"After the two same-sex couples filed their challenge to Proposition 8 in federal court in California, the California government officials who would normally have defended the law in court, declined to do so. So the proponents of Proposition 8 stepped in to defend the law, and the California Supreme Court (in response to a request by the lower court) ruled that they could do so under state law. But today the Supreme Court held that the proponents do not have the legal right to defend the law in court. As a result, it held, the decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, the intermediate appellate court, has no legal force, and it sent the case back to that court with instructions for it to dismiss the case."
So what now? Again, marriages will soon resume in California. It may even happen as soon as today!
What The Court ultimately did was to invalidate the Ninth Circuit Court ruling and essentially revert all the way back to (then) Judge Vaughn Walker's historic ruling that struck down California's marriage ban on broad 14th Amendment equal protection grounds. While there may be some early confusion at some County Clerk offices in California (since there's no binding legal order just yet to mandate marriage equality), we will likely see marriages happen somewhere in The Golden State soon.
However, wedding bells won't ring here in Nevada... Just yet. But with the Sevcik v. Sandoval now pending in the Ninth Circuit, it may not be too much longer before marriage equality again makes a splash at SCOTUS.
So today, LGBTQ civil rights activists didn't score a complete victory. However, they still won battles big and small. And this story is still far from finished.
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