I’m feeling very ambivalent about the California Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the passing of Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage.

On the one hand, by far the likeliest outcome is that a new proposition to overturn the ban will be on the ballot in less than two years, and it will pass. I don’t think out-of-state religious groups are going to keep throwing huge amounts of money at the issue election after election, nor is the same scare campaign going to work a second time. Without everyone’s attention riveted on the presidential campaign, we’ll have time to prepare better to counter the false arguments and to put on a better campaign than we did the last time.

(We can hardly put on a worse one. As a friend of mine said, there are two things we need to remember about the people who ran the No on 8 campaign. We mustn’t forget to be grateful for their enormous effort. And we must never let them run a campaign for us ever again.)

And I know that in the long run this will be a securer step forward if it’s accomplished by popular vote than by a court ruling.

But dammit, the decision still pisses me off. For a court to say that it’s okay to put it in the freaking state constitution that some people are barred from getting privileges that everybody else gets — that’s just flat-out wrong.