Gay Marriage Nears Supreme Court With Inevitability Tag
By Greg Stohr Jul 31, 2014 12:00 AM ET
If a U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage looks inevitable, perhaps it is.
Since a pivotal high court ruling 13 months ago, gay-marriage advocates have tallied more than two dozen lower court victories without a single defeat. With this week’s decision in Virginia, two federal appeals courts have now backed same-sex marriage. Courts have consistently read last year’s ruling, U.S. v. Windsor, as undercutting any rationale for state bans.
The lower court rulings have created a sense of legal momentum with few if any precedents in the nation’s history. And with the issue moving toward the Supreme Court, the question is becoming whether, in the face of such a legal rout, the justices can possibly disagree.
“I can’t think of any Supreme Court decision in history that has ever created so rapid and broad a lower-court groundswell in a single direction as Windsor,” said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School. “Nor can I think of any historical examples in which lower courts have so overwhelmingly and universally read a Supreme Court decision one way, only to have the court say ‘Never mind, you’ve all gotten it wrong.’”
The 5-4 Windsor ruling in June 2013 is the high court’s most definitive take on the constitutional rights of gay couples. Striking down a 1996 U.S. law that denied federal benefits to legally married same-sex spouses, the Windsor majority said the measure created a “second-tier marriage” for gay couples.
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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-31/gay-marriage-nears-supreme-court-with-inevitability-tag.html
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