Over a year removed from the Supreme Court ruling that made same-sex marriage legal nationwide, Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill on June 5 to broaden the language of California law in accordance with the decision. State Senator Hannah Beth-Jackson’s Senate Bill 1005 will alter the legalese of multiple California code sections to more gender-neutral language.
SB 1005 will change instances of words like “husband” and “wife” to more ambiguous words like “spouse,” said Jackson, since the former two terms are too gender-specific to be applied to same-sex marriages.
The Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges officially guaranteed marriage equality to same-sex couples in June 2015, but the language of the law had “not caught up,” Jackson said. In this case, she said, the fundamental step was realizing that words matter when it comes to properly recognizing this newfound right.