There's a fascinating new trend emerging in the state-by-state litigation over marriage equality: In increasing numbers, governors and attorneys general are announcing that they will no longer support their state's marriage-equality bans.
This was the case in California with AFER's Prop 8 case. And it's happened in Pennsylvania and Illinois, and with AFER's new case in Virginia.
And now the latest state to end its defense of a marriage-equality ban is Oregon. In essence, state officials announced that there is no way to constitutionally defend the law.
For over a decade, we've had to put up with a patchwork of state-by-state marriage laws. The rules for who could marry changed every time you crossed state lines. Now that patchwork approach has extended to litigation, with defendants adopting wildly different stances from one state to the next. That's progress of a sort.
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