In California, gay rights activists mark progress one step at a time

LOS ANGELES - No matter what voters decide in November on same-sex marriage, the election will not change one fact: Over the past decade, California has become the nation's leader in providing legal protections to gays and lesbians.

This has happened not just because of such high-profile gestures as the decision by Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco to issue the nation's first same-sex marriage licenses in 2004, but also because of a carefully crafted campaign to enact laws in the state Legislature and push for court decisions to support and enhance the new rights.

The changes have delighted some Californians and alarmed others.

Gay rights have been expanded in "little bites that people found hard to argue with at the time," said Matt McReynolds, staff attorney of the Pacific Justice Institute. "And all of a sudden, we are at a point where gay rights trump religious rights."

Geoff Kors, executive director of Equality California, a gay rights group, disputes the claim that gay rights threaten religious liberties. But he doesn't disagree with McReynolds when it comes to what his group and others have accomplished.

"In work, at home, and in all aspects . . . we've had such great advancement," he said.

The earliest protections gays and lesbians enjoyed in California stemmed from court decisions. In 1914, when Long Beach police arrested 31 men accused of being part of a gay sex ring, most went free because of a California Supreme Court ruling that oral sex was not "a crime against nature," Yale law professor William N. Eskridge Jr. wrote in a legal brief.

In 1951 California's Supreme Court became the first to rule that police could not shut down bars simply because gays frequented them. In 1961 it invalidated police spying in men's bathroom stalls, and in 1969 it held that public schools could not fire teachers for being gay.

The ruling that would figure most prominently in the same-sex marriage decision did not involve gays. In 1948 the court became the first to strike down a law that barred interracial marriage, ruling that people have a fundamental right to marry the person of their choice.

Legislative action on gay rights lagged behind court decisions until the mid-1990s, when openly gay and lesbian officials began to win election.

Sheila Kuehl, a Democratic state senator from Santa Monica who was the first openly gay lawmaker in the Capitol, recalled what it was like when she got to Sacramento in 1995 and introduced a bill to extend protections to gay students.

"It was a nightmare," she said. "The speeches that people would make. No one held back at all, talking about the most outrageous things about gay people."

Early on, the legislators made a decision to push for incremental changes rather than plunge straight into polarizing issues like same-sex marriage. The first step came in 1999, when Kuehl finally got her education bill passed and signed by Governor Gray Davis. During the same session, Senator Carole Migden, a San Francisco Democrat, won passage of the state's first domestic partner protection bill, which allowed gay partners to register but afforded them few additional rights.

The backlash began almost immediately. The next year, state Senator Pete Knight championed a state ballot initiative that defined marriage as between only a man and woman. That law, which was approved by more than 60 percent of the voters, was invalidated this year by the California Supreme Court.

But lawmakers had become comfortable voting for gay rights bills. And they saw that many of their constituents supported those bills, Kors said.

In 2003, Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg won passage of a domestic partner law that gave same-sex couples many of the rights married couples have in such areas as custody and community property.

During its most recent session, the Legislature - which now includes five openly gay members - approved five gay civil rights bills, bringing the total in the past 10 years to 50.