

In a pair of highly anticipated decisions, the divided court effectively undercut California's Proposition 8 and struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act. Though one of the decisions was written narrowly, together they provide an emphatic, if incomplete, win for advocates of same-sex marriage.


The Proposition 8 case involved a challenge to the California ballot measure that banned same-sex marriage. On Wednesday, the court concluded that the supporters lacked the legal standing to defend the measure.


"Because we find that petitioners do not have standing, we have no authority to decide this case on the merits, and neither did the 9th Circuit," Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. wrote.


The court's majority, though, stopped short of declaring a constitutionally protected right to same-sex marriage nationwide. The justices also declined to take up the Obama administration's proposal, which would have extended the ruling to a handful of other states that have shared California's policy mix of allowing civil unions while banning same-sex marriage.


"DOMA divests married same-sex couples of the duties and responsibilities that are an essential part of married life," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote. He joined the court's four liberal justices in the decision.

Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act declares that, for the purposes of providing federal benefits, marriage is "only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife" and a spouse is only a "person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife."


"It affects every aspect of life," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said during oral argument.




While the decisions were read inside the court starting at 9 a.m. CDT, sparking a frantic rush by reporters to figure out what the justices had concluded, a large crowd outside anxiously checked iPhones and Androids for the latest updates.




The California case arose after the state Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples had the right to marry. Voters subsequently changed the state's constitution in 2008, in the Proposition 8 ballot measure, to limit marriages to those between one man and one woman.




The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Walker's decision, though for a very state-specific reason that essentially confined its reach to California: The California Supreme Court had recognized same-sex marriage rights in May 2008, and then voters removed those rights in November 2008 by approving the ballot measure.





Supporters of the Defense of Marriage Act when it passed included Democratic Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, who's now the Senate majority leader, and then-Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, now the vice president.

The House of Representatives, which passed the bill by an overwhelming 342-67, explained in a committee report that the law was meant to convey "moral disapproval of homosexuality." One of the law's chief backers at the time, current Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., said during the House debate that homosexual conduct was "based on perversion and ... lust."

In the years that followed, though, a number of supporters began back-pedaling. The act now is opposed by former Rep. Bob Barr of Georgia, a Republican author of the bill who in July 1996 decried "the flames of hedonism, the flames of narcissism, the flames of self-centered morality (that) are licking at the very foundations of our society: the family unit."

The Obama administration initially defended the federal law, as is customary for administrations, but it stopped in February 2011 after concluding that Section 3 violated the Constitution. In its place, House Republicans funded the defense of the statute through what's called the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group.