This morning in San Francisco, the California supreme court heard arguments on the constitutionality of Proposition 8, the ballot measure that banned gay marriage. The supremes will also consider whether the thousands of same-sex marriages performed in the state prior to Prop. 8's passage should remain valid.

The hearings opened with Shannon Minter, lead counsel for those petitioning to invalidate Prop. 8, arguing that "what Proposition 8 accomplishes, if it were upheld by this court, is to establish the constitutional principle that a majority can take away a fundamental right from a group defined as a [marginalised] class." It was a typically clinical way of conveying in legalese what the case is really about: Is our democracy intended to accommodate mob rule that rescinds individual rights?

Despite what Mike Huckabee would have us believe, California's Prop. 8 is radically different from other state amendments banning same-sex marriage. In California, the state supreme court ruled same-sex marriage legal, and marriages between same-sex couples were performed legally from June until November and the passage of Prop. 8. For that reason, this case is necessarily about the right of the majority to vote the rights of a minority out of existence.

But so much more than a legal right hangs in the balance.

Watching and listening on TV to the attorney for the sponsors of Prop. 8, Ken Starr – last seen feverishly masturbating over a Beltway tryst and a stained blue dress – speak in his yawn-inducing monotone about revisions versus amendments, what struck me most was how passionless it all was. We're talking about people's lives, and family and sex and romance and love, and people's right to have that love legally recognized – everything we associate with emotion and intimacy and the most fundamental expressions of our humanity. Yet all of that was being very carefully ignored, talked around in this dreadfully staid and formal way.

It made me want to run into that courtroom and shout and gnash my teeth and stomp my feet, just to inject some semblance of passion into the proceedings.

(If I could simultaneously have drowned out Starr's inserting into the record such laughably absurd asides as "Each of us is a minority – a minority of one" and "Proposition 8 doesn't invalidate – it merely denies recognition" in that condescending cadence he picked up at the Bobby Jindal School of Speaking Good, it would have been even better.)

Naturally, I know that a courtroom isn't the place for that sort of thing – that justice isn't meant to be meted out on the basis of emotional entreaties – so I didn't expect fists pounding against podiums. Yet there was something somehow indecent about the calm, abstract, detached legal proceeding meant to consider a thing born of the messy vulgarity of irrational fear and raw hatred.

Still, in the end, when San Francisco's chief deputy city attorney Therese Stewart concluded, coolly and succinctly, that "a guarantee of equality that is subject to exceptions made by a majority is no guarantee at all," it was satisfying. Because it was right.

Now it's in the hands of the justices. Late yesterday, the LA Times reported that the court appeared likely to uphold Prop. 8, "but also seemed likely to decide – perhaps unanimously – that the marriages of same-sex couples who wed before the election would remain valid". The judges have 90 days to submit their ruling – but let's hope it doesn't take them that long to decide in favour of equality and love.