California Chief Justice: Doing the Right Thing Means Not Playing It Safe
Ronald George, the chief justice of the California Supreme Court, is known as a moderate Republican who heads a cautious court.
Yet he made history Thursday when he wrote the majority opinion striking down a ban on gay marriages in the state. George told the Los Angeles Times in an interview that he doesn’t know if Californians will accept the ruling, but he felt he couldn’t be swayed by public opinion.
“If you worry, always looking over your shoulders, then maybe it’s time to hang up your robe,” he told the newspaper.
George noted that the California Supreme Court was ahead of public sentiment in 1948 when it became the first in the country to strike down laws banning interracial marriage.
His opinion in the gay marriage case considered the parallels. It said a ban on interracial marriage would be unconstitutional even if a state statute had allowed such unions under an alternative name, such as “transracial union.” Similarly, the state’s domestic partnership scheme denies gay couples equal protection of the laws, even though it gives gay couples essentially the same rights as married couples, he wrote.
The 68-year-old George told the newspaper that he recalled a trip he made through the South as a boy with his immigrant parents. The signs barring blacks from public establishments left “quite an indelible impression on me,” he said.
“I think,” he told the Times, “there are times when doing the right thing means not playing it safe.”
