SOUL FOOD:

The California Supreme Court ruling allowing California gay and lesbian couples to marry left many in Huntington Beach places of worship feeling rather like Dorothy in Oz — not in Kansas anymore. That is, if Kansas stands for a Judeo-Christian society with traditional religious values.

But for residents like Drew Griffin and Ty Bradley, and their partners, June 16 marked a day of liberation. At long last they are able to marry their beloved, when they so choose.

For 35-year-old Bradley and Scott C. Self, his partner of eight years, that will be the realization of a dream Bradley has fought for as a Log Cabin Republican for nearly a decade.

“If this survives the November initiative, it’s going to be a real blessed day,” the former president of the Orange County Chapter of Log Cabin Republicans said. “Scott and I definitely look forward to getting married.”

The initiative that stands to dash his dream is the California Marriage Protection Act, which seeks to overturn the May high-court decision.

A broad-based coalition of churches, other organizations and individuals collected more than 1.1 million signatures to place the measure on the Nov. 4 ballot, hoping to establish once and for all that “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” Among its endorsers is Sen. Tom Harman, who represents Huntington Beach.

Griffin, a 34-year-old wedding consultant and planner, lives with his partner of going-on-two-years. He believes people are going to see that same-sex marriage “isn’t going to kill civilization; Rome isn’t going to fall.”

The term “same-sex marriage” bothers him, though. If he must, he uses “same-gender” instead. On his business’ website, www.prideweddingservices.com, he describes it as “a boutique wedding planning company specializing in gay and lesbian unions.”

“I want to take the word ‘sex’ out of the [term],” he told me, “because we’re not talking about sex.” At the Santa Ana courthouse Tuesday, he observed, protesters hammered away at how “homo sex does not procreate children.”

They kept focusing on that, he said. But Griffin doesn’t get it.

His business partner has been married more than 20 years and is childless. She and her husband wanted to do with their lives and their financial resources as they wished, “to give to charities, to be good people in their own way,” Griffin said.

His sister, on the other hand, has four children, three out of wedlock and with different fathers.

“Does that make it any better because she [had] heterosexual relationships and had children?” Griffin asked.

The Universal Life Church reverend offers wedding services that include theme ceremonies — Phantom of the Opera, French Revolution, black magic, Elvis, police officer — and even drive-up services along with the more traditional, simple and elegant. On Tuesday, Griffin handed out business cards to couples applying for marriage licenses at the Santa Ana courthouse.

He didn’t tie any knots on the spot.

“They weren’t busy enough,” he told me, “They were able to do everything on the inside.”

But he did find couples seeking to hold nuptials July 4 and 5, as well as Nov. 1, the Saturday before the election that will decide the fate of the California Marriage Protection Act, if indeed it is on the ballot. As of Friday, opponents filed a petition to have it removed.

The act is as controversial as the Supreme Court ruling, which is big. The court’s decision put discrimination based on sexual orientation in the same constitutionally suspect class as discrimination based on race, gender, religion and national origin, a likeness which society at large appears to be uncomfortable with at best.

Among the 50 states in the union, 41 have statutes that prohibit same-sex marriage; 27 have constitutional amendments against it.

As Douglas W. Kmiec, a professor of constitutional law at Pepperdine University wrote to me last week, “A good number of mainstream religions understand homosexual practice to be immoral in nature.” Nevertheless, he pointed out, the 121-page Supreme Court majority opinion made no effort at all “to address the inevitable conflicts between religious believers and the affirmation of same-sex marriage.”

With its majority of Republicans and generally viewed as moderately conservative, the court startled the nation by being the first to create for sexual orientation a strict scrutiny standard enjoyed by suspect classes such as race. Strict scrutiny is the highest level of judicial protection provided by the courts.

“A law facing strict scrutiny [will be] struck down unless it furthers a compelling interest [for the state] and is crafted in the least discriminatory or burdensome means available,” Kurt T. Lash, a professor of constitutional law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, explained.

When the Massachusetts Supreme Court gave its residents the right to marry someone of the same gender, it did not do so by making sexual orientation a protected class. It did so by deeming that a ban on marriage between same-sex partners “did not meet the rational basis test for either due process or equal protection.”

Efforts to amend the Massachusetts constitution to define marriage as solely between one man and one woman failed again and again. In California, the fight is not o’er nor the battle won.

Those in our places of worship who do believe homosexual practice is immoral, — among them traditional Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Mormonism — worry about what is ahead if the California Marriage Protection Act fails. And they may have good reason.

In 2006 the adoption agency Catholic Charities of Boston was forced to either adopt children to same-sex couples or close its doors. A Methodist organization in New Jersey lost a portion of its tax-exempt status in 2007 when it refused to rent a facility to a lesbian couple for their civil union ceremony. New Mexico’s Human Rights Commission fined a wedding photographer thousands of dollars in April after she turned down the business of a lesbian couple.

“The California Supreme Court put the same-sex marriage claim in direct conflict with freedom of religion,” wrote Kmiec.

And he says, “It is not clear that [the California Marriage Protection Act] is phrased sufficiently to overturn the California Supreme Court ruling.”

Bradley envisions another way to peaceably deal with the clash. I’ll tell you more about that in a future column.

Meanwhile, if this is an issue close to your heart, e-mail me and tell me what you think.

MICHÈLE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She can be reached at [email protected].