Shortly before Christmas 2003, Kristin Perry took her girlfriend Sandy Stier for a walk near their Berkeley home. As they sat on Indian Rock, overlooking San Francisco Bay, Perry pulled a ring out of her pocket and said, “Will you marry me?”

Stier, an Iowa farm girl who never met a homosexual until she was a teen, said yes. Then she got a confused look on her face. “What does that mean?” she asked.

Perry, 45, and Stier 47, are co-plaintiffs in the federal lawsuit challenging Proposition 8, California’s voter-approved prohibition against same-sex marriage. Advocates say watching them describe their engagement – and the daily pain and awkwardness of not having a word to explain their relationship – would have humanized the issue in a way that realms of legal arguments cannot.

But outside of a few hundred observers in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco, nobody could hear, let alone empathize with them this week.

If the Supreme Court decides as early as today to continue blocking the federal court from broadcasting the trial on YouTube, advocates of same-sex marriage will lose a major part of the public education campaign they hoped to gain from the internationally watched trial.

Read the rest of Joe Garofoli’s San Francisco Chronicle article here.