Well, I agree with you. We might expect better from him.
I guess he wants to be liked in the beltway.
While I'm no opponent of same-sex relationships (whether they call themselves married, domestically partnered, civilly unionized, or just plain going steady), I'm going to give Ted a bit of the benefit of the doubt here. Even the Lambda Legal organization (pro-homosexual law lobby) has said this suit is a mistake.
Regardless of Ted's personal motivations for this, opponents of gay marriage should welcome this suit. We all know that the Ninth Circuit is by far the most liberal of the appellate courts, and this is the first case ripe for them.
Washington State has had no recent law requiring one man, one woman marriage, and the constitutional amendments of Hawaii, Alaska and even Oregon were enacted some time ago. In the case of California, the amendment is very recent, and actually changed the law (court-imposed, of course) that allowed same-sex marriage. That didn't happen in any other state. Clearly, this is a severe temptation for the Ninth Circuit to rule in favor of the suit, and should they do so, there would be a fairly quick appeal to the Supreme Court.
Right now, the status of same-sex marriage is that it is legal in a few places, explicitly prohibited in about three-fifths of the states (recently so), and less than fifteen years ago was officially disfavored on the Federal level with DOMA.
Sotomayor replacing Souter on the Court does nothing to change the balance between conservative and liberal. The four conservative Justices can be depended on to be rock solid on this, only Kennedy is in question. I know how he voted on Lawrence vs. Texas, but there's a big difference between allowing an activity, and sanctioning it in a societal institution. Kennedy probably can make that distinction.
At this point, there is liable to be a ruling that may stand for many years that there is no Constitutional right to marry a person of the same gender. That could be what Ted's secretly trying to accomplish here. That tosses the issue back to the states, and sets a precedent for enforcing DOMA. You will have gay marriage in only the hard-core blue states, the ones that voted for Dukakis, at least for the next generation.
If you oppose letting homosexuals marry, what's the downside here?