California left behind on pot, marriage
Politics are just more complicated here.
[...] when voters elsewhere legalized same-sex marriage and marijuana last week, those outcomes were made possible by groundbreaking work done on previous failures in California.
"Prop. 8 is the best thing to ever happen to the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) community," said Rick Jacobs, founder of the Courage Campaign, a liberal, 750,000-member online network that has been at the forefront of the fight for same-sex marriage.
Two years ago in California, Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca co-chaired the main committee opposed to Prop. 19, while U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder promised in the final days of the campaign to "vigorously enforce" federal drug laws even if Californians passed the measure.
Law enforcement firmShould legalization come to California's ballot again, "law enforcement would continue to oppose it," said John Lovell, a lobbyist for California law enforcement organizations that led opposition to Prop. 19.
Washington state's leading corporate voices, including Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, donated millions of dollars to the campaign to legalize same-sex marriage, seven times what opponents gave.
[...] the U.S. Supreme Court is to decide in the next month whether to hear the case involving Prop. 8 and the federal Defense of Marriage Act, the 1996 law that barred federal marital benefits such as joint tax filing, Social Security survivors' payments and immigration sponsorship to same-sex spouses.
Pot advocates in California probably won't have that option, and they are waiting to see how federal law enforcement officials treat the discrepancy between federal and state laws in Colorado and Washington.
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