Replies

when the U.S. Supreme Court made same-sex marriage the law of the land

NO THEY DID NOT, The supreme Court does not have the authority to “MAKE LAW” they merely invalidated a State Law for a specific case. They only have the “Authority” to invalidate Sate Law in it’s entirety if and only if they Hear the Case in “Original Jurisdiction” which means from DAY ONE. This was an “Appellate” decision, not one derived from “original jurisdiction” and it only applies to the case at hand.

Article 3, section 2 US Constitution:

n all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.

Furthermore, as I understand it. the Case was SENT BACK to an “inferior court” with a decision on law and fact, whereby the “inferior court” becomes the final arbiter.

However NO INFERIOR COURT has the authority to order any State to do anything.:

A recent detailed study of the courts of all 50 states and the District of Columbia determined that 46 states and the District of Columbia adopt the position that the precedents of lower federal courts are not binding in their jurisdictions. Wayne A. Logan, A House Divided: When State and Lower Federal Courts Disagree on Federal Constitutional Rights, 90 Notre Dame L. Rev. 235, 280-81 (2014). The position of three other states is uncertain. Only one state (Delaware) defers to the constitutional decisions of lower federal courts. Id. At 281.

Federal courts have recognized that state-court review of constitutional questions is independent of the same authority lodged in the lower federal courts. “In passing on federal constitutional questions, the state courts and the lower federal courts have the same responsibility and occupy the same position; there is a parallelism but not paramountcy for both sets of courts are governed by the same reviewing authority of the Supreme Court.” United States ex rel.Lawrence v. Woods, 432 F.2d 1072, 1075 (7th Cir. 1970).

Although consistency between state and federal courts is desirable in that it promotes respect for the law and prevents litigants from forum-shopping, there is nothing inherently offensive about two sovereigns reaching different legal conclusions. Indeed, such results were contemplated by our federal system, and neither sovereign is required to, nor expected to, yield to the other.

Surrick v. Killion, 449 F. 3d 520, 535 (3rd Cir. 2006).

The United States Supreme Court has acknowledged that state courts “possess the authority, absent a provision for exclusive federal jurisdiction, to render binding judicial decisions that rest on their own interpretations of federal law.” Asarco Inc. v. Kadish, 490 U.S. 605, 617 (1989). Two justices of the United States Supreme Court in special writings have elaborated on this principle.

The Supremacy Clause demands that state law yield to federal law, but neither federal supremacy nor any other principle of federal law requires that a state court’s interpretation of federal law give way to a (lower) federal court’s interpretation. In our federal system, a state trial court’s interpretation of federal law is no less authoritative than that of the federal court of appeals in whose circuit the trial court is located.

Lockhart v. Fretwell, 506 U.S. 364, 375-76 (1993) (Thomas, J., concurring). See also Steffel v. Thompson, 415 U.S. 452, 482, n. 3 (1974) (Rehnquist, J., concurring) (noting that a lower- federal-court decision “would not be accorded the stare decisis effect in state court that it would have in a subsequent proceeding within the same federal jurisdiction. Although the state court would not be compelled to follow the federal holding, the opinion might, of course, be viewed as highly persuasive.”).