The Alabama Supreme Court bade on March 3, Tuesday, that same-sex marriages in the state be banned regardless of the fact that the United States Supreme Court allowed them to proceed. The ruling went on for a month with a lot of confusion and resistance in Alabama after the decision by a U.S. district court in January overturning Alabama's ban on gay marriage.
The Alabama justices were resistant, saying that it has been done for almost two centuries and Alabama law only allows marriages between man and woman. Alabama judges have an obligation "not to issue any marriage license contrary to this law. Nothing in the United States Constitution alters or overrides this duty." the court said, according to Reuters.
Many compared the resistance in Alabama-where the states' rights has always been revered and state supreme court justices are elected rather than appointed-to the state's resistance regarding the 1963 school desegregation orders. During that time, Gov. George Wallace stood in the doorway of the University of Alabama to preclude the court-ordered enrollment of black students.
A statement from the Liberty Counsel challenged the lower court ruling saying that the ruling of the Alabama Supreme Court "offers the most forceful and clearly articulated rebuttal to date of the imaginative arguments for the same-sex marriage employed by federal courts".
What will happen next is still unknown. But there are speculations that someone will go back to the federal courts to upend the ruling.
The court said that Alabama has chosen to define marriage in the traditional way throughout the entirety of its history. On the contrary, Alabama Supreme Court said that marriage has always been between men and women. It said that the opposite sex complement each other both biologically and socially; and that the sexual union between men and women, most often than not, produces offspring.
This reasoning by the Alabama Supreme Court has been vetoed by more or less 60 state and federal courts all around the country in the past years. However, the state supreme court said that up until the point where the nation's highest court has weighed in, "state courts may interpret the United States Constitution independently from, and even contrary to, federal courts."