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.)