“Sutton argued that appellate judges’ hands are tied by a one-sentence Supreme Court ruling from 1972, which “upheld the right of the people of a state to define marriage as they see it.” “
I hear that the high court has a real distaste for overturning its own rulings.
Hopefully 5 of them will keep to that.
Technically, last year’s rulings from the Supreme Court on homosexual marriage were very limited.
They ruled that the federal government would recognize homosexual marriage from states in which it was legal.
And they ruled that nobody in California had standing to defend their marriage law, so by default, homosexual marriage resumed in California under court order.
These rulings did not establish whether there is a constitutional right to homosexual marriage.
It’s possible that there aren’t five votes on the current Supreme Court to declare a constitutional right to homosexual marriage. They may rather dance around the edges of that with technical rulings on the subject instead.