Marriage equality was set to begin tomorrow morning at 9:00 AM MDT in Idaho after Federal Magistrate Judge Dale ruled Idaho's marriage ban violates the due process and equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. However, Governor Otter has filed a motion for an emergency stay at the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The main argument for the stay (other than "unseemly choas" occurring in the state without the stay) is that the SCOTUS issued a stay in the Kitchen marriage equality case out of Utah. The plaintiffs in the case counter that at the time the SCOTUS issued the stay in the Kitchen case, it was the only pro marriage equality ruling made post-Windsor. Now, there are numerous rulings in favor of marriage equality in both federal and state courts nationwide.
The Ninth Circuit (three judge) panel has issued a temporary stay pending their decision of the motion for the emergency stay. So, marriages will not begin tomorrow morning in Idaho (unless further developments occur).
via Buzzfeed
From the State's Motion to Stay:
If the Injunction becomes effective, Idaho will experience the same unseemly chaos, confusion, conflict, uncertainty, and spawn of further litigation and administrative actions seen in Utah and, to a lesser extent, in Michigan and resulting from a period of time when those district courts’ decisions, very similar to the Injunction, were not stayed and hundreds of same-sex couples “married” in contravention of their respective States’ marriage laws.
On January 6, 2014, the United States Supreme Court made clear that it will decide the constitutionality of man-woman marriage and until that time no lower court decision holding against man-woman marriage should operate to allow same-sex couples to marry or have their marriages recognized contrary to the law of their particular States. The Supreme Court did this by the extraordinary measure of staying the Utah district court’s injunction against man-woman marriage after both that court and the Tenth Circuit had refused to do so.
Now, weren't you just disgusted and horrified by the "unseemly chaos" of seeing all those extremely happy gay couples getting married in Utah? What is a self-respecting homophobe to do? Goodness gracious!
From the Plaintiffs' Response to the Motion to Stay:
“A stay is not a matter of right.” Nken v. Holder, 556 U.S. 418, 433 (2009). A party seeking the extraordinary relief of a stay must satisfy a four-factor test, which requires, among other things, a “strong showing that [the stay applicant] is likely to succeed on the merits” and a showing that “the applicant will be irreparably injured absent a stay.” Id. at 434. Moreover, with respect to irreparable harm, the applicant “must show that there is a reason specific to his or her case, as opposed to a reason that would apply equally well to . . . all cases” why denial of a stay will irreparably harm the applicant. Leiva-Perez v. Holder, 640 F.3d 962, 969 (9th Cir. 2011) (emphasis added). Defendants cannot meet this standard.
This Court should reject Defendants’ suggestion that the Supreme Court’s entry of a stay in Herbert v. Kitchen 134 S. Ct. 893 (Jan. 6, 2014), compels a stay here. The district court decision in Kitchen v. Herbert, 961 F.Supp.2d 1181 (D. Utah 2013), invalidating Utah’s ban on marriage by same-sex couples, was the first reported decision of any court to address a marriage equality claim in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Windsor, 133 S. Ct. 2675 (2013). While the district court’s reasoning was clearly correct, at the time it was decided, it stood virtually alone as federal authority; accordingly, the stay application had to be measured against a limited jurisprudence of a single case. Since that decision, however, an unbroken wave of federal and state courts in every corner of the nation—including Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, New Mexico, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia—have come to the same conclusion: in the wake of Windsor, marriage equality is a constitutional imperative. Not a single court in the nation has found to the contrary.
In light of that extraordinary consensus, the stay application in this case, and this Court’s assessment of the merits, must be measured against a substantial body of doctrine that is consistent and uniform in supporting the correctness of the District Court’s judgment. That body of uniform case law—virtually non-existent in Kitchen—differentiates this case and strongly supports the denial of a stay.
via
Equality On Trial