http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morn ... -in-state/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;The Alabama Supreme Court ordered a halt Tuesday to same-sex marriages in the state despite a U.S. Supreme Court order allowing them to proceed. The ruling capped a wild month of confusion and resistance in Alabama following a January decision by a U.S. district court invalidating Alabama’s ban on gay marriage.
The Alabama justices were defiant. “As it has done for approximately two centuries,” the court said, “Alabama law allows for ‘marriage’ between only one man and one woman.” Alabama judges have a duty “not to issue any marriage license contrary to this law. Nothing in the United States Constitution alters or overrides this duty.”
The resistance in Alabama, where states’ rights has always been sacred writ and state supreme court justices are elected rather than appointed, has been compared by many to that state’s resistance to school desegregation orders in the 1963, when Gov. George Wallace (D) stood in the doorway of the University of Alabama to prevent the court-ordered enrollment of black students.
“The ruling of the Alabama Supreme Court offers the most forceful and clearly articulated rebuttal to date of the imaginative arguments for same-sex ‘marriage’ employed by federal courts,” said a statement from the Liberty Counsel, which challenged the lower court ruling.
What happens next is unclear. Presumably someone will go back to the federal courts to overturn the ruling. But short of a ruling on gay marriage by the nation’s highest court, which isn’t expected for months, the standoff seems likely to continue. The Alabama court suggested that it would be bound by the U.S. Supreme Court but nothing lower than that.
Indeed, the state’s highest court declared itself equally empowered as the lower federal courts to decide whether Alabama’s ban on same-sex marriage violates the Constitution — stating unequivocally that it does not in what amounted to a broadside against the trend of courts invalidating same-sex marriage bans.
