What law? There is still no law that allows gay marriage in Massachusetts. Or are you under the misimpression that courts make laws in a constitutional republic?
There is. It’s called the marriage law. There is a law, that defines marriage. Now, that law says “man and woman”. But the Mass. Constitution also says that you can’t discriminate on the basis of sex (something we barely managed to keep out of our federal constitution, thank God).
The Mass. Court, mistakenly I believe but rationally, said that in order to not “discriminate” on the basis of sex, you should be able to substitute “woman” for “man” and vice versa whereever it is found in the law.
And low and behold, the Marriage law has those words “man” and “woman”. The court ruled therefore that the constitution prohibiting sex discrimination meant either sex could qualify as either a man or woman in the marriage law.
They then stayed their ruling, giving the legislature time to change the law, if they wanted. For example, the legislature could have change the law to prohibit all marriages. Or they could have immediately started a constitutional amendment process.
Some people mistakenly think the court was holding off to give the legislature the time to “fix” the law to ALLOW gay marriage. But that is incorrect — the court ruled that the law ALREADY allowed gay marriage, by application of the “substitute male for female” rule.
After 18 months, the legislature had done nothing to change the law so that gays could not marry, so the court’s ruling went into effect.
Of course, Romney could have ordered people to not write marriage licenses. If they didn’t listen to him, he could have fired them. It would have gone to the courts, the courts would have ruled the same way they did before, the marriages would be deemed legal, the firings illegal.
But that didn’t happen, because Mitt instead pushed for a constitutional amendment, which almost made it onto the ballot. Except 4 supporters were turned by the democrats. 4 that might not have been turned if opponents of gay marriage had focused 100% of their energy on keeping the votes they had, instead of attacking Mitt Romney for not improperly opposing the court.