from SFGate.com:
SAN FRANCISCO — San Diego’s Republican mayor testified emotionally Tuesday about his transformation from a foe to a friend of same-sex marriage and spotlighted a central issue in the Proposition 8 case – whether the law can be based on prejudice against lesbians and gays if many supporters harbor no anti-gay bias.
With his daughter and her newlywed wife in the gallery, Jerry Sanders’ voice quavered as he described his turnabout in 2007 that led him to sign a City Council resolution supporting San Francisco’s lawsuit that sought marital rights for gays and lesbians. As a declared supporter of civil unions and an opponent of same-sex marriage, he had planned to veto the measure.
“I think the decisions I made were grounded in prejudice,” Sanders testified in federal court in San Francisco at the start of the second week of trial on the constitutionality of Prop. 8, the November 2008 ballot measure that limited marriage to opposite-sex couples. “I was discriminating even against my own daughter.”
Sanders said he witnessed similar discrimination in the 1970s, early in his 26-year career as a police officer, when he saw a gay sergeant driven off the force.
He said he felt “overwhelming love” as well as parental fears for his daughter Lisa, now 26, when she told him in 2003 that she was lesbian.
What tipped the scales in 2007, he said, was a meeting with gays and lesbians the day before his intended veto of the marriage resolution. They reminded him that they, too, had families with children, and “I was shocked at the depth of (their) hurt,” he said.
In cross-examination, Brian Raum of the Alliance Defense Fund, a lawyer for Prop. 8’s sponsors, grilled Sanders about his assertion that he bore no ill will toward gays and lesbians during the years he opposed their right to marry.
Isn’t it true, Raum asked, that many people “voted for Proposition 8 because they believed civil unions were a fair and reasonable alternative to marriage,” the view Sanders formerly espoused? Weren’t there “sincere religious beliefs on both sides?” Does a voter, Raum asked, have to be a bigot to favor the traditional concept of marriage?
Sanders replied that some of Prop. 8’s supporters fit Raum’s description, but the cause they backed was ultimately based on prejudice.
“I don’t think that makes them a bigot,” he said, “but I believe they were saying an entire class of people doesn’t deserve the same treatment in their relationships.”
The plaintiffs, two same-sex couples and the city of San Francisco, claim Prop. 8 discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation and gender. They hope to persuade Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker that the initiative, promoted as a restoration of the historic definition of marriage, was actually an appeal to anti-gay prejudice and thus unconstitutional.
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