What I don’t like is that:
a) a state of legislators with the approval of voters pass a ban on gay marriage.
b) a special interest group challenges it in court.
c) a liberal judge upholds the challenge.
d) a series of appeals courts also uphold the challenge while largely kicking the can up to the Supreme Court.
e) The Supreme Court then refuses to hear the appeals.
Notice who got left out of the process of legalizing gay marriage in most of these states? That’s right. It’s the voters and their elected representatives who, in most cases, expressed their disapproval by passing the bans to begin with.
Note one major difference between this and the judicial fiat of abortion. In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court upheld (agree with it or not) a constitutional right to an abortion which then put the onus on the states to overturn incrementally.
Here, the SCOTUS has NOT ruled that gays have a right to be married, only that they would not rule on a ban of such behavior.
I have no argument with the states that passed gay marriage through the vote of the people or the state legislative process but to say that conservative states now have legal gay marriage because the bans of such were denied by federal court is turning representative democracy on its head.
What gave you the impression that *this* was not the next progressive step in the process?
Once we lost have a Constitutional Republic, then a representative democracy, then our (current?) ‘banana republic’....Why the cries of anguish for the oligarchy of 9?
f) You can be damn sure that if the roles were reversed, and a state had passed legislation recognizing same-sex marriage and a judge had thrown it out and it went to the USSC, the USSC would certainly have taken the case to overrule that ‘misguided, unconstitutional judge.’