In all probability, as I opined in last week’s column, the California Supreme Court will not allow same-sex marriage in California. The court may rule, 4-3, that current law prohibiting same-sex marriage does not violate the California Constitution.

Nevertheless, right-wing groups are circulating petitions to put an initiative on the ballot to amend the California Constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage. And some local business owners are contributing large sums to support such.

Doug Manchester, for instance, owner of the Manchester Grand Hyatt Hotel and Marina, has contributed $125,000.

And, as The San Diego Union-Tribune reported, state records show Mission Valley developer Terry Caster has donated $162,500; La Jolla businessperson Roger Benson gave $50,000; and Robert Hoehn, owner of Hoehn Motors in Carlsbad, contributed $25,000.

The campaign has also raised $1 million from San Diego residents, money that is being used to pay for signature collectors to collect the 700,000 valid signatures the group needs to qualify the constitutional amendment for the November ballot, the newspaper said.

But the California initiative is a useless idea, given there’s no need for it. It should suffer the same fate as the one in Arizona did. Voters rejected that measure because there was simply no purpose for it.

Further, not only is the measure a waste of time, but there are risks involved for those who contribute and for those who sign petitions for the initiative.

Already, we’re hearing calls for boycotts of Manchester properties.

These businesses risk derision, notoriety and aggravation they hadn’t bargained for. Because once the GLBT and allied communities know which proprietors of which establishments have signed a petition that would, effectively, insert under Article I, Section 7, “Equal protection applies to all, except homosexual couples and their children,” we might just be inclined to stage protests in front of such establishments, urging boycotts of businesses owned by signatories and contributors. The California Supreme Court ruled a few weeks ago that it’s entirely legal to do so, even if the business is in a mall.

We might take such actions because, in our community, it’s difficult to understand how anyone could sign a petition to deny basic rights to same-sex couples and their children.

Of course, all we have to do is look at history to see that people have always sought to legislate inequality.

In 1964, for example, California voters signed petitions to ban fair housing laws that would have ended racial discrimination by property owners and landlords who refused to rent or sell their property to black people. They amended a section of the California Constitution repealing all existing laws barring racial discrimination in private housing, reserving to voters the exclusive power to legislate fair housing.

It wasn’t until 1966 that, in Mulkey v. Reitman, the California Supreme Court held that the amendment was unconstitutional. The court held that the state’s (via the voters) repeal of protections against housing discrimination in the face of clear evidence of private discrimination in California amounted to unconstitutional discrimination, and suggested, in summary, that, although the fourteenth amendment did not obligate the state to enact fair-housing legislation, it must be held responsible for private discrimination where it, “in any meaningful way, has lent its processes to the achievement of discrimination even though that goal was not within the state’s purpose.”

Of course, we also remember Prop 187, a measure designed to deny children of immigrants a basic education, even though the U.S. Supreme Court, in Pyler v. Doe, had ruled that equal protection laws apply to all children, regardless of whether they are documented immigrants.

Then, in 1978, there was the Briggs Initiative, the last pernicious campaign against GLBT people, when people signed petitions to ban openly gay and lesbian teachers from teaching in our schools.

It failed, and so, ultimately, will anyone’s attempts to prevent equal rights for all.