After their ruling on DOMA, I think we all know how this is gonna go:
BLOOMBERG – The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to consider legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide, accepting a case that may cap a transformational decade for gay rights with what would be a landmark civil rights ruling.
The court’s decision, likely to come in late June, could bring gay marriage to 14 more states and stand alongside the 1967 ruling that said interracial couples had a constitutional right to legally wed. Whatever the outcome, the case will be a defining moment for Chief Justice John Roberts’s court.
Both sides urged the Supreme Court to resolve a disagreement among the lower courts. Pro-marriage rulings by four federal appeals courts have helped triple the number of gay-marriage states since 2013. The justices will be reviewing the sole appellate ruling that said states could restrict marriage to heterosexual unions, a decision that applied to Michigan, Kentucky, Tennessee and Ohio.
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In the case before the justices, Judge Jeffrey Sutton of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati said changes to marriage laws should come from “the customary political processes,” not through the courts.
“When the courts do not let the people resolve new social issues like this one, they perpetuate the idea that the heroes in these change events are judges and lawyers,” Sutton wrote in a 2-1 decision.
Gay-marriage advocates say the Constitution protects a fundamental right to wed and bars same-sex couples from being treated differently than heterosexual people.
Gays are being denied “the fundamental freedom and equal right to marry, and their families are deprived of the status, dignity, security and stability that marriage brings,” April DeBoer and Jayne Rowse argued in their appeal in the Michigan case. The two are nurses who have adopted three children, including two with special needs.
In 2013 Mark Levin said the Supreme Court had no business interfering in the well known Prop. 8 gay marriage case in California because there was no constitutional issue, and I believe it applies here as well:
So let me suggest this to you with respect to the power of the courts, in particularly the Supreme Court. Where there is not a clear constitutional issue as there clearly was in Loving vs Virginia under the 14th amendment, a clear violation of the 14th amendment, then why should the federal courts intervene? Why should the Supreme Court intervene?
The Equal Protection Clause doesn’t say the ‘liberal promotion clause’ or the ‘radical egalitarianism clause’ where people can pour their economic or social agendas into the Constitution for the courts to decide. That’s not what that clause is there for and that’s not what it means.
‘So Mark, what should the court do?’
In my humble opinion, the court should strike down the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision, and through it the district court’s decision in San Francisco. And the court should say:
‘We have no business in this case. The people of California voted, they passed Proposition 8 to amend their constitution. Maybe in ten years they’ll pass another proposition to reverse course. But there’s no federal constitutional violation here. This is not the same as segregation and racism. This is not a matter of equal protection.’