Rob Reiner on Monday said he is
confident the U.S. Supreme Court would overturn California's gay
marriage ban, Proposition 8.
Reiner is a co-founder of the American
Foundation for Equal Rights (AFER), the group challenging the
constitutionality of the ban.
Appearing on The Stephanie Miller
Show, which is now being broadcast on Current TV, Reiner said he
viewed gay marriage as “the last leg of the civil rights race.”
“The gay community is the only
community in America that is viewed as less under the law of any
group so this last little piece that we can hopefully put in place
with our federal court challenge to Prop 8 … There's still a lot of
work to be done and I don't want anybody to think that we've won
this. By no stretch of the imagination have we won this,” he said,
referring
to a federal appeals court's recent upholding of a lower court's
decision which ruled the amendment unconstitutional.
“Years from now we'll look back and
say, 'What was all the fuss about?' People will look back and say,
'You mean there was a time that women couldn't vote? There was a
time that blacks couldn't vote or blacks couldn't marry whites?' I
mean, we look at those things as ridiculous now and we will look at
this as being ridiculous but right now we're in the middle of a fight
and we have to keep fighting.”
“We're going to win this, but we've
got to keep our foot on the gas.”
On the possibility of the case going to
the Supreme Court, Reiner said: “They have upheld gay rights
historically in Lawrence v. Texas, in Romer [v.
Evans] case. And we believe that they will uphold us in this.”