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California's Prop 8 Same-Sex Marriage Ban Looks Headed To Supreme Court

A federal appeals court in San Francisco says it will not reconsider an earlier ruling that California's Prop 8 ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional.

That means, as our colleagues at KQED's News Fix blog report, that "Prop 8 supporters will almost certainly ask the United States Supreme Court to hear the case."

Today's decision is posted here. It does not mean that same-sex marriages are suddenly legal again in California. KQED writes that the court said its decision "is stayed for 90 days pending the filing of a petition for writ of certiorari in the Supreme Court."

In 2010, federal Judge Vaughn Walker ruled that "Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples."

Update at 2:30 p.m. ET. KQED's News Fix has been live-blogging. Here's its collection of reaction and coverage from around the Web:

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Mark Memmott is NPR's supervising senior editor for Standards & Practices. In that role, he's a resource for NPR's journalists – helping them raise the right questions as they do their work and uphold the organization's standards.