From The California Supreme Court's ruling on the state's ban on same-sex marriage (emphasis in original):

"the constitutionally based right to marry properly must be understood to encompass the core set of basic substantive legal rights and attributes traditionally associated with marriage that are so integral to an individual’s liberty and personal autonomy that they may not be eliminated or abrogated by the Legislature or by the electorate through the statutory initiative process. These core substantive rights include, most fundamentally, the opportunity of an individual to establish — with the person with whom the individual has chosen to share his or her life — an officially recognized and protected family possessing mutual rights and responsibilities and entitled to the same respect and dignity accorded a union traditionally designated as marriage. As past cases establish, the substantive right of two adults who share a loving relationship to join together to establish an officially recognized family of their own — and, if the couple chooses, to raise children within that family — constitutes a vitally important attribute of the fundamental interest in liberty and personal autonomy"

Now, I've plucked this passage out of text that clearly defines the scope as pertaining to the California State Constitution and its application in Perez v. Sharp, but replace that with the U.S. Constitution and Loving v. Virginia, and it reads the same as it should.

This is a huge victory. The California Supreme Court has basically said that the Legislature nor the Electorate have any right to eliminate civil liberties from one group that another group already enjoys, and draws a framework from previous cases showing that tradition is not sound legal justification for doing so.

These wins may look local, but they represent a changing of prevailing legal opinion and provide great ammunition for the showdown that's certain to go before the SCOTUS sooner than later.

-pb