More than six months after Nevada began issuing marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples, the group which defended the state's ban on gay marriage in court has asked the Supreme Court to review the ruling which struck it down.

The Coalition for the Protection of Marriage stepped in to argue the ban's merits after Nevada officials dropped their defense of the ban last year.

Nevada became the 27th state where gay couples can marry after the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco declared Nevada's ban unconstitutional in October.

The Coalition for the Protection of Marriage asked the appeals court to review its ruling, arguing that the lottery used to select the three judges who heard the case was rigged. The request was denied.

The group turned to the Supreme Court on Thursday.

“The reality is that changing the meaning of marriage to that of 'any two persons' will transform the institution profoundly, if not immediately, then certainly over time as the new meaning is mandated in texts, in schools, and in many other parts of the public square and voluntarily published by the media and other institutions, with society, especially its children, thereby losing the ability to discern the meaning of the old institution,” the group wrote in its petition.

The Coalition for the Protection of Marriage also repeated its claims that the appeals court was biased toward plaintiffs.

“The appearance of unfairness is not a close question here,” the petition states. “Even without the aid of professional statisticians, a reasonable person will immediately sense that something is amiss when one judge out of more than thirty is assigned over a four and one-half year period to five of a circuit’s eleven Relevant Cases involving a particular issue, and when both that Judge and another Judge with respect to whom assignment disparities also exist, are assigned to the most momentous of those cases, here involving same-sex marriage.”

The Supreme Court has previously refused intervenor status to a third party in a similar case challenging California's Proposition 8. The petition also appears to be moot, given its timing. That is, justices are likely to rule in a similar case challenging bans in four states before it could hear arguments in the case.

(Brief provided by Equality Case Files.)