BREAKING: Supremes Rule Gay Marriage Legal…

It’s not the same country anymore. With yesterday’s decision to uphold Obamacare subsidies, the Supreme Court starts the day, today, with another shocking ruling.

In all 50 states, gay marriage is legal, according to at least 5 of the 9 justices. And so it stands.

Justice Kennedy issued the ruling:

Business Insider: Justice Anthony Kennedy issued the 5-4 ruling, finding that the Fourteenth Amendment requires a state to license a marriage between two people of the same sex.

“The fundamental liberties protected by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process clause extend to certain personal choices central to individual dignity and autonomy, including intimate choices defining personal opinions and beliefs,” a summary of the opinion stated.

The justices explored two key questions about same-sex unions during their arguments in April:

1) Does the Fourteenth Amendment require a state to license a marriage between two people of the same sex?

2) Does the Fourteenth Amendment require a state to recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex when their marriage was lawfully licensed and performed out-of-state?

While they just gave license to gays to marry and usurped state’s rights to decide, they managed to weasel out of determining if gay marriage was Constitutional:

But the high court declined to rule on the broader question about gay marriage: Is there a Constitutional right to gay marriage?

The court’s 2013 decision on DOMA has spawned battles across the country over same-sex marriage — including one in Alabama, where courts have issued conflicting rulings leading to an uncertain fate for gay couples.

That latest case reviewed a decision by the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit to uphold same-sex marriage bans in Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee, and Kentucky, and looked at whether those bans violated the Fourteenth Amendment.

That amendment guarantees Americans “equal protection under the law” and the right to “due process of law.”

In their petition asking the Supreme Court to hear the case, same-sex couples argued that Kentucky’s same-sex marriage ban “marks the same-sex relationships and the families they create as less valuable and less worthy of respect than opposite-sex relationships.”

That mark creates a stigma, the petition continued, which is “incompatible with the bedrock Constitutional principles animating the Fourteenth Amendment.”

The Washington Post lists the affirming justices:

“The court now holds that same-sex couples may exercise the fundamental right to marry. No longer may this liberty be denied to them,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion. He was joined in the opinion by the court’s liberal Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.