Utah Asks Supreme Court to End Marriage of Same-Sex Couples in the State

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The Supreme Court has been asked to stop same-sex marriage in the state of Utah by the state’s Attorney General’s Office, according to BuzzFeed. The office wants to delay same-sex marriage while it appeals a trial court ruling that defeated its amendment making it illegal.

An application to stay judgment pending appeal was filed in the Supreme Court with justice Sonia Sotomayor. Sotomayor is able to make a decision by herself or can refer it to the rest of the Supreme Court.

  

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The state’s lawyers claim that the Supreme Court might accept the case on appeal. It is Kitchen v. Herbert and it is on appeal with the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals right now. The lawyers also argue that it will succeed and the ruling from District Judge Robert Shelby will be overturned.

“Justice Sotomayor has called for a response due by noon E.S.T. on Friday, January 3, 2014,” the public information office of the Supreme Court told BuzzFeed.

In the filing, the state’s attorneys wrote that the decision by the Supreme Court in United States v. Windsor was “based in significant part on federalism concerns. [T]he district court not only refused to accommodate Utah’s definition [of marriage] for purposes of federal law, it altogether abrogated the decisions of the State and its citizens, acting through every available democratic channel, to define marriage in the traditional way. The district court’s decision was therefore a far greater ‘federal intrusion on state power’ than the intrusion invalidated in Windsor.”

The state also believes the ruling will be overturned with an appeal is the fact that “the large and growing body of social science research contradicting the central premise of the district court’s due process and equal protection holdings: i.e., its conclusion that there is no ‘rational reason’—much less any compelling reason—for restricting marriage to same-sex couples.”