Awesome Article on the inside of the Prop 8 Trial

Editor's note: Lisa Bloom is the managing partner of The Bloom Firm, where she practices civil and criminal law.

(CNN) -- There's a big difference between a political debate about same-sex marriage and the recent hard-fought court challenge to the California ban, Proposition 8.
In politics, anything goes: Vague, sinister comments about same-sex marriage threatening children or undermining the sanctity of heterosexual marriage were prevalent during the Prop 8 campaign. In court, same-sex marriage opponents needed solid evidence to back up these and other claims.
Despite "able and energetic counsel," they never produced it. That's why they lost, resoundingly, in the federal district court. And that lack of evidence should dog opponents up through the chain of appeals that is now beginning, because appellate courts are required to review only the evidence in the court record and to give great deference to Judge Vaughn Walker's findings of fact. He was there, after all, presiding over the trial, and the appellate judges weren't.
And what a lopsided trial he presided over. All the anti-same-sex marriage arguments imploded when subjected to the rules of evidence.

You don't have to have evidence of this point," counsel responded to the judge's question asking what support existed for their claim that "responsible procreation is really at the heart of society's interest in regulating marriage."
No, sorry, at trial, you do have to have evidence. Of this point and every point. (And since -- as even Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once pointed out in another case -- the sterile and elderly are allowed to marry, it can't be all about procreation.)
Trials turn on admissible evidence -- primarily credible witness testimony or documents, in this type of case. And Prop 8 proponents did not have it. Over and over again, Walker's decision focused on the evidence, the mountain of reliable facts offered by gay marriage advocates, and the glaring lack thereof proffered by gay marriage opponents.
The same-sex-marriage advocates presented eight lay witnesses and nine expert witnesses.
One plaintiff testified that marriage would be a way to tell "our friends, our family ... that this is a lifetime commitment ... we are not girlfriends. We are not partners. We are married." The other three presented similarly compelling, credible testimony about the damage to their dignity, the economic losses, the sting of discrimination they suffered daily due to their legally enshrined second-class citizenship.


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