story; here for the NYT story; here for the SF Chron story. Click here, also, for previous LB coverage.

For instance, according to the NYT account, plaintiffs’ lawyer Ted Olson asked his client Kristin Perry What it means to be a lesbian.

Perry responded with a tale of how she fell in love with her partner, Sandra B. Stier. "I remember thinking that she was the sparkliest person I'd ever met," Perry said. Writes the NYT’s Jesse McKinley:

Such human touches, of course, are part of the legal strategy Mr. Olson and his law partner on this case, David Boies, who have cast their efforts to overturn Proposition 8 as a seminal civil rights struggle.

But much of the morning, it seems, belonged to the lawyers. Charles Cooper, the lawyer for “Protect Marriage,” the group defending the suit Its lawyer, said extending marriage to same-sex couples would undermine its status as a “pro-child institution” and redefine it as a private relationship between two adults who love each other, weakening the parent-child bond and probably increasing divorce rates.

In his opening remarks, Olson said marriage is a “basic civil right,” and promised to share evidence that keeping it away from gays and lesbians caused them immeasurable psychological harm.

“There’s no question that what Proposition 8 did and intended to do was to take away the rights of gay and lesbian couples to get married,” Olson said. “It put them in a different category and that is discrimination.”

For minute-to-minute coverage (or the closest thing you’re going to find), check out Recorder reporter Dan Levine’s Twitter coverage here.

Photo: AP

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on January 12, 2010 (boomark / email).