California Legalizes Same-Sex Marriage

Both Kendell and Goldberg pointed out that the court's own justices were under significant political pressure.

"Given that this court is a relatively conservative court, mostly appointed by Republican governors, my sense is that this is a ruling that signals a new beginning that supporting the right of lesbian and gay people to marry is not a fringe issue; it's a mainstream issue consistent with fundamental American values," Goldberg said.

"This is a conservative court," Kendell said. "This was, by no means, a fait accompli."

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But Perkins wasn't the only opponent of the decision who spoke out today.

"I believe that the gay and lesbian community deserves to be covered under the same civil rights canopy as the rest of the citizens in state of California," said the Rev. Sam Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference and advisory board member of the Alliance for Marriage. "But ... there's nothing in our Constitution or adjudicated at the federal level that has defined marriage as [a] civil right, as [a] right of every citizen."

Members of the gay and lesbian community, he added, "do not have the freedom to usurp the right of marriage from my community."

Defining marriage as a relationship "with the functionality of two participatory roles for the purpose of healthy families," Rodriguez said that he welcomed same-sex couples to "create another system" to serve the function of marriage.

But today's decision, he said, "hijacked democracy, usurped the will of the people ... and was an assault on the institution of family."

Jennifer Chrisler, a lesbian mother of two and executive director of the Family Equality Council in Massachusetts, is married and raises two twin boys with her partner in Massachusetts. She believes that the best evidence in the case for same-sex marriage is the existence of married, productive same-sex couples.

"Having lived through Massachusetts' marriage experience myself, I think there's no greater influencer than same-sex couples getting married, being productive citizens, being good parents and doing nobody any harm in the process," she said. "We can show Californians who vote in November that it's a good thing for families to be strong.