Disappointing, but nowhere close to the end of the line.
Denying the city of Houston’s request, the U.S. Supreme Court will not review a June decision by the Texas Supreme Court, which ruled that the landmark decision legalizing same-sex marriage does not fully address the right to marriage benefits.
The high court on Monday announced it would not take up the case — which centers on Houston’s policy to provide spouses of gay and lesbian employees the same government-subsidized marriage benefits it provides to opposite-sex spouses — just months after the city of Houston filed its appeal, arguing the state court’s June decision “disregarded” precedent.
In that decision, the Texas Supreme Court threw out a lower court ruling that said spouses of gay and lesbian public employees are entitled to government-subsidized marriage benefits, and it unanimously ordered a trial court to reconsider the case. The ruling found that there’s still room for state courts to explore “the reach and ramifications” of marriage-related issues that resulted from the legalization of same-sex marriage.
That’s despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in 2015 and noted that now-defunct marriage laws were unequal in how they denied same-sex couples the benefits afforded to opposite-sex couples.
See here for the previous update. What this means is that the district court needs to reconsider the lawsuit in light of the state Supreme Court’s assertion that Obergefell may have made marriage universal, but it did not specifically address the question of whether same-sex marriages are entitled to the same actual rights and benefits as traditional marriage. If all this sounds to you like unfathomable pinhead-ery, in which the concept of marriage is divided into an upper class and an underclass based on biology and the easily offended sensibilities of a couple of old coots, you’re correct. But this is where we are. The city will continue to provide spousal benefits for all its married employees, as it has the right to do, at least for now. The Chron, the Dallas Observer, the Texas Observer, and the Current have more.
The case to watch is the gays vs. the cake baker currently in front of the SCOTUS.