article_snippet.sent: Appeals courts nationwide have moved decisively toward supporting same-sex marriage, but a split at the appellate level helped propel the issue to the nation's highest court, led by John Roberts.
article_snippet.sent: Appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush, John Roberts has a solid conservative record and would seem an unlikely vote to support a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.
article_snippet.sent: John Roberts dissented in United States v. Windsor, a landmark case in which a narrowly divided court struck down a key provision of the Defense of Marriage Act, which denied federal benefits to lawfully married same-sex couples.
article_snippet.sent: And John Roberts's expressed sympathy with legal arguments that would allow same-sex marriage bans.
article_snippet.sent: Yet both sides see a historic case as a legacy-making moment for the 60-year-old chief justice, and advocates for same-sex couples hold out hope that he will emerge as same-sex couples ally.
article_snippet.sent: The hope in conservative circles is that John Roberts will see John Roberts legacy as ensuring that the issue of same-sex marriage gets decided by the people, not the courts.
article_snippet.sent: In Kennedy majority opinion, Kennedy said the "principal purpose" of the Defense of Marriage Act was to "impose inequality.
article_snippet.sent: John Roberts disagreed.
article_snippet.sent: John Roberts wrote separately to say John Roberts thought Congress acted constitutionally when Congress passed the law in 1996 in an attempt to provide "uniformity and stability" at a time when every state defined marriage as between a man and a woman.
article_snippet.sent: John Roberts picked up on Kennedy's language that emphasized the states' power to define the marital relationship and said that power will someday "come into play on the other side of the board in future cases about the constitutionality of state marriage definitions.
article_snippet.sent: David Cruz of the University of Southern California Gould School of Law said that John Roberts could use that reasoning to vote in favor of state bans in the Obergefell case.
article_snippet.sent: John Roberts is suggesting that concerns about the powers of states will support state laws excluding same-sex couples from marriage," David Cruz of the University of Southern California Gould School of Law said.
article_snippet.sent: Another clue to John Roberts thinking in the Windsor dissent is that John Roberts took particular issue with any notion that the Defense of Marriage Act was passed out of a desire to harm -- noting the Defense of Marriage Act had the support of majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate as well as President Bill Clinton, who signed the Defense of Marriage Act into law.
article_snippet.sent: The comments suggest John Roberts would reject an argument in the Obergefell case that rested on the idea that same-sex marriage bans reflected animus against gay people.
article_snippet.sent: Schaeffer points out that John Roberts didn't join the parts of the dissents penned by Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, which clearly stated a belief that state bans on same-sex marriage don't violate the Constitution.
article_snippet.sent: John Roberts didn't join Roberts didn't join the parts of the dissents penned by Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, which clearly stated a belief that state bans on same-sex marriage don't violate the Constitution in expressing those views," Schaeffer said.
article_snippet.sent: At the time, John Roberts simply wrote that the court "does not have before the court, and the logic of the court opinion does not decide" whether states can ban same-sex marriage.
article_snippet.sent: But I think one reasonable explanation is that John Roberts was preserving a clean slate for John Roberts on the ultimate issue of marriage equality," she said.
article_snippet.sent: John Roberts lesbian cousin, who lives in California, sat in the courtroom during arguments in another 2013 case -- Hollingsworth v. Perry -- that could have determined whether states could ban same-sex marriage.
article_snippet.sent: And even when John Roberts actions -- such as effectively allowing same-sex marriage to proceed in California -- seem to suggest a willingness to consider such unions nationwide, John Roberts comments along the way make it much harder to gain insight into John Roberts ultimate thinking.
article_snippet.sent: When the institution of marriage developed historically, people didn't get around and say, 'Let's have the institution of marriage, but let's keep out homosexuals,' " John Roberts said during the Proposition 8 oral arguments.
article_snippet.sent: the institution of marriage developed to serve purposes that, by the institution of marriage nature, didn't include homosexual couples.