Gay people exist

Jay Michaelson of The Daily Beast ponders whether marriage equality is indeed unstoppable. Yes, there have been a flurry of court rulings overturning bans to same-sex marriages. And all of those rulings are based on the Windsor case the Supremes handed down last summer, the one that overturned a key part of the Defense of Marriage Act. But, says Michaelson, all those recent state and federal rulings went way beyond what Justice Kennedy wrote in his Windsor decision.

There are four justices, Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, and Alito, who have consistently voted against us. Another four, Ginsberg, Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor, have consistently voted for us. That leaves Kennedy in the middle. So Kennedy's words, and other courts' interpretation of them, matter.

According to Michaelson, Kennedy did not claim marriage as a right, nor that DOMA violated equal protection, nor that states must allow marriage equality. Kennedy only wrote that marriage conferred dignity and Congress, for no legitimate reason, had denied that of same-sex couples in a state that had granted this dignity.

In contrast, Judge Jones of Pennsylvania wrote that there is a fundamental right to marriage and the state can't get in the way. Even more, there is that equal protection thing. Other justices in other states have written similar legal flourishes.

So is Kennedy ready to overturn amendments to the constitutions in two dozen states? That would be unprecedented.

Perhaps he is. To conservatives, such as Scalia, there are no homosexuals, there are only homosexual acts. And homosexual acts can be regulated. But it was Kennedy, 20 years ago, who was the first of the Supremes to declare gay people exist. It is not proper to discriminate against gay people. That is what all these court cases are declaring. That is why Kennedy will likely rule in our favor.