I just read the whole 6th Circuit decision and dissent and all I can say is, I don’t think her fellow judges on the panel will be inviting Martha Craig Daughtrey (the dissenting judge) to lunch anytime soon.

(I know there are a few pages about this ruling, but I thought I’d offer some of the highlights of the dissent for your overnight reading enjoyment.)

She painted them as the buffoons they are, showing no mercy.
From her opening

The author of the majority opinion has drafted what would make an engrossing TED Talk or, possibly, an introductory lecture in Political Philosophy. But as an appellate court decision, it wholly fails to grapple with the relevant constitutional question in this appeal…

to

my colleagues view the plaintiffs as social activists who have somehow stumbled into federal court, inadvisably, when they should be out campaigning to win “the hearts and minds” of
Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee voters to their cause.

to

The majority’s “original meaning” analysis strings together a number of case citations but can tell us little about the Fourteenth Amendment, except to assure us that “the people who adopted the Fourteenth Amendment [never] understood it to require the States to change the definition of marriage.” The quick answer is that they undoubtedly did not understand that it would also require school desegregation in 1955 or the end of miscegenation laws across the country, beginning in California in 1948 and culminating in the Loving decision in 1967.
to

The principal thrust of the majority’s rational-basis analysis is basically a reiteration of the same tired argument that the proponents of same-sex-marriage bans have raised in litigation
across the country…As previously noted, however, this argument is one that an eminent jurist has described as being “so full of holes that it cannot be taken seriously.”

to her closing comment

If we in the judiciary do not have the authority, and indeed the responsibility, to right fundamental wrongs left excused by a majority of the electorate, our whole intricate, constitutional system of checks and balances, as well as the oaths to which we swore, prove to be nothing but shams.

BOOM.