UCLA Center for the Study of Women

In the days leading up to the 2008 election, the airwaves were peppered with commercials about Proposition 8, the California ballot initiative to ban same-sex marriages and amend the state constitution to limit the definition of marriage to a union between a man and a woman. An unprecedented fundraising campaign, second only to that of Barack Obama, generated over $74 million. Proponents associated “traditional” heterosexual marriage with the well-being of children, tradition, and the moral content of earlychildhood family education. Their opponents countered that marriage confers dignity, equal protections, and full citizenship rights upon gays, and is a core part of the equality movement. As an institution that is legally and culturally associated with the private spheres of love and family, the debate over government definitions of marriage restages its emphatically public, state-centered parameters.