The Courage Campaign, FDL, and San Jose Mercury News are stilll live-blogging. Live-tweets here and here. Margaret Talbot once again sums up the day's testimony. Jerry Sanders, Republican mayor of San Diego and convert to the marriage equality cause, took the stand:
Sanders is a genuine conservative who, like many people with gay and lesbian family or friends, changed his mind on gay marriage, much to his own surprise. His law-and-order credentials are impeccable: he spent most of his career before he became mayor in the San Diego police force, with stints as commander of the SWAT team and as chief of police. In 2007, when the city of San Diego was considering filing an amicus brief in favor of gay marriage with the California Supreme Court, Sanders initially planned to use his mayoral veto to quash it. He thought civil unions were good enough, and besides, San Diego is a fairly conservative city, not San Francisco at all, so he worried about the repercussions. In fact, voters apparently believed in his sincerity enough to elect him to a second term in 2008. He’s like Dick Cheney—who also has a lesbian daughter he’s close to and who has also made a decision to support marriage equality—without the whole war-in-Iraq thing.
