Here are the paragraphs right here that explains why SCOTUS will have to take this up IMMEDIATELY. And it will be the most hotly debated part about the whole question:
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(page 24)
The debate over marriage of course has another side, and we cannot deny the costs to the plaintiffs of allowing the States to work through this profound policy debate. The traditional definition of marriage denies gay couples the opportunity to publicly solemnize, to say nothing of subsidize, their relationships under state law. In addition to depriving them of this status, it deprives them of benefits that range from the profound (the right to visit someone in a hospital as a spouse or parent) to the mundane (the right to file joint tax returns). These harms affect not only gay couples but also their children. Do the benefits of standing by the traditional definition of marriage make up for these costs? The question demands an answer—but from elected legislators, not life-tenured judges. Our task under the Supreme Court’s precedents is to decide whether the law has some conceivable basis, not to gauge how that rationale stacks up against the arguments on the other side. Respect for democratic control over this traditional area of state expertise ensures that “a statewide deliberative process that enable(s) its citizens its citizens to discuss and weigh arguments for and against same-sex marriage” can have free and reasonable rein.
Windsor , 133 S. Ct. at 2689.
Animus.
Given the broad deference owed the States under the democracy-reinforcing norms of rational basis review, the cases in which the Supreme Court has struck down a state law on that basis are few. When the Court has taken this step, it usually has been due to the novelty of the law and the targeting of a single group for disfavored treatment under it....
In another case, a statewide initiative denied gays, and gays alone, access to the protection of the State’s existing antidiscrimination laws. The novelty of the law, coupled with the distance between the reach of the law and any legitimate interest it might serve, showed that the law was “born of animosity toward” gays and suggested a design to make gays “unequal to everyone else.” ...
...None of the statewide initiatives at issue here fits this pattern. The four initiatives, enacted between 2004 and 2006, codified a long-existing, widely held social norm already reflected in state law. “[M]arriage between a man and a woman,” as the Court reminded us just last year, “had been thought of by most people as essential to the very definition of that term and to its role and function throughout the history of civilization.”
Windsor , 133 S. Ct. at 2689. Neither was the decision to place the definition of marriage in a State’s constitution unusual, nor did it otherwise convey the kind of malice or unthinking prejudice the Constitution prohibits...And if there was one concern animating the initiatives, it was the fear that the courts would seize control over an issue that people of good faith care deeply about. If that is animus, the term has no useful meaning. ...
...Just as state judges have the authority to construe a state constitution as they see fit, so do the people have the right to overrule such decisions or preempt them as they see fit. Nor is there anything static about this process. In some States, the people have since re-amended their constitutions to broaden the category of those eligible to marry. In other States, the people seemed primed to do the same but for now have opted to take a wait-and-see approach of their own as federal litigation proceeds.
See, e.g., Wesley Lowery,
Same-Sex Marriage Is Gaining Momentum, but Some Advocates Don’t Want It on the Ballot in Ohio, Wash. Post (June 14, 2014),
Same-sex marriage is gaining momentum but some advocates don t want it on the ballot in Ohio - The Washington Post (
explaining that Ohio same-sex marriage advocates opted not to place the question on the 2014 state ballot despite collecting nearly twice the number of required signatures). What the Court recently said about another statewide initiative that people care passionately about applies with equal vigor here: “
Deliberative debate on sensitive issues such as racial preferences all too often may shade into rancor. But that does not justify removing certain court-determined issues from the voters’ reach. Democracy does not presume that some subjects are either too divisive or too profound for public debate.”
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The issue of debate will be, do sensitivities and concerns towards adults [and children swept up in it] a new and untested social culture seeking to replace an old one, thousands of years older and diametrically opposed to it, have rights to use fascism to control "legal outcomes" by citing that any resistance to its spread is by definition "rancorous" or *yawn* "bigoted", "hateful", "homophobic"...etc. etc. etc...??
Do officials in Ohio have a right to deny a legitimate petition for the ballot with twice the required signatures? Do officials like Governor Brown and AG Harris in California have the right to order county clerks to defy initiative law that has been neither legally altered or revoked, nor rendered federally dead ( by illegal attempts to overturn Baker, 1971 from underneath) by new intiative law [as required by the California Constitution}?
These questions will take up most of the Supremes' time in the hearng that will becoming soon to a legal theater in DC.