Will America Have Nationwide Marriage Equality Within a Year?

The husband and I have a number of gay couple friends who like us have traveled out of Virginia to marry.  Others that we know want to wait until they can marry legally here in Virginia.  One attorney who argued the DOMA case before the U. S. Supreme Court believes that it is possible that same sex marriage will be legal nationwide by next summer (i.e., June, 2015).  I can understand his reasoning inasmuch as the motivations behind state marriage bans are identical to those that motivated Congress in enacting DOMA: anti-gay animus,  If such motivation was deemed improper when engaged in by Congress, the same result should hold under the 14th Amendment in terms of state sponsored discrimination.  Here are highlights from The Advocate:

Same-sex couples could have the right to marry throughout the United States within a year, estimates a leading litigator in marriage equality cases.

That prediction comes in a Vox interview with Paul Smith of the law firm Jenner and Block, who was part of the team that successfully challenged the federal Defense of Marriage Act in the U.S. Supreme Court last year.

As state bans on same-sex marriage continue being struck down and the decisions appealed, the two cases that are farthest along in the appeals process as those from Utah and Virginia. In the best-case scenario, Smith says, appeals courts could decide those this summer and whichever side loses would appeal to the Supreme Court, which would issue a decision in the summer of 2015. Even in a slower scenario, with procedural hang-ups, Smith estimates a Supreme Court decision would come no later than 2016. And he expects the decision would be on the side of marriage equality.

“I think that most observers think there are five [of nine] votes for the pro-equality side — the same five that felt the Defense of Marriage Act was unconstitutional,” he told Vox.

Here is more from the cited story in Vox:

By Paul Smith's estimate, it's going to take at most two years for the nation's top court to retry the same-sex marriage issue — and this time, they're expected to settle the issue once and for all.

There's another, although less likely, possibility. First, the appeals courts could unanimously rule in favor of marriage equality. Then, the Supreme Court could refuse to hear any of the appeals of those cases. That would, in effect, legalize same-sex marriage across the country: if the Supreme Court doesn't agree to hear any of the pro-equality appeals, opponents of same-sex marriage would have no other court to turn to.

Smith, however, remains skeptical of that scenario. "My personal view is that the Supreme Court wants to be the one to decide this issue, not the lower courts," he says. "So the Supreme Court will probably take it."

One thing has, however, taken Smith by surprise: how fast it's all happening.

"It's interesting and surprising how quickly courts are getting to the merits of deciding the cases — expediting briefings, expediting cases," Smith says. "Courts usually take their time about things, but somehow there seems to be a perception that this is an issue that needs to be decided fairly quickly."

I concur with Smith - I think the U.S. Supreme Court will take one of the appeals.  Moreover, give the Supreme Court's ruling in United States v. Windsor, I honestly do not see how the Court could do anything but follow through and hold all state level bans to be unconstitutional.