FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
SACRAMENTO—Just weeks before the California Supreme Court is expected to decide whether the official proponents of Proposition 8 have legal standing to defend the measure in court, Gov. Jerry Brown has nominated Goodwin Liu, an openly anti-Prop 8 candidate, to the high court.
“Jerry Brown’s refusal as Attorney General to defend California’s majority vote for Prop 8 at the outset of the Perry vs. Schwarzenegger lawsuit was a dereliction of duty,” said Andy Pugno, legal counsel for ProtectMarriage.com, the official sponsor of Prop 8. “Now, by nominating someone who openly opposed and testified against Prop 8, to the very court which will decide our right to defend this measure, Brown is continuing his vendetta against the millions of Californians who voted to support traditional marriage.”
Prior to the voters’ passage of Proposition 8, nominee Goodwin Liu testified against the measure’s passage at a joint public hearing of the Assembly and Senate Judiciary Committees.
Then, in an opinion editorial published in The Los Angeles Times just after Prop 8 was passed, Liu, then an associate dean and law professor at UC Berkeley, continued to express his anti-Prop 8 stance:
“Changing the Constitution -- the state's paramount law -- in such a momentous way arguably calls for deliberative rather than direct democracy….The more familiar we become with gay spouses and their children -- as our friends, neighbors and co-workers -- the more gay marriage will become an unremarkable thread of our social fabric. Proposition 8 may then come to be viewed, in the long run, not as an enduring constitutional principle but as the will of a narrow and ultimately temporary majority.”
“Liu’s statement that gay marriage will become an ‘unremarkable’ thread of our social fabric, despite the fact that it would topple a societal norm found in every population since the beginning of time, speaks volumes about his bias on this issue,” said Pugno.
Liu also joined the effort to invalidate Prop 8 after the 2008 election. In a friend-of-the-court brief filed by Liu, he argued that the traditional definition of marriage violated the equal-protection guarantees of the state constitution.
“There is no doubt Liu’s opposition to Prop 8 was well known by Governor Brown in deciding to appoint him to the Supreme Court,” said Pugno.