Sutton's reasoning directly reflects my own. In the interim while their is a challenge to the mechanics of marriage itself [man/woman, father/mother], that have NOTHING to do with race, lower inferior federal courts do not have a right to overrule SCOTUS. The interim status is only law enacted within the states...only to be overturned later, if it should so be, by SCOTUS itself....AND ITSELF
ALONE.
14-1341 184 6th Circuit Decision in Marriage Cases
*page 8 on..) "SUTTON, Circuit Judge.
This is a case about change—and how best to handle it under the United States Constitution. From the vantage point of 2014, it would now seem, the question is not whether American law will allow gay couples to marry; it is when and how that will happen. That would not have seemed likely as recently as a dozen years ago. For better, for worse, or for more of the same, marriage has long been a social institution defined by relationships between men and women.
So long defined, the tradition is measured in millennia, not centuries or decades. So widely shared, the tradition until recently had been adopted by all governments and major religions of the world.
But things change, sometimes quickly.
Since 2003,
nineteen States and the District of Columbia have expanded the definition of marriage to include gay couples,
some through state legislation, some through initiatives of the people, some through state court decisions, and some through the actions of state governors and attorneys general who opted not to appeal adverse court decisions. Nor does this momentum show any signs of slowing. Twelve
of the nineteen States that now recognize gay marriage did so in the last couple of years. On top of that, four federal courts of appeals have compelled several other States to permit same-sex marriages under the Fourteenth Amendment.
What remains is a debate about whether to allow the democratic processes begun in the States to continue in the four States of the Sixth Circuit or to end them now by requiring all States in the Circuit to extend the definition of marriage to encompass gay couples.
Process and structure matter greatly in American government. Indeed, they may be the most reliable, liberty-assuring guarantees of our system of government, requiring us to take seriously the route the United States Constitution contemplates for making such a fundamental change to such a fundamental social institution. Of all the ways to resolve this question, one option is not available: a poll of the three judges on this panel, or
for that matter all federal judges, about whether gay marriage is a good idea.
Our judicial commissions did not come with such a sweeping grant of authority, one that would allow just three of us—just two of us in truth—to make such a vital policy call for the thirty-two million citizens who live within the four States of the Sixth Circuit: Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee. What we have authority to decide
instead is a legal question: Does the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibit a State from defining marriage as a relationship between one man and one woman?...
...
Does the Due Process Clause or the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment require States to expand the definition of marriage to include same-sex couples? The Michigan appeal (
DeBoer )presents this threshold question, and so does one of the Kentucky appeals (
Love). Caselaw offers many ways to think about the issue. A.
Perspective of an intermediate court.
Start with a recognition of our place in the hierarchy of the federal courts. As an “inferior” court (the Constitution’s preferred term, not ours), a federal court of appeals begins by asking what the Supreme Court’s precedents require on the topic at hand. Just such a precedent confronts us.
...Baker v. Nelson
, 191 N.W.2d 185, 186 (Minn. 1971)....
Minnesota Supreme Court rejected both claims. As for the due process claim, the state court reasoned: “
The institution of marriage as a union of man and woman, uniquely involving the procreation and rearing of children within a family, is as old as the book of Genesis. . . . This historic institution manifestly is more deeply founded than the asserted contemporary concept of marriage and societal interests for which petitioners contend. The due process clause . . . is not a charter for restructuring it by judicial legislation.”
Id.
As for the equal protection claim, the court reasoned: “[T]he state’s classification of persons authorized to marry” does not create an “irrational or invidious discrimination. . . . [T]hat
the state does not impose upon heterosexual married couples a condition that they have a proved capacity or declared willingness to procreate . . . [creates only a] theoretically imperfect [classification] . . . [and] ‘abstract symmetry’ is not demanded by the Fourteenth Amendment.”
Id.
at 187....
...
The Supreme Court’s decision four years earlier in
Loving v. Virginia
, 388 U.S. 1 (1967), which invalidated Virginia’s ban on interracial marriages, did not change this conclusion. “
n commonsense and in a constitutional sense,” the state court explained, “there is a clear distinction between a marital restriction based merely upon race and one based upon the fundamental difference in sex.”
Baker
, 191 N.W.2d at 187...
..
Baker and McConnell appealed to the United States Supreme Court. The Court rejected their challenge, issuing a one-line order stating that the appeal did not raise “a substantial federal question.”
Baker v. Nelson, 409 U.S. 810, 810 (1972). This type of summary decision, it is true, does not bind the Supreme Court in later cases. But it does confine lower federal courts in later cases. It matters not whether we think the decision was right in its time, remains right today, or will be followed by the Court in the future. Only the Supreme Court may overrule its own precedents, and we remain bound even by its summary decisions “until such time as the Court informs [us] that [we] are not.”
Hicks v. Miranda, 422 U.S. 332, 345 (1975) (internal quotation marks omitted). The Court has yet to inform us that we are not, and we have no license to engage in a guessing game about whether the Court will change its mind or, more aggressively, to assume authority to overrule Baker ourselves..
..
now, claimants insist, must account for United States v. Windsor, 133 S. Ct. 2675 (2013), which invalidated the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996, a law that refused for purposes of federal statutory benefits to respect gay marriages authorized by state law. Yet Windsor does not answer today’s question. The decision never mentions Baker, much less overrules it. And the outcomes of the cases do not clash. Windsor invalidated a federal law that refused to respect state laws permitting gay marriage, while Baker upheld the right of the people of a State to define marriage as they see it. To respect one decision does not slight the other. Nor does Windsor ’s reasoning clash with Baker. Windsor hinges on the Defense of Marriage Act’s unprecedented intrusion into the States’ authority over domestic relations. Id. at 2691–92.
.
