[MountainFlower]

'It also violates with the Massachusetts Constitution, which states: "The power of suspending the laws, or (suspending) the execution of the laws, ought never to be exercised but by the legislature..." ' AMEN!

therefore he is in violation of the constitution, yes?

[CharlesWayneCT]

There's been some extensive posts on this, and I've even done a point-by-point analysis of the actual decision, which is posted here somewhere.

The court did not suspend the marriage law.

The marriage law uses the terms "man" and "woman". The Ma. Constitution has been construed to abolish unintended distinctions between male and female.

The court analyzed the phrase used in the marriage law, and determined that the phrase was a common-law phrase, not a specific choice of the legislature.

That allowed them to say that the phrase was not specifically intended to discriminate, but was merely a colloquial expression, so to speak.

Having waved their arms to eliminate what you and I know was the clear intent to restrict marriage, they could then "fix" the problem without re-writing the law.

They simply said that whereever the terms "man" and "woman" appear in the law, they should be interpreted as "person", just as the Ma. constitution says for general laws.

This is not unusual. There were a rash of laws that used the term "man" that the court has decided should apply to both men and women.

They were wrong in this case, but they didn't re-write the law, they merely said that the "proper" "constitutional" interpretation of the terms "man" and "woman" was "person".

Then they ordered that appropriate relief be given to the plaintiffs, AS WELL AS any other people in the same situation.

They did tell the legislature they had 6 months if they wanted to re-write the law to try to make it explicit that the legislature intended the law to restrict same-sex couples.

The legislature, having no interest in stopping gay marriage, did not act.

Note that there are so many pro-gay-marriage legislators in Ma. that they couldn't even get 50 of them (I think that's 25%) to vote to allow a referendum onto the ballot. So the idea that the legislature's failure to act was because they supported a gay marriage ban is ludicrous. They didn't act because they knew they didn't have to.

I will also note the if you read all the news reports from the time, you will see that everybody expected from day one of the ruling that in 6 months gay marriage would be legal.