What, it took forty-eight hours for his Wheaties to kick in?:
Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy on Wednesday temporarily blocked an appeals court ruling that declared gay marriage legal in Idaho and Nevada.
Kennedy's order came a little more than an hour after Idaho filed an emergency request for an immediate stay and about 10 minutes before the state said that state and county officials would otherwise have been required to begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
The order also applies to Nevada, where marriage licenses to same-sex couples were going to start to be issued later Wednesday.
Well, good for Justice Kennedy - and let me say, as an aside, that I am astonished that he is the Justice who issued the stay - and praise the LORD for the smallest of favors, but I have to say this mystifies me. Why let the lower court rulings against traditional marriage in five States stand on Monday and then rush out and stay two of them today? Was the whole SCOTUS as sound asleep as Justice Ginburg usually is? Did the nuclear backlash against that unconscionable inaction prove too much for Justice Kennedy's conscience? I don't get it.
In any "case," this reprieve probably won't last for long:
The delay could last just a few days. Kennedy's order requested a response from the plaintiffs involved in Idaho's gay marriage lawsuit by the end of day Thursday.
The full court almost certainly would weigh in to extend the delay much beyond the weekend. That has been the justices' practice in other cases in which a single justice initially blocked a ruling from taking effect.
Will Justice Kennedy's move mug the wumps of Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito off their communal schnied? One can only hope and pray so.
But isn't it appalling that the fate of what's left of traditional marriage hangs on the whims of a handful of judicial oligarchs? If I didn't know better, I could almost believe the Founding Fathers never intended such a thing....
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