I have a gay friend who insists this ruling will be the start of a civil war with the religious right. What do you all think?
Early Monday morning, the Supreme Court refused to stay a federal judge’s order invalidating Alabama’s ban on same-sex marriage. In doing so, the justices immediately set up a constitutional crisis between the state’s lawless chief justice and the federal judiciary. They also effectively admitted what court-watchers have suspected for months: The court is preparing to rule in favor of nationwide marriage equality at the end of this term.
Here’s how Monday’s decision reveals the justices’ intention to strike down gay marriage bans across the country. Typically, the justices will stay any federal court ruling whose merits are currently under consideration by the Supreme Court. Under normal circumstances, that is precisely what the court would have done here: The justices will rule on the constitutionality of state-level marriage bans this summer, so they might as well put any federal court rulings on hold until they’ve had a chance to say the last word. After all, if the court ultimately ruled against marriage equality, the Alabama district court’s order would be effectively reversed, and those gay couples who wed in the coming months would find their unions trapped in legal limbo.
Nothing happens until the S Ct decision is published. Then someone in the Alabama court system is going to recognize that the Chief Justice cannot issue an order to the inferior courts without the concurrence of the rest of the Justices, and this goes away with a whimper.
I can’t speak for Mississippi or Alabama or other parts of the dark depths of the South. But in most places, I think it becomes a non event, certainly in large cities like Dallas, Houston, Miami or Atlanta.
Gay marriage and the stars and bars in one month. That could be interesting. Or it could be that the less bigotted bigots who let this go on for so long don’t really care about either issue very deeply, and that they might even be a majority of the bigots. A lot of bigotry is just pandering to what they think is the norm without really having a real sense of how deep those feelings run.