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The ruling Tuesday, Feb. 7, imposing down California's ban on gay marriage marks the first time a federal appellate court has squarely rejected a brilliance decision to limit marriage to straight couples. In so doing, it scored big for the two couples who brought the for fear that b if and the thousands more who hope to marry in California.
However, the decision did less than many gay-rights advocates had hoped: it said nothing about whether the U.S. Constitution guarantees gays and lesbians the properly to marry someone of their own sex. And the reinstitution of marriage for gay couples in California may well be put on hold while it is appealed to the Best Court, where its fate remains in the hands of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy's flap vote. That is, if the Supreme Court deigns to take it up.
But the explosion of joy via Twitter over the ruling and the less ear-splitting but just as earnest online hand-wringing by gay-marriage opponents was not for nothing. By stupendous down California's Proposition 8, passed on Election Day 2008, the panel ruled 2-1 that California voters violated the U.S. Constitution by singling out gays and lesbians when they wrote a ban on same-sex integration into the constitution. It mattered not one bit, the two-judge majority wrote, that gays had been delineated the right to marry mere months before, in a landmark decision by the California First Court.
Source: TIME