That's my point. The decision countered the state Constitution. From Baxter's dissent.
Nothing in our Constitution, express or implicit, compels the majority's startling conclusion that the age-old understanding of marriage-- an understanding recently confirmed by an initiative law-- is no longer valid. California statutes already recognize same-sex unions and grant them all the substantive legal rights this state can bestow. If there is to be a further sea change in the social and legal understanding of marriage itself, that evolution should occur by similar democratic means. The majority forecloses this ordinary democratic process, and, in doing so, oversteps its authority.
"The majority's mode of analysis is particularly troubling. The majority relies heavily on the Legislature's adoption of progressive civil rights protections for gays and lesbians to find a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. In effect, the majority gives the Legislature indirectly power that body does not directly possess to amend the Constitution and repeal an initiative statute. But a bare majority of this court, not satisfied with the pace of democratic change, now abruptly forestalls that process and substitutes, by judicial fiat, its own social policy views for those expressed by the People themselves.
"Undeterred by the strong weight of state and federal law and authority, the majority invents a new constitutional right, immune from the ordinary process of legislative consideration. The majority finds that our Constitution suddenly demands no less than a permanent redefinition of marriage, regardless of the popular will.
"In doing so, the majority holds, in effect, that the Legislature has done indirectly what the Constitution prohibits it from doing directly. Under article II, section 10, subdivision (c), that body cannot unilaterally repeal an initiative statute . . . Yet the majority suggests that, by enacting other statutes which do provide substantial rights to gays and lesbians-- including domestic partnership rights which, under [Family Code] section 308.5, the Legislature could not call 'marriage'-- the Legislature has given 'explicit official recognition' (maj. opn., ante, at pp. 68, 69) to a California right of equal treatment which, because it includes the right to marry, thereby invalidates section 308.5.
"I cannot join this exercise in legal jujitsu, by which the Legislature's own weight is used against it to create a constitutional right from whole cloth, defeat the People's will, and invalidate a statute otherwise immune from legislative interference."
but the more you get to know them as people, the less you tend to think about that stuff. I am very friendly with a lesbian couple who just had their third child. Now, I am not friendly enough to know exactly how they had that child, and I admit being a bit curious, but I have seen how they function as a family unit and that matters more. It is impressive, and they may as well be married. The kids seem like normal kids to me. 
It just doesn't seem like a big deal. Ten years ago I would have thought that they "shouldn't" have had kids, but they are doing a better job raising them than 90 percent of the hetero parents out there. At least. So, who am I to decide whether they should or shouldn't? 
