Last week’s California Supreme Court decision on gay marriage hit on a couple of big news days — Bush’s “appeasement” remarks to the Knesset dominated play — and the rolling in of the first big “summer’s here” sorta heatwave on the west coast, that reaction to it kinda got delayed. Now that people have had a chance to wrap their heads round it, they’re beginning to realise what a bombshell it is.

To recap, oversimply: the court decided 4-3 to strike down a California law allowing for civil partnerships for same-s-x couples, the effect of which was to bar them from petitioning for marriage by offering a form of partnership of effectively equal legal status. The majority decision argues that there is no compelling social reason (as there is in a ban on incest or polyamory) to exempt such arrangements from the state constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.

The ruling has come as a surprise for many, because six of the seven judges on the bench are Republican appointees, and not social liberal Schwarzenegger Republicans either, but put there by earlier, more Reaganish California administrations.

Furthermore, the extension of marriage to same-s-x couples doesn’t require that those wanting to tie the knot be residents of California. Massachusetts, the only other state to permit same-s-x marriage, cut a compromise by having state residency provisions on marriage, thus preventing a pink avalanche of petitioning couples.

Not so in California. Once the 30 day delay is up, anyone will be able to rock up and get hitched. The state is expecting a massive influx.

“San Francisco will be getting a sudden and massive arrival of gays and lesbians,” spokesperson Frank Madeupname said today.

“Nothing in our history has prepared us for this. What will a massive ‘gay’ culture look like? We just don’t know.”

But of course the fun really begins when the thus-hitched return to their own states and demand recognition of their California marriage. Twenty or so states now have specific state constitutional amendments or unchallenged laws against same-s-x marriage — but how will that stack up against the provisions of the federal constitution regarding inter-state respect for differing laws (i.e. a divorce in Reno is good everywhere, not just in Nevada)?

I don’t know, but at the very least it will give scope for a series of successively higher court petitions on the matter. The question then is whether that process, should it commence in the next few months, would serve to reignite the culture wars, something as redolent of the first years of the new century as a Good Charlotte reunion tour. Yes, I hadn’t thought about them for quite some time either.

Would such an event prove as disastrous for the Democrats now as it did then? It’s possible. The provision of basic rights in the American system, and the fact that the country’s most radical leaders were its founders, means that the abstract legal system — as utilised by liberals — is always coming into conflict with the everyday life, lived as a set of embedded traditions and unspoken values.

One effect of this is that the legal protection extended to some rights — abortion is the best example — actually renders them more precarious, or at least in constant requirement of constant defence and re-assertion. Thus, abortion in Australia and the UK requires continued vigilance to be sure, but its acceptance is pretty much now embedded.

The identification of liberalism with legalism in the US gives a rallying point for right wing populists (and home grown whackos like Planet Janet Albrechtsen, whose blog on this issue is a doozy)* on the issue of judges running our life etc — and it would be in vain to suggest that if they don’t like it they should work to abolish the rights provisions in their state and national constitutions.

There is of course one big reason why the culture wars thang might not work again, and that is because the tactic is so closely associated with the Bush administration and its tranquilised lassitude as the whole place went to the hounddogs. The US in 2003-4 was still in that vaguley spacey attitude in which a purported boom had not yet been revealed as the sound made by the bursting of an enormous bubble, and people like Rupert Murdoch were still saying that “$12 a gallon gas would be a fantastic result” of the Iraq War.

With the absence of real division it was possible to portray same-s-x marriage as the most important thing Americans had to worry about. The way things are for many today, it’s not even going to make the top five.

Nevertheless, the issue could still get well out of the box and become a major rallying point. For no matter how much left-liberals argue that same-s-x marriage has no inherent effect on marriage as an institution, it undoubtably does, and people feel it.

Put simply, the social meaning of marriage has always been fertility and lineality — the interlacing of society between different family groups by ensuring that they will have shared objects of devotion, i.e. kids they know they’re related to. The ideology that fills out that institution may vary — family duty, true love, honour nobility, sacrifice to the Wicker man, whatever — but fertility was at its root, joining culture to nature — and to God and the state, when those institutions got involved.

The plain fact is that you can’t change the meaning of marriage to include same-s-x couples — with children acquired by adoption, surrogacy, basting implements, Chinese mail-order whatever — without changing its meaning, and that observation is prior to any question of whether you think that is a good idea or not.

Proponents of s-s marriage can fairly be accused of hypocrisy on this, knowing or otherwise — on the one hand, the initiative is presented as a small thing, not likely to change much. On the other marriage, rather than civil union, is defended as something required, as having meaning above and beyond its purely administrative status.

Which it is — and which is why so many people feel threatened by it. Not threatened in a psychological sense, but in a literal and rational sense, because same-s-x marriage de-centres the entire basis on which culture, any culture, has subsisted. It’s an enormous shift, which is why it’s enough for people to decide their vote on, even when their kids are in Iraq, their house is in repossession, and their truck is in the garage cos they can’t afford to run it.

So politically, how will Obama handle it, should the issue arise? Hillary, insofar as it now matters, will be able to oppose it based on her new found populist credentials (“Hell boys, I’se against it, God made Adam and Eve not Adam and Ateve, dya get me, but lemme tell y’all there’s times I’ve thought I could dang well do with a wife. Now where those grits at?”), but her opponent will have to come up with some fancy footwork if he is to both appease his pro-same-s-x marriage liberal base while not finally driving a whole group of Hillarycrats into the McCain camp.

My guess is he’ll say it’s a state-by-state issue, not something a President should be discoursing on, and hope that can stall it.

Either that or have an aide in the crowd suddenly clutch his chest and fall to the floor, while the man from Illinois makes a quick departure on a rope ladder that suddenly falls from the…

*the best part of Planet’s rave? The idea that the judges in the California case are “undermining democracy”. Only one problem — the judges, initially appointed, are then confirmed in their position by a vote. The judges who voted on the same-s-x marriage laws were returned with a vote of 69% — higher than the 61% of voters who opposed same-s-x marriage in an earlier plebiscite.