Supreme Court Will Rule On Marriage Equality Soon

On Friday, the wonderfully inevitable happened: the Supreme Court agreed to rule on same-sex marriage nationwide this term — in other words, by the beginning of this summer. The case won't be argued until April, but a ruling is expected before the court closes its term in June. The specific cases SCOTUS will be settling involve four separate state rulings in Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee that upheld bans on same-sex unions.

This latest development comes after a watershed eighteen months for same-sex marriage, following the Supreme Court's decision to strike an essential part of the Defense of Marriage Act and California's Prop 8 in the summer of 2013. Same-sex marriage is now legal in more states in this country than it isn't, and the Supreme Court has refused to rule on state-wide gay marriage bans for the last few months. This has been widely interpreted as the court waiting for a major case that would decide whether marriage equality was to be legal in the United States once and for all.

14 states still enforce gay marriage bans, including the four that have now forced SCOTUS to finally make a make-or-break ruling on gay marriage in the Unites States. (We'll be thanking them later. Hopefully.) Support for gay marriage in the United States increased slightly for the years leading up to 2010, when polls revealed 50 percent of the nation supported the rights of the LGBT community to legally marry under the Constitution. It has since jumped to between 50 and 60 percent, depending on who you ask.

And yes: It's more likely than not that we'll have cause for celebration sometime between April and June.

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