Supreme Court declines to take up two more gay rights cases

[RiverNoord]

3. I don't know what point exactly you were making

with the numbers, but they only indicate that the Supremes won't take on state bans in general until the balance has shifted much more substantially. They only indicated that right now the overwhelming majority of the states ban same-sex marriage.

At the time of Loving, the civil rights movement was extremely active, desegregation had already been through its nastiest resistance, and it was pretty much southern states that had so-called anti-miscegenation laws. It was time.

Right now, the overwhelming majority of the states do not recognize same-sex marriage, and the level of violence and repression generally directed against gays is nowhere near the level of what African Americans had suffered at the time of Loving. (Please understand that I am not in any way belittling the effects of violence and repression directed against gays in this country - it is very substantial and is not to tolerated. There just aren't routine lynch mobs running around just grabbing gay people and hanging them, keeping them away from the polls, etc. There aren't 'male, female, homosexual' separate-but-equal public accommodations and signs everywhere in the most bigoted areas declaring that businesses serve 'heterosexual only.')

It'll take at least a 50/50 balance before the Supreme Court will actually take on the issue.

Remember that the Windsor majority reasoning depended very heavily on respect for States' traditional and nearly exclusive rights to define marriage. It's a big step to do a u-turn on the same subject and turn the reasoning around entirely to support striking down state bans on same-sex marriage...

Oh - and finally, the real challenge is even bigger - there is basically no historical record of civilizations that enabled homosexuals to marry each other, while many civilizations, generally out of necessity concerning diverse ethnic makeup, had much marital mixing of persons of diverse ethnic backgrounds. I strongly believe that same-sex marriage is a good thing, and its time has come, but I do recognize that it is a genuinely radical step in redefining what the institution of marriage is.