Over 11 years and 570 episodes, John Rabe and Team Off-Ramp scoured SoCal for the people, places, and ideas whose stories needed to be told, and the show became a love-letter to Los Angeles. Now, John is sharing selections from the Off-Ramp vault to help you explore this imperfect paradise.
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Prop 8 is dead. Lt Governor Gavin Newsom started the whole thing as Mayor of San Francisco, and we had a wide-ranging interview the day after the Supreme Court decision came down.
"Considering the conservative and cautious nature of this court," he said, "We did about as well as I could have hoped and expected, but yeah, sure, I wish they had ajudicated on the merits. I wish we had the kind of sweeping decision" that came from Judge Vaughn Walker.
I also asked him a tantalizing what-if question. What if then Gov. Schwarzenegger and then-AG Jerry Brown has not refused to defend Prop 8? That would have eliminated the possibility of the Supreme Court deciding as it did, ruling that gay marriage opponents have proven no harm, and so do not have standing in the case.
Newsom says he's had private conversations about this topic, but now for the first time publicly says yes, it might have radically changed the outcome, might even have killed gay marriage in the US, because the court would probably have decided the case on its merits, if it didn't refuse to hear it in the first place.