MARRIAGE NEWS WATCH

Our Prediction for Today’s Supreme Court Marriage Decision

Ruth_Bader_GinsburgWell, this is it: September 29th, the day that the Justices of the Supreme Court finally drag themselves back to work after their long, luxurious summer break of lounging by the pool, sunning themselves and re-reading How Stella Got Her Groove Back.

The court’s first order of business: figuring out what they’re going to do about this whole gay marriage kerfuffle. Five states (Virginia, Oklahoma, Utah, Wisconsin, Indiana) are all jostling to be the case that the highest court in the land chooses to settle once and for all whether we should be allowed to get married.

Which state will it be? There’s no way to know for sure, but our money’s on none. At least not yet.

We could of course be wrong about this, as indeed we are about so many things. But here’s why we think the court’s not ready for a decision yet:

This is just the first conference of the session. There are months upon months for them to pick a case. The fact that they scheduled these cases for consideration on their first day back could just mean that they acknowledge the importance of the issue and want to get up to speed for later, not that they’re ready to make a move right away.

Also: there are a couple of lower courts about to issue decisions in other cases at any moment. If the Supreme Court waits another few weeks, they could have a much broader array of cases from which to chose.

And: Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself said that they would wait until the lower courts disagreed with each other before taking a case. That hasn’t happened yet. In fact, the way things are going, it might never happen.

So we would not be surprised if the court decides to just wait. It’s not terribly satisfying, but then again, nothing about the federal government ever is.

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