Gay marriage Ban Struck Down in Utah.

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This is a federal case. Doesn't this mean gay marriage has to be legalized throughout the whole country?

Not as a direct result of this decision.  This lawsuit is presumably between the state of Utah and a citizen plaintiff.  The remedy itself only applies to Utah.  But, it could eventually lead to that, if it reaches the Supreme Court and creates a federal legal precedent.

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Does that mean marriages can start being celebrated in Utah right now, or is everything suspended until the SCOTUS ruling?

I think it's like the California case, where the defendants will take it to the SCOTUS. If SCOTUS refuses to hear the case, it's legal in Utah. If SCOTUS does here the case they can either punt to allow in in JUST Utah, overrule it to allow Utah to continue banning it, or finally just legalize it everywhere.

I don't think that's quite right.  The posture of the Prop 8 case made that ban quite different because California had allowed gay marriage and then revoked it.  However here, the legal implication of overturning the Utah ban on gay marriage would apply in every state. 

They other minor point is that the Supreme Court's ruling is binding on the parties in the case, which would be Utah.  A broad ruling would then quickly cause other bans to be overturned in Court in short order.  The Supreme Court's ruling itself would have no binding legal effect on Ohio or Alabama.

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I agree.  This is the case that will go to the Supreme Court.  I think Windsor vs. United States was the groundbreaking case, but the case from Utah has got to wind up coming before Justice Kennedy and I think he is going to be the fifth vote to repeal all of the marriage bans.

I don't get why people think Kennedy is so rock solid on this issue. Just because he overturned DOMA? Any real conservative would be against DOMA because it violates states rights. The difference is that Kennedy isn't a hypocrite whereas most of the GOP (including Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Roberts) is.

Kennedy also wrote Romer and Lawrence which speak in broad terms about equality under law for homosexuals.  If you read the reasoning of Lawrence and Romer, it's not difficult, but not neccesasry either, to extrapolate to overturning gay marriage bans nationwide.

It in all likelihood applies to Utah and Utah alone.

I thought that it would be up to the LDS hierarchy to decide when same-sex marriage goes legal in Utah. Now it may adjust on its own. So does the LDS begin a gay outreach?

This case applies to Utah.  But, once the Supreme Court decides this case or one like it, the legal reasoning would apply in all the Federal courts nationwide.  If you're going to overturn Utah's ban on Constitutional equal protection grounds, I don't see how you would limit the reasoning to Utah.  What happens when a similar suit gets filed in Arizona?

[bedstuy]

I hate to ruin the celebration, but won't this ruling almost certainly be overturned?

Now that some folks in Utah have actually gotten married today following this ruling, it can't be.

What? Where do you get this stuff? Of course It doesn't mean that.


I think gay marriage supporters are a bit too sanguine about this law's prospects in the SCOTUS.

I think the case of Prop 8 shows that you can get unmarried by a legal change without complete chaos.  This is probably why the state of Utah didn't get a TRO to stop gay marriages in the state.  There's no irreparable harm to Utah in issuing marriage licenses now, if they can be rescinded later. 

On the SCOTUS question, I think that's a good point.  There are likely 4 votes on the side of marriage equality.  We don't know if Kennedy is going to find some caveat that allows Utah to ban gay marriage.  The hopeful sign to me is that gay marriage opponents have no good arguments that can pass rational basis review and they aren't going to find a novel compelling argument.  Kennedy is going to have to buy into a tenuous argument on the ration basis grounds for discriminating against gays.  Considering his history on this issue, I'm cautiously optimistic.

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At this point, the only hope of SSM opponents is that one of the five justices in the majority on Windsor leaves the Court and either Obama messes up and appoints a SSM opponent or that the GOP retakes the Senate next November and blocks all Obama nominations in hopes of having a Republican win the White House in 2016.  I just see no way that anyone who signed onto Kennedy's opinion in Windsor could uphold the existing SSM bans.  The only reason the court moved slowly was to give the country more time to change its views on its own before the inevitable decision is handed down.  The court does not want SSM to become another issue like abortion where it moved way ahead of public opinion and prevented it from forming on its own.

Don't you think some case is going to reach the Supreme Court before 2017 though?  I think the only real hope is either that Kennedy has a come to Jesus moment and decides to draw some arbitrary line in the sand or that one of the 4 Democratic appointed justices or Kennedy leaves the court suddenty and Republicans can delay a new appointment by an unprecedented amount of time.

