Okay, the legal reason she’s (Arizona) claims in pushing ahead with the appeal to the US S.Ct. is that the Ninth Circuit misconstrued the Equal Protection clause.

The relevant part of the 14th Amendment:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Considering that the courts have construed this to require extending benefits for same sex partners, she’s looking to narrow the Equal Protection clause so it doesn’t apply to gays and lesbians.

She’s hoping to get the S.Ct. to overturn the 9th Circuit. Procedurally, the 9th has looked at the issue twice. First as a 3-judge panel, and the second time, it refused to look it at a full-11 member panel. The 9th had upheld the trial court’s ruling. The S.Ct. has until August 9 to issue a response on cert. Brewer v. Diaz Dkt No 12-23.

The 9th Circuit had found that the AZ law would have been discriminatory on a rational basis (the lowest level of review - strict scrutiny being highest):

In sum, the district court correctly recognized that barring the state of Arizona from discriminating against same-sex
couples in its distribution of employee health benefits does not constitute the recognition of a new constitutional right to such benefits. Rather, it is consistent with long standing equal protection jurisprudence holding that “some objectives, such as ‘a bare … desire to harm a politically unpopular group,’ are not legitimate state interests.”