Advocates of same-sex marriage are in their favorite place – a courtroom – trying to overturn the results of a decisive election. This time the courtroom is in San Francisco, and the vote in question is Proposition 8, the triumph of truth over deception that took place in California last year.

In May attorneys Ted Olson and David Boies joined forces to file a federal lawsuit seeking to overturn the results of the Proposition 8 vote, which put the biblical definition of marriage into the California Constitution, mere months after the state Supreme Court mis-defined it to include same-sex couples. The Supreme Court later admitted that the vote was legitimate, but Olson and Boies were undeterred, taking their case to federal district court in San Francisco.

Some homosexual activists initially opposed the lawsuit for a couple of reasons. First, they mistrusted Olson, a longtime Republican activist and government official whose wife, Barbara, was killed in the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when the plane she was riding in crashed into the Pentagon. He and Boies were on opposite sides of the U.S. Supreme Court case Bush v. Gore in 2000, which was the former vice president’s attempt to overturn the results of the presidential election in the state of Florida. They’ve since become friends, and decided on their own to take on the California vote out of an apparently sincere conviction that same-sex couples deserve the legal rights and responsibilities of marriage.

The timing of the lawsuit has been another concern of same-sex marriage advocates. Almost everyone who is following the issue closely assumes that its ultimate destination is the U.S. Supreme Court, which may not be disposed to reinvent marriage even if it becomes more liberal in the next few years. As The New York Times put it Oct. 27, “The suit was, gay rights advocates said then, the wrong claim in the wrong court in the wrong state at the wrong time.”

Federal Judge Vaughan R. Walker has denied an initial motion to dismiss the case. It’s scheduled for trial in January, and Walker seems especially dedicated to making the case a comprehensive record of fact for appeals courts to consider in their subsequent rulings. What happens in his courtroom early next year won’t be the final word on the subject, but it will offer some significant hints about how the final outcome will be determined.