Abstract
Same-sex marriage supporters in West Virginia—and several other states—went to bed on Sunday night, October 5, 2014, not knowing that they should be as excited as Cindy Lou Who on Christmas Eve. The next morning, those supporters awoke to news that the US Supreme Court had cleared the way for some states to begin granting marriage certificates to same-sex partners seeking to marry. The court denied certiorari to several applications for appeal of Circuit Court decisions to strike state laws against same-sex marriage as unconstitutional. That denial of certiorari, while legally the equivalent of the rejection of a dinner invitation, set the wheels in motion to lift stays on several judicial opinions that struck bans on same-sex marriage from Circuit Courts and District Courts scattered throughout the country. And without missing a beat, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit followed the Supreme Court’s denial of certiorari almost immediately with a decision to uphold a lower court decision to strike a ban on same-sex marriage in Idaho. And so it was, in the span of about a week, same-sex marriage became—at least in theory—legal in 13 more states than it had been on October 5, 2014.