CARNAL NATION

Last night, while faced with over 700 pieces of legislation that needed to either be signed or vetoed before midnight, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed two bills into law that were significant to the LGBT communities. One commemorates the memory of slain gay rights pioneer Harvey Milk by making May 22 of every year Harvey Milk Day in the state of California. The other gives LGBT people a less symbolic gain by recognizing same-sex marriages performed in other states.

Both bills were introduced by Senator Mark Leno of San Francisco. Leno said that he was "pleasantly surprised" that Governor Schwarzenegger signed them both into law. The governor vetoed  a bill establishing Harvey Milk Day last year, and many expected him to do so again. The anti-gay organization Save California reacted with predictable outrage. Randy Thomasson, the president of Save California said "Harvey Milk was a sexual predator of teens, an advocate of polygamous relationships, a public liar, and is in no way a good role model for impressionable schoolchildren. Sadly, children in public schools will now have even more in-your-face, homosexual-bisexual-transsexxual indoctrination."

A surprising amount of press coverage has been given to the creation of Harvey Milk Day considering that the battle over gay marriage has been more intense and visible in California than in any other state for the last two years. In June of 2008, the California Supreme Court ruled that same-sex marriage fell under equal protection guarantees, making it legal until Proposition 8 was passed last November. Proposition 8 has become a national symbol of the controversies over same-sex marriage, not least because it leaves many people in legal marriages while forbidding future marriages between same-sex partners. The question of whether out-of-state marriages would be legally recognized was an important one that was considered to be unresolved until Governor Schwarzenegger signed the bill this weekend. Schwarzenegger said of the marriage bill that it "honors the will of the People in enacting Proposition 8 while providing important protections to those unions legally entered into in other states."