The cases the Supreme Court agreed to hear before the end of the 2015 term, were brought by some 15 same-sex couples in four states. The plaintiffs said they have a fundamental right to marry and to be treated as opposite-sex couples are, adding that bans they challenged demeaned their dignity, imposed countless practical difficulties and inflicted particular harm on their children. The pace of change on same-sex marriage, in both popular opinion and in the courts, has no parallel in the nation's history. Gay rights advocates hailed the court's move on Friday as one of the final steps in a decades-long journey toward equal treatment, and they expressed confidence they would prevail.  "We are finally within sight of the day when same-sex couples across the country will be able to share equally in the joys, protections and responsibilities of marriage," said Jon W. Davidson, the legal director of Lambda Legal. Supporters of traditional marriage said the Supreme Court now has a chance to return the issue to voters and legislators. "Lower court judges have robbed millions of people of their voice and vote on society's most fundamental relationship — marriage," said Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, a conservative policy and lobbying group. "There is nothing in the Constitution that empowers the courts to silence the people and impose a nationwide redefinition of marriage."

The Supreme Court's lack of action in October, 2014 and its last three major gay rights rulings suggest that the court will rule in favor of same-sex marriage. But the court also has a history of caution in this area. It agreed once before to hear a constitutional challenge to a same-sex marriage ban, in 2012 in a case called Hollingsworth v. Perry that involved California's Proposition 8. At the time, nine states and the District of Columbia allowed same-sex couples to marry.  When the court's ruling arrived in June 2013, the justices ducked, with a majority saying that the case was not properly before them, and none of them expressing a view on the ultimate question of whether the Constitution requires states to allow same-sex marriage. But a second decision the same day, in United States v. Windsor, provided the movement for same-sex marriage with what turned out to be a powerful tailwind. The decision struck down the part of the Defense of Marriage Act that barred federal benefits for same-sex couples married in states that allowed such unions.

The Windsor decision was based partly on federalism grounds, with Justice Anthony M. Kennedy's majority opinion stressing that state decisions on how to treat marriages deserved respect. But lower courts focused on other parts of his opinion, ones that emphasized the dignity of gay relationships and the harm that families of gay couples suffered from bans on same-sex marriage. In a remarkable and largely unbroken line of more than 40 decisions, state and federal courts relied on the Windsor decision to rule in favor of same-sex marriage.

The most important exception was a decision in November, 2014 from a divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati. Writing for the majority, Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton said that voters and legislators, not judges, should decide the issue. That decision created a split among the federal appeals courts, a criterion that the Supreme Court often looks to in deciding whether to hear a case. That criterion had been missing in October. The Sixth Circuit's decision upheld bans on same-sex marriage in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee. The Supreme Court agreed to hear petitions seeking review from plaintiffs challenging those bans in each state. The court said it will hear two and a half hours of argument, probably in the last week of April. The first 90 minutes will be devoted to the question of whether the Constitution requires states "to license a marriage between two people of the same sex." The last hour will concern a question that will be moot if the answer to the first one is yes: whether states must "recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex when their marriage was lawfully licensed and performed out of state."

The court consolidated the four petitions, not all of which had addressed both questions. Two cases — Obergefell v. Hodges, No. 14-556, from Ohio, and Tanco v. Haslam, No. 14-562, from Tennessee — challenged state laws barring the recognition of same-sex marriages performed elsewhere. "Ohio does not contest the validity of their out-of-state marriages," the plaintiffs seeking to overturn the ban wrote in their brief seeking Supreme Court review. "It simply refuses to recognize them." State officials in Ohio had urged the justices to hear the case. "The present status quo is unsustainable," they said. "The country deserves a nationwide answer to the question — one way or the other.    Gov. Bill Haslam of Tennessee, a Republican, took a different approach from those of officials in the other states whose cases the Supreme Court agreed to decide. He did what litigants who have won in the lower court typically do: He urged the justices to decline to hear the case.  The Michigan case, DeBoer v. Snyder, No. 14-571, was brought by April DeBoer and Jayne Rowse, two nurses. They sued to challenge the state's ban on same-sex marriage. In urging the Supreme Court to hear their case, they asked the justices to do away with "the significant legal burdens and detriments imposed by denying marriage to same-sex couples, as well as the dignity and emotional well-being of the couples and any children they may have." Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican, joined the plaintiffs in urging the Supreme Court to hear the case.  The Kentucky case, Bourke v. Beshear, No. 14-574, was brought by two sets of plaintiffs. The first group included four same-sex couples who had married in other states and who sought recognition of their unions. The second group, two couples, sought the right to marry in Kentucky. In his response to the petition in the Supreme Court, Gov. Steven L. Beshear, a Democrat, said he had a duty to enforce the state's laws. But he agreed that the Supreme Court should settle the matter and "resolve the issues creating the legal chaos that has resulted since Windsor."

