A New York State appellate court has struck down a lower court ruling that found a right to same-sex marriage under the state's constitution. The appellate court held that there was no such right and that the lower court had overreached into the realm of the legislature.
I wonder if the case had been about the rights of marriage, instead of marriage itself, if the outcome might have been different. In Vermont, most famously, the state's highest court found gay couples to be entitled to the state-granted rights and obligations that married couples enjoy, while leaving it to the state legislature to devise a means to grant those rights (which it did, via the then-novel idea of civil unions). But in New York it was all about the "M" word.
Yet progress rarely comes in such big steps, and we pay a price
for the rejection of incrementalism (which, despite initial
lesbigay activist opposition, recently brought statewide marriage
rights to gay couples via civil unions in Connecticut
as a result of legislative action not forced by a court
ruling). The
enactment of Britain's new Civil Partnership Act is another
example.