A few hours ago the California State Supreme Court delivered a 4-3 ruling that declared unconstitutional a state law prohibiting same-sex marriage.  The Court’s money quote from its decision is this:

“Furthermore, in contrast to earlier times, our state now recognizes that an individual’s capacity to establish a loving and long-term committed relationship with another person and responsibly to care for and raise children does not depend upon the individual’s sexual orientation, and, more generally, that an individual’s sexual orientation — like a person’s race or gender — does not constitute a legitimate basis upon which to deny or withhold legal rights.

“We therefore conclude that in view of the substance and significance of the fundamental constitutional right to form a family relationship, the California Constitution properly must be interpreted to guarantee this basic civil right to all Californians, whether gay or heterosexual, and to same-sex couples as well as to opposite-sex couples.”

With this ruling, California becomes the second state in the nation to legalize same-sex marriage. Massachusetts is the other state, and has done so since 2003.

Welcome to the 2008 presidential campaign, gay marriage.

Opponents of same-sex marriage have been preparing for such a potential decision by collecting signatures to put on the November ballot an initiative to change the California state Constitution to ban same-sex marriage. The Associated Press reports that if the initiative gets on the ballot and is passed, it would trump today’s court ruling.  

California’s governornator said this after the court ruling today:

“I respect the court’s decision and as governor, I will uphold its ruling,’” said California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, in a statement. “As I have said in the past, I will not support an amendment to the constitution that would overturn this state supreme court ruling.”

For the presidential candidates, this is a chance to make clear their position on a topic that has been used in recent years as a key electoral wedge issue. Indeed, for Republican presidential nominee John McCain, who has struggled to entice Christian conservatives to his candidacy, this is a big moment. Religious website beliefnet — at its “God-o-meter” — put it this way:

If John McCain wanted an opportunity to make common cause with the Christian Right, he’s just been handed it: the California Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the state’s gay marriage ban. One of the Christian Right’s biggest grievances against McCain is his steadfast refusal to get behind a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. This is a moment when McCain can reverse that opposition and make a plausible case that circumstance, rather than raw political calculus, forced his hand.

It wouldn’t be the first time a Republican presidential candidate tried such a thing. President Bush used the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s 2003 legalization of gay marriage as an opportunity to announce his support for the so-called Federal Marriage Amendment, now known as the Marriage Protection Amendment.

The amendment has gone nowhere in the years since then. But supporting it and roughly a dozen similar state-level constitutional amendments became the rallying cry for Christian conservatives who played a huge role in Bush’s reelection. The GOP’s evangelical grassroots have been unwilling to play a similar role for McCain for a litany of reasons. Will McCain seize this moment to try to change all that, reverting more to a Karl Rove style get-out-the-base strategy, or will he stick to running a much more centrist campaign by hedging on support for a constitutional amendment? This is a moment of truth.

To be absolutely clear: McCain has not only opposed the federal gay-marriage amendment for years; he’s blasted it, using such words as these when he voted against the amendment in 2004:

“The constitutional amendment we’re debating today strikes me as antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans,” McCain said. “It usurps from the states a fundamental authority they have always possessed and imposes a federal remedy for a problem that most states do not believe confronts them.”

He’ll now be asked about those words again. And again. And again.