John Eastman, the chairman of the National Organization for
Marriage (NOM), has knocked a recent ruling ordering Ohio officials
to recognize the marriage of a gay couple.
The ruling, handed down by a federal judge, granted James
Obergefell and John Arthur of Cincinnati a temporary injunction to
allow Arthur, who is bedridden from Lou Gehrig's Disease and
receiving hospice care, to be listed as married on his death
certificate, with Obergefell listed as his surviving spouse.
(Related: Dying
gay man's final wish: To marry his partner.)
The judge in the case drew on a recent Supreme Court decision
which struck down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) as
unconstitutional.
Al Gerhardstein, the couple's attorney, told NPR that that the
Ohio ruling is likely to have a ripple effect throughout the nation.
“I suspect there will be lots of places where same-sex couples
can make this same argument,” said Gerhardstein. “So no state
ultimately may be free of this legal reasoning.”
Eastman reiterated a favorite claim of opponents, that the Supreme
Court said that the states get to decide the issue. In the challenge
to California's Proposition 8, the court said that interveners did
not have legal standing to defend the law, which paved the way for a
lower court's ruling to knock down the state's constitutional
amendment approved in 2008 that limited marriage to a heterosexual
union. The justices neither ruled on the amendment nor upheld it.
“The Supreme Court said that the states are supposed to be the
primary place where marriage policy is set,” Eastman said. “And
this judge has just replaced Ohio's policy with his own.
Eastman was also quoted as saying that the Ohio ruling “flies in
the face of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling and will be ultimately
overturned.”