Ed Vitagliano
AFA Journal news editor
August 2008 – California judges are at it again, establishing law from the bench. Through a stunning abuse of judicial power, the California Supreme Court legalized homosexual marriage in mid-May. The court ordered the first marriage licenses for gay and lesbian couples to be issued after the end of a 30-day period.
The decision was by a 4-3 vote, and the ruling overturned the will of the voters in that state, who in 2000 made their voices clearly heard. In that election, voters approved Proposition 22, a ballot initiative defining marriage as being between a man and a woman. Even in the liberal state of California, more than 61% of voters approved the measure.
Homosexual activists and their sympathizers wouldn’t stand for it. They began a series of legal challenges to Prop 22 that resulted in the California high court’s ruling.
Since California pro-family forces clearly understood how persistent the gay lobby was in their state, they began collecting signatures to put another initiative on the ballot this November. This one would amend the California Constitution, in effect overturning the Supreme Court’s ruling.
Through other laws passed in the last two years, California schools are already indoctrinating children as young as kindergarten, teaching them that homosexuality is as normal, healthy and moral as heterosexuality. If the Supreme Court’s ruling is allowed to stand, teaching same-sex marriage will be normalized in the schools as well.
Since California has no residency requirement for marriage, out-of-state homosexual couples are able to travel to California and get married. One study estimated that as many as 70,000 out-of-state gay couples will do this over the next several years.
What will those homosexual couples do when they return to their own states? Activists plan on using some of them as plaintiffs in lawsuits that will demand that their marriages licenses be recognized. They want to use the successful California strategy and repeat it elsewhere.
AFA and other pro-family groups see what is happening in California as the battle of our generation on the matter of homosexuality. If we lose there – if same-sex marriage remains legal in California – then the culture war on this front is probably lost for decades.
As San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom gleefully boasted on the day the state’s Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage: “As California goes, so goes the rest of the nation.”
In anticipation of that critical California vote this November, AFA is planning the August release of a video focusing on the legalization of same-sex marriage in that state. Through interviews with pastors and pro-family leaders in California, as well as interviews with high-profile culture warriors like Chuck Colson of Prison Fellowship and Brad Dacus of the Pacific Justice Institute, AFA hopes to encourage Christians to turn out en masse at the polls and amend their state constitution.
The as-yet untitled DVD will also include shocking images of the first homosexual couples who showed up to get married in California, and it will include both a Biblical and “natural law” defense of the one man/one woman model of marriage. It will be an ideal tool for educating and activating Christians for involvement. It will be available on AFA’s Web site.
The Bible speaks of the sons of Issachar, “men who understood the times, with knowledge of what Israel should do” (1 Chronicles 12:32). Now, more than ever, we need Christian men and women to be like the
sons of Issachar. 