MARRIAGE EQUALITY AROUND THE WORLD VIDEO WALL

From the 14th Amendment, Section 1:

"No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

The 14th Amendment has two Applicable Parts: The Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause:

Under the Due Process Clause, no state can deprive its citizens of life, liberty or property (which has been interpreted to include rights and freedoms) without due process of law. This means states cannot deprive their citizens of rights contained in, guaranteed by or extending from the U.S. Constitution. Although the US Constitution does not mention marriage in any way, it does contain a "Full Faith and Credit Clause" which requires state A to honor contracts made in state B. This is also applied to things such as license plates, legal name changes, car registrations, divorces, adoptions and marriages. The 1996 Defense of Marriage Act ("DOMA") purports to enable states to violate the Full Faith and Credit Clause with respect to marriage, based upon the gender of the parties thereto. One can argue that the Due Process Clause prohibits states from violating the Full Faith and Credit Clause without judicial review.Under the Equal Protection Clause, a state must provide equal protection under the law to all persons within its jurisdiction. This means that if a state enacts a law that has an adverse impact on one group of people, it may not do so arbitrarily and there must exist a compelling need for the law to be enacted.As evidenced by California's Proposition 8 trials, it can be difficult to come up with a legal argument against same-sex marriage without relying upon religious doctrine which is inadmissible. This is one reason why the parties who sued to prevent same-sex marriage in California also fought very hard to prevent videotape of them speaking the arguments they made in court from being released to the public. They themselves argued that if the public saw them saying the things they said in Court, there would be outrage, death threats and their careers would be irreparably harmed. One can argue that the Equal Protection Clause is violated by states that permit some citizens to marry, but not others and then cannot produce a coherent argument as to why this is necessary.

Lambda Legal's Jon Davidson has spelled out what will happen should SCOTUS go the other way:  If the Supreme Court were to rule in the cases in which it today granted review that the U.S. Constitution does not protect same-sex couple's right to marry and does not require states to respect marriages same-sex couples lawfully have entered in other jurisdictions, a number of issues would arise. With respect to same-sex couples who already have married as a result of court rulings, Lambda Legal strongly believes -- as a federal district court in Michigan ruled just yesterday with respect to marriages entered in that state before the 6th Circuit's adverse ruling -- that those marriages will remain valid and will need to continue to be respected by the states in which those marriages were entered. Nonetheless, the validity of those couples' marriages may be challenged and those couples may want to take additional steps (such as executing wills, durable health care powers of attorney, and securing second parent adoptions) to provide them and their families extra peace of mind and security.

With respect to whether same-sex couples would be able to marry and would have their marriages respected in other states, that would vary from state to state. States in which marriage equality was achieved by a ruling under the state's constitution, by legislative reform, or at the ballot box, would be unaffected. Unmarried same-sex couples in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee (the states whose marriage laws the Supreme Court today agreed to review) would be forced to seek reform through the political process. States in which a final judgment has been obtained in federal court would be required to continue to allow same-sex couples to marry and to respect out-of-state marriages entered by same-sex couples unless and until someone with standing makes a motion to reopen the judgment and that motion is granted (unless stays are properly obtained before then). In some states, there may be no one with standing interested in seeking to set aside the existing judgment. Same-sex couples in states in which a judgment is on appeal or can still be appealed whose judgments have not been stayed should be able to continue to marry and to have their out-of-state marriages honored by the state until the existing judgment is stayed or reversed. There's no question that it would be a mess. This is one additional reason why the Supreme Court should reverse the 6th Circuit's aberrant decision and hold that same-sex couples, like all other couples, share the fundamental right to marry and that it violates federal guarantees of equality and liberty to refuse to allow them to marry or to deny recognition to the marriages they lawfully have entered in other states.