(CNSNews.com) - The California Supreme Court's 4-3 decision last Thursday to create homosexual marriage was "a blockbuster" that sent a shockwave that will eventually reverberate in every state of the union, according to legal experts.

"One of the principal effects of the California decision will be to create large numbers of same-sex marriages that will not only reside in California, but will migrate across the country," said Douglas Kmiec, a law professor at Pepperdine University Law School in Malibu, Calif.

Kmiec, one of the nation's foremost legal scholars, told Cybercast News Service that the California court "tossed out the window" the view of marriage that predates the founding of the United States, predates the U.S. Constitution, and that was assumed by those who drafted California's constitution, as well as those who created civil rights law itself.

"(The justices) decided that marriage as a fundamental right could not be limited to heterosexual couples," Kmiec said. "But they also decided, for the first time anywhere in the United States, that as a matter of state constitutional law, sexual orientation was what lawyers call 'a suspect classification' deserving of protection."

The California decision, he said, will have a different effect than the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's 2003 decision bringing same-sex marriage to that state.

"The Massachusetts ruling was confined, more or less to its own state," Kmiec said. "The way the Massachusetts court had interpreted its state law, same-sex marriage in Massachusetts was not available to non-residents."

Homosexuals can't get married in Massachusetts if they aren't already state residents, or they don't come from a state that recognizes same-sex marriage.

"In California, there's no waiting period, there's no residency requirement, and so yesterday's ruling doesn't just affect a single state with a very large population," said Kmiec, "it has the capacity to be exported into other states."

Kmiec predicts that homosexual couples will flock to California, be issued marriage licenses and return to their home states, more than 40 of which have Defense of Marriage Acts (DOMAs) on the books.

"One of the things we'll see is that the home states will raise the defense of traditional marriage in their own state law -- to refuse to give acknowledgment to California marriages in those other states," Kmiec said. "There will be much more litigation around the country about the validity of California marriages."

Attorneys on the losing side of Thursday's decision, meanwhile, plan to go back to court to try to delay the decision from taking effect until Californians get a chance this fall to vote on a ballot initiative to return the definition of marriage back to one-man, one-woman.

"It would be mid-June before the decision would really take effect - opinions don't take effect until 30 days after they are issued - and the ballot initiative is not approved for the ballot yet, but it looks really promising," attorney Steve Crampton of Liberty Counsel told Cybercast News Service .

All systems are "go" for the initiative to qualify for the ballot, he said, with more than 1.1 million signatures collected.

"They've done a great job in collecting signatures, they've reviewed it and done what's called a statistical sampling, and it looks really promising that it is going to be certified," Crampton added

But a state amendment initiative faces stiffer opposition than at any time in the past. Last Thursday, California's Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenggar reaffirmed his opposition to the amendment, as did U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, (D-Calif.), whose district includes San Francisco.

"I encourage California citizens to respect the Court's decision, and I continue to strongly oppose any ballot measure that would write discrimination into the state constitution," Pelosi said.

Meanwhile, homosexual activists have already targeted the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act for demolition, Kmiec said.

"Same-sex marriage advocates believe that Congress lacked the authority under the Constitution to have passed the statute, and that the federal DOMA is itself unconstitutional," he said.

In the end, Kmiec thinks only a federal marriage amendment would preserve traditional marriage across the nation.

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