The U.S. Supreme Court has temporarily blocked a lower court's order forcing the state of Kansas to begin recognizing same-sex “marriages” today.
The confusion over the duration of the order mirrors the bewildering legal landscape in the state.
The state Supreme Court has instructed officials in all 105 counties not to issue marriage licenses to homosexual couples pending the outcome of a case that is still ongoing.
The state appealed to the Kansas Supreme Court, which scheduled hearings on November 6. The court ruled that clerks should not issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples until the case is determined, to preserve statewide uniformity.
One hour after the court's October 10 ruling, the ACLU filed a separate lawsuit in federal court.
U.S. District Judge Daniel Crabtree, an Obama judicial appointee, ruled against the state but stayed his decision for one week – until 5 p.m. Central time this afternoon.
Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt called the case “a de facto circumvention” of the Kansas Supreme Court.
Schmidt said the justices should grant a stay to allow the state Supreme Court to complete its own case, and because the “right” to gay “marriage” remains hotly legally contested. “Plaintiffs seek in the first instance to establish a novel constitutional right through litigation,” he wrote in a 106-page court document.
“It’s real hard to say what’s going to happen next,” Tom Witt, executive director of Equality Kansas, told MSNBC.
The string of judicial fiats striking down state marriage laws nationwide came to an end last Thursday as the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that marriage laws in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee did not violate the U.S. Constitution. The Cincinnati-based court's ruling, issued by two judges appointed by President George W. Bush, says that the state began defining marriage for “millennia” out of “a need to create stable family units for the planned and unplanned creation of children” and “the need to regulate male-female relationships and the unique procreative possibilities” they present.
Judge Jeffrey Sutton ruled, “People may not need the government’s encouragement to have sex. And they may not need the government’s encouragement to propagate the species. But they may well need the government’s encouragement to create and maintain stable relationships within which children may flourish.”
Supreme Court justices have indicated in the last week that they are open to issuing a definitive ruling on whether they believe the U.S. Constitution conveys a right to same-sex “marriage.”
NPR host Nina Totenberg asked two pillars of the Court's liberal bloc – Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan – about redefining marriage at the 2014 General Assembly of Jewish Federations of North America. Breyer responded that federal appeals courts had unanimously decided to overturn marriage amendments, but “the status quo there changes, you know, so there are plenty of opportunities.”
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had previously told Totenberg, “When there’s no disagreement among the courts of appeals, we don’t step in...If there had been a court of appeals on the other side, we probably would have taken that case." Her words came before the Sixth Circuit Court, based in Cincinnati, weighed in.
