I thought this was really awesome
I agree that it was awesome, but I think the newspaper oversimplified the headline by saying the court "made" it happen: that kind of language incites right-wing culture warriors to rail against "activist judges". What really happened is more complicated than that.
The Connecticut legislature passed a civil unions bill in 2005, which was signed by the Governor, and which went into effect on October 1 of that year. Since then, a full-marriage bill has been introduced, has passed the state House Judiciary Committee 27-15, but the House adjourned before the bill was presented to the full house, so it would have been on the legislative agenda for the next session.
In the suit the Connecticut Supreme Court heard, the plaintiffs argued that the civil unions law violated constitutional equal protection laws, and the court agreed. (The bold-facing in the excerpt below is my own
The plaintiffs challenge the trial courts conclusion that the distinction between marriage and civil unions is merely one of nomenclature. They contend that marriage is not simply a term denominating a bundle of legal rights. Rather, they contend that it is an institution of unique and enduring importance in our society, one that carries with it a special status. The plaintiffs therefore contend that their claim of unequal treatment cannot be dismissed solely because same sex couples who enter into a civil union enjoy the same rights under state law as married couples. . . . We agree with the plaintiffs . . .
A cognizable constitutional claim arises whenever the government singles out a group for differential treatment.
At this point, the court cites several previous cases in which the language of the opinion supports the notion that marriage is more than just a set of rights; I find those citations personally compelling, but will omit them here.
So the can of worms is this: by attempting to find a middle-ground compromise, the
legislature of Connecticut (not the courts) singled out one group for differential treatment, and
even though the rights were the same, the differential treatment itself is held to be unconstitutional.
This is like the old Alabama bus laws: even though the front of the bus and the back of the bus followed the same routes and schedule (and so the "rights" were equal), the differential treatment was enough for the courts to strike down the practice as unconstitutional.
The courts may have made the final determination, but the
legislature accelerated the case by trying to pacify bigots instead of doing the right thing in the first place.