Maybe it’s just because I’m not a lawyer and have no clue what the big precedents are, but I was not expecting Latrell Sprewell to show up anywhere in U.S. District Judge Robert C. Jones’s ruling in Sevcik v. Sandoval, which I found via “Judge rules against Nevada same-sex couples who want to marry.”
The Thursday Monday* ruling’s most striking non-Latrell sentences so far:
Homosexual persons may marry in Nevada, but like heterosexual persons, they may not marry members of the same sex. That is, a homosexual man may marry anyone a heterosexual man may marry, and a homosexual woman may marry anyone a heterosexual woman may marry.
The context for those two sentences, as asserted by the judge:
The question before the Court is not the wisdom of providing for or recognizing same-sex marriages as a matter of policy but whether the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits the People of the State of Nevada from maintaining statutes that reserve the institution of civil marriage to one-man–one-woman relationships or from amending their state constitution to prohibit the State from recognizing marriages formed in other states as “marriages”** under Nevada law if those marriages do not conform to Nevada’s one-man–one-woman civil marriage institution.
The broader context, as reported by Richard Socarides on newyorker.com:
The Supreme Court has several gay-marriage cases pending, with an announcement scheduled for next Monday, December 3rd, on which of the cases it will hear. If not addressed this term, the constitutional right-to-marriage issue will soon arise again, perhaps in Sevcik v. Sandoval, a federal-court challenge brought by Lambda Legal against Nevada’s ban on same-sex marriage.
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* Update: As explained in the Washington Blade, “The ruling was filed on Monday, but had only come to the attention to the media on Thursday because the court made no previous announcement it had issued a decision.”
