Gay...Marriage...in...California!

One hates to be prematurely hopeful, but:

A tentative victory in California today, as a Superior Court judge from San Francisco City/County, California has decided that there's no good reason (under the California constitution) that the marriage laws should apply only to different-sex couples. This of course is pending appeal from the California Supreme Court (which has heretofore been silent on the issue) and the California General Assembly, which may yet approve a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage (again, subject to approval by the notoriously unpredictable Californian public).

The hard-to-find decision in Judicial Council Coordination proceeding no. 4365, "Marriage Cases" is available here in PDF.

(Weird possibility: If the California Supreme Court upholds, and then a constitutional amendment overturns without a specifically retroactive clause, there may be a limited number of valid gay marriages, with no new gay marriages performed. Such may be the case in Oregon if the court holds that the marriages performed in Portland were legal before Oregon passed a constitutional amendment.)

UPDATE:

An interesting aspect of this opinion is that the judge applies the strict scrutiny test...on the basis of the "suspect classification" of...gender! That's right, he doesn't decide the issue on the basis of sexuality, but on the basis of gender, much the way the Loving v. Virgnia court struck down miscegenation laws on the basis of race. This is not unprecedented (it happened in Hawaii in the early '90s) but it's been relatively unused as of late.