That’s not quite right—the headline makes it sound as if the Supreme Court ruled and then people could go ahead and get married. It would be more accurate to say that the ruling “cleared the way for the restoration of gay marriage in California.”
This ruling was especially tricky, because it was so technical. Basically, the court said that, since the government decided not to appeal the court of appeals’s decision, the case should not have continued on to the Ninth Circuit. A private group had no right to come in and argue the anti-marriage case.
SCOTUSblog has a full explainer on this, so I’ll be brief. In short: A lot has to happen before marriage becomes legal again in California, even after the ruling. The court of appeals has to lift its stay on gay marriages that they imposed on the district court’s judgment (they’ve now said it will be lifted in 25 days from the ruling). And it has to be decided by the state government (which is gay marriage-friendly) that the District Court decision prohibiting officials to enforce the heterosexual-marriage only restriction of Proposition 8—that was the big Prop 8 trial overseen by Judge Vaughn Walker—applies to everyone, not just the two couples who sued. Even now, it might not be over.
As the Los Angeles Times so capably explained:
Opponents of gay marriage have suggested they might go back to court to try to prevent Brown from enforcing the injunction beyond the couples named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit.
District judges generally are supposed to apply injunctions narrowly to the parties before them unless they are deciding a class action lawsuit or unless a broad order is the only way to protect the plaintiffs who sued. The Proposition 8 challenge was not filed as a class action.
Gay rights lawyers say they are confident any effort to limit Walker’s decision will fail.
Did readers in other states need to know all that? Not necessarily. But they did need to know that the Supreme Court didn’t give Californians the immediate right to marry, it only cleared the way for marriages to happen. It might seem like a small difference … unless you’re a gay Californian who is hoping to wed.
I note this story leaves out the most common error of all -- thoroughly one-sided, pro-gay reporting at all levels of the major media.
Of course, if journalists were objective that might not happen.
#1 Posted by Dan Gainor, CJR on Fri 28 Jun 2013 at 10:09 PM
"because of the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the Constitution, a state usually has to recognize marriages performed in other states"
"If DOMA was struck down completely, it would mean that if a couple got married in New York but lived in North Carolina, then North Carolina and the federal government would recognize their marriage."
These statements are incorrect. FFC has always been applied to judgments in legal cases and never to marriages. Historically, a state has always been free to refuse to recognize other states' marriages, and many have done so. HuffPo and the NYT have written on this topic, and I've linked them below.
If one is going to write about media outlets getting the law wrong, it's probably a good idea to get the law right yourself, and not simply restate incorrect conventional wisdom.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/17/us/bans-on-interracial-unions-offer-perspective-on-gay-ones.html?pagewanted=1
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tobias-barrington-wolff/doma-repeal-and-the-truth_b_905484.html
#2 Posted by Tom T., CJR on Sat 29 Jun 2013 at 12:33 AM