Antigay State Officials Waste Everyone’s Time With Pointless Marriage Tantrum

Oh, for crying out loud, Kansas and South Carolina officials. Could you please not be huge jerks about having failed to prevent queers from getting married? Just face it: you lost. Now please stop trying to stall.

Here’s the situation: federal courts are in near-unanimous agreement that state marriage bans simply aren’t constitutional. That’s particularly true in states like KS and SC, where Circuit Courts overturned marriage bans and the US Supreme Court allowed that decision to stand.

In other words, the marriage bans have to go. And that’s exactly what’s happened in places like North Carolina and Colorado. State officials there were completely reasonable, and said “oh, we can’t have marriage bans? Well, OK. Go get married, gays, we’re not going to stop you.”

But not so in Kansas and South Carolina. They tiptoed up to the line of overturning their bans, with a few officials actually ordering a start to marriage. But then other officials were like “not so fast” and went to court to defend the marriage bans. Why? What are they hoping to accomplish? Do they really think they can win at this point? Our theory is that this is all a ploy by antigay elected officials to look good in front of their mouth-breathing base next time they’re up for election.

In any case, we’re likely to have marriage in those states sooner rather than later. Courts have ordered more briefing and maybe oral argument in the next few weeks, so we’ll have a final decision soon enough. We’ve just got to be a liiiiiittle more patient.