Or maybe the Republican congress could take away the subject matter jurisdiction of the lower courts over same-sex marriage cases.  That's impossible too though because it would require a veto override or a Republican President. 

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At this point, the only hope of SSM opponents is that one of the five justices in the majority on Windsor leaves the Court and either Obama messes up and appoints a SSM opponent or that the GOP retakes the Senate next November and blocks all Obama nominations in hopes of having a Republican win the White House in 2016.  I just see no way that anyone who signed onto Kennedy's opinion in Windsor could uphold the existing SSM bans.  The only reason the court moved slowly was to give the country more time to change its views on its own before the inevitable decision is handed down.  The court does not want SSM to become another issue like abortion where it moved way ahead of public opinion and prevented it from forming on its own.

Don't you think some case is going to reach the Supreme Court before 2017 though?  I think the only real hope is either that Kennedy has a come to Jesus moment and decides to draw some arbitrary line in the sand or that one of the 4 Democratic appointed justices or Kennedy leaves the court suddenty and Republicans can delay a new appointment by an unprecedented amount of time.

Or maybe the Republican congress could take away the subject matter jurisdiction of the lower courts over same-sex marriage cases.  That's impossible too though because it would require a veto override or a Republican President. 

The time between the District court ruling and the Supreme Court decision in the prop 8 case was about 2 years and 11 months. So if this case were to follow a similar timeline we'd be talking about a decision in late 2016 or early 2017. We won't get a Supreme Court ruling before then.

If this takes takes the same timeline, it would be decided in 2016, so what I'm saying still holds.  But, this case will likely go up more quickly because Hollingsworth had that hiccup about standing at the Circuit Court level.

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Is the 10th circuit particularly conservative?

I don't know the leanings of each particular judge, but the Tenth Circuit is split evenly 5-5 (with two vacancies) between Democratic and Republican appointees. At worst, it's hard to see that court overturn the lower court, as I believe a split ruling lets the lower court ruling stand. This may very well be the ultimate gay marriage case before the Supreme Court that makes a final ruling on the issue.

Huh?  This case will not be heard by the entire circuit en banc.  It's going to be a 3 judge panel. 

Also, you're forgetting about the senior status judges who are 6-4 Republican nominees. 

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Huh?  This case will not be heard by the entire circuit en banc.  It's going to be a 3 judge panel. 

Also, you're forgetting about the senior status judges who are 6-4 Republican nominees.

Yeah, I know it's a 3-judge panel first (which can realistically result in a wide array of potential rulings), but it's quite possible that this case could be heard en banc depending on that ruling. In that case, I don't think the senior status judges have votes. If it does reach that point, it's also possible that Obama's current (two) nominees will have filled the remaining vacancies, one of which has already passed the Judiciary Committee. Either way, if the Tenth Circuit in any form upholds the district court ruling, I don't see how it doesn't get to the Supreme Court, as there would essentially be a circuit split.

I beg to differ.  Rehearing en banc is an extraordinary procedure for a specific purpose of correcting a major error or conflict with the circuit's precedents.  It's pretty difficult to have an obvious conflict in a case where the precedent in the circuit is thin.  This is the first post Hollingsworth case of its kind.  What precedent of the circuit would it conflict with?

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If I understand that short blurb correctly, it said the motion denied because it was made on emergency grounds, but that a motion for stay pending appeal might be accepted.  I was somehow under the impression that Utah's governor had more sense than to make an emergency motion like that--what an epic loser move.

I'm not sure about this, but I think Utah can still get a stay of the decision.  Getting any sort of emergency ruling from a court generally requires that you show you're going to suffer immediate, irreparable harm without the ruling.  Utah doesn't have a good case that gays getting married constitutes irreparable harm to the state of Utah.

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This is like a dagger into the heart of the anti-SSM opposition. If they don't put much of a fight into this, or if they lose, then social conservatives everywhere will finally confront the fact that they've lost this issue.

An interesting point.  However, you look at the anti-SSM crowd and they've tried to pivot to a state's rights position.  Even Ted Cruz said, leave it to the states.  This could take that argument off the table and perhaps force the social conservatives back to strong support of a constitutional  amendment.  More likely though I think the Republicans will just whine about "activist judges" and how they're being persecuted, rather than take an actual position.