Currently, all homosexual Americans are eligable for marriage in every state of the union. They are just required to chose a partner of a different gender. Being gay, or chosing a gay person is not what disqualifies a homosexual relationship from marriage.

Desegregating marriage in terms of race is necessary in the same way the country had to desegregate schools and public restrooms. That being said, if Olson is right in his logic, must we now desegregate classrooms and restrooms in terms of gender as well?

Also, I thought Olson was appealing THIS decision. But it looks like you’re right. I’ll amend.

So understood, it’s obvious that the Supreme Court of the United States couldn’t overturn yesterday’s decision even if it wanted to. Yesterday’s decision involved a pure question of California law by the court with the last word on the meaning of California law. See, e.g., Michigan v. Long, 463 U.S. 1032, 1042-3 (1983); Fisher v. Jones, 83 F.3d 426 (1996) (“Because state courts are the ultimate expositors of state law, we are bound by their constructions and limited to deciding whether a conviction violates the Constitution, laws, or treaties of the United States”). Indeed, since the litigants in these cases have raised no federal issues in state proceedings, the US Supreme Court would lack jurisdiction to hear the case, see 28 U.S.C. § 1257. Jurisdiction could be created if the petitioners added federal claims to their cases, but the court would almost certainly refuse to hear a case comprised solely questions neither raised nor addressed below. See, e.g., F. Hoffmann-La Roche v. Empagran, 542 U.S. 155, 175 (2004) (declining to address arguments not addressed by the court below); Cutter v. Wilkinson, 544 U. S. 709, 718 n.7 (2005) (same) (“we are a court of review, not of first view”); Montejo v. Louisiana, 556 U.S. __, __ (2009) (slip op. at 19) (same).

Olson’s separate litigation is another story. The Supreme Court of the United States has been on a collision course with this issue since Romer v. Evans and Lawrence v. Texas. At least in my own view, expressed here and elsewhere before, a straight line through those cases points directly to the conclusion that there is a five-vote majority on the court today (something unlikely to be changed by Sotomayor’s nomination) to support the Olson lawsuit claims.