On the New Republic’s website, Benjamin Wittes, who supports same-sex marriage, criticizes the California supreme court’s ruling and points out that the court majority has effectively branded Barack Obama an anti-gay bigot for his position supporting civil unions and opposing same-sex marriage.  (Or, rather, Obama’s professing to oppose same-sex marriage while somehow “respect[ing]” the court’s ruling and committing to appoint the sort of justices who would invent a federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage.)  An excerpt:

Another cost [of the California supreme court’s “so far outflank[ing] our political system”] is that slow drip-by-drip accretion of power to courts, that steady undermining of the right of people to govern themselves. In California, the deprivation of that right is exquisitely on display, for the compromise the court upset involved decades of negotiation and movement. The nucleus of California’s domestic partnership law dates from the late 1970s. Over time, it has grown more generous, by 2006 including all of the rights and obligations of marriage. In 2000, however, the people of California voted overwhelmingly to limit marriage itself to opposite-sex unions. The legislature has twice voted to extend marriage to gay couples–and Governor Schwarzenegger has twice vetoed the bill. The current arrangement, in short, reflects a series of evolving compromises set against the backdrop of a quickly developing social consensus concerning the value and honor of same-sex relationships–a process that the court treated as just so much bother on the way to a self-evident truth. Once upon a time, this bother had a name. We called it democracy….

In the long run, … it matters a lot how we make marriage equality a reality. It matters whether we brand the people who want to proceed incrementally as discriminators. It matters whether we take the time to persuade them democratically of what we believe. And it matters if we think so little of them that we ask judges to flip a switch and change the world and damn our fellow citizens if they dislike it.

I suspect that the best way for most supporters of same-sex marriage to come to share Wittes’s appreciation of the tough work of democratic persuasion would be for Obama to lose California, and lose the presidential election, this November as the initiative to amend the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage passes by a large margin.  (I’m making no predictions here.)