The Supreme Court is going to take up the issue of gay marriage
There won't be an answer until mid-Summer at the earliest, but every pundit and prognosticator is furiously writing Op-Eds today about What This Means. Charlie Pierce thinks this means they will grudgingly allow gay marriage and will repeal part of DOMA. I hope he's right.
Supreme Court Will Hear Gay Marriage Cases - Esquire
It looks as though the Supreme Court is planning to revisit the whole megillah here — not merely Proposition 8 in California, but also a key provision of the Defense Of Marriage Act, which might be enough finally to sink that badly listing Clinton-era derelict. At least as a preliminary reading, it's looks as though the Court is preparing to decide for the nation the practical question whether gay people can get married under the U.S. Constitution. The huge and general question to be decided is whether or not the federal government has to recognize under the U.S. Constitution marriages between gay people that various states may decide to sanction.
It is possible — and I would argue, it is more than likely — that the Roberts Court, seeing no issue here that would engage its basic love of corporate rights, and being rather chaos-averse in its decisions that do not affect corporate rights, would look at the staggering tangled mess that would result in the states through a constitutional ban on gay marriage and back away. In that case, it also would look at a decision holding that position as being not only a naked violation of states rights and of the Full Faith And Credit clause, but also that it now would be a slap in the face of free elections, and decide, as it did in upholding the Afforable Care Act, that it simply doesn't want the hassle. That would be the way I would be betting today but, my god, there are at least a couple of people on that Court who have to have been bleeding from their gums for a decade in anticipation of striking down the illicit joining of the pee-pees.
