The year 2012 could be looked back on as a monumentally historic year regarding same sex marriages if the Supreme Court decided whether to hear several cases related to the controversial issue.
The highest court in the U.S. will meet Friday in a private conference to discuss whether they should hear 10 cases related to same-sex-marriage. At least eight of those cases debate how the federal Defense of Marriage Act applied to legally married same-sex couples.
The conference comes three weeks after voters at the polls on Nov. 6 backed same-sex marriage in Maine, Maryland and Washington and defeated a ban on it in Minnesota, marking a landmark day for gay couples looking to be wed.
Currently, gay marriage is legalized in nine states including Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Vermont, and Washington, as well as the District of Columbia. And while federal courts in California struck down the state's constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, the issue is still being appealed; meaning the ruling from the federal courts cannot take effect yet.
Of the 10 cases facing the court relating to this issue, the biggest one the court could decide to take on revolves around California's Proposition 8, which bans gay marriage that voters adopted in 2008 after the state Supreme Court ruled that gay Californians could get married.
The case could set a precedent that allows the justices to decide whether the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of equal protection means that the right to marriage cannot be limited to heterosexuals.
For that reason, however, some legal and political experts such as Andrew Koppelman, a professor of law and political science at Northwestern University, believe that the high court may opt to pass on hearing the case.
"What do they have to gain by hearing this case? Either they impose same sex marriage on the whole country, which would create a political firestorm, or they say there's no right to same-sex marriage, in which case they are going to be reversed in 20 years and be badly remembered. They'll be the villains in the historical narrative," Koppelman told the Chicago Tribune.
Koppelman signed onto a legal brief urging the justices not to hear the California case.
Yet on the other side of the coin, proponents for gay marriage say the issue is too important for the Supreme Court to ignore.
"The question is whether there's a civil right to redefine marriage, as the California Supreme Court did. We don't think there is," Brian Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage, told the Tribune.
As CNN reports, President Obama, who supports same sex marriage, has ordered U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder not to defend the Defense of Marriage Act in court, effectively removing the participation of the Justice Department from the issue.
This prompted the Republicans, who have opposed same sex marriage, to appoint their own attorney, high-profile Washington lawyer Paul Clement, a former solicitor general, to defend the law.
"DOMA does not bar or invalidate any marriages but leaves states free to decide whether they will recognize same-sex marriage," Clement told the court in a legal brief. "Rather, DOMA merely reaffirmed and codified the traditional definition of marriage: what Congress itself has always meant and what courts and the executive branch have always understood it to mean -- in using those words: A traditional male-female couple."
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