As predicted, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals panel has struck down the Wisconsin and Indiana bans on same-sex marriage.

Here's my blog post on the oral argument — which was only 9 days ago. The opinion is written by Judge Richard Posner, who at the oral argument was audibly disgusted by the efforts to justify the ban.

Here's a PDF of today's opinion, which I'm just starting to read. I can see that Posner puts his distinctive imprint on the standard equal protection doctrine:

The difference between the approach we take in these two cases and the more conventional approach is semantic rather than substantive. The conventional approach doesn’t purport to balance the costs and benefits of the challenged discriminatory law. Instead it evaluates the importance of the state’s objective in enacting the law and the extent to which the law is suited (“tailored”) to achieving that objective. It asks whether the statute actually furthers the interest that the state asserts and whether there might be some less burdensome alternative. The analysis thus focuses not on “costs” and “benefits” as such, but on “fit.” That is why the briefs in these two cases overflow with debate over whether prohibiting same-sex marriage is “over- or underinclu- sive”—for example, overinclusive in ignoring the effect of the ban on the children adopted by same-sex couples, under- inclusive in extending marriage rights to other non- procreative couples. But to say that a discriminatory policy is overinclusive is to say that the policy does more harm to the members of the discriminated-against group than necessary to attain the legitimate goals of the policy, and to say that the policy is underinclusive is to say that its exclusion of other, very similar groups is indicative of arbitrariness.

ADDED: Indiana claimed its interest was based on the biological reality that only heterosexual sex produces babies.

The state treats married homosexuals as would-be “free riders” on heterosexual marriage, unreasonably reaping benefits intended by the state for fertile couples. But infertile couples are free riders too. Why are they allowed to reap the benefits accorded marriages of fer- tile couples, and homosexuals are not?

The state offers an involuted pair of answers, neither of which answers the charge that its policy toward same-sex marriage is underinclusive. It points out that in the case of most infertile heterosexual couples, only one spouse is infertile, and it argues that if these couples were forbidden to marry there would be a risk of the fertile spouse’s seeking a fertile person of the other sex to breed with and the result would be “multiple relationships that might yield unintentional babies.” True, though the fertile member of an infertile couple might decide instead to produce a child for the couple by surrogacy or (if the fertile member is the woman) a sperm bank, or to adopt, or to divorce. But what is most unlikely is that the fertile member, though desiring a biological child, would have procreative sex with another person and then abandon the child—which is the state’s professed fear.

The state tells us that “non-procreating opposite-sex couples who marry model the optimal, socially expected behavior for other opposite-sex couples whose sexual intercourse may well produce children.” That’s a strange argument; fertile couples don’t learn about child-rearing from infertile couples. And why wouldn’t same-sex marriage send the same message that the state thinks marriage of infertile heterosexuals sends—that marriage is a desirable state?

AND: Posner makes Indiana's argument sound ludicrous:

... Indiana’s government thinks that straight couples tend to be sexually irresponsible, producing unwanted children by the carload, and so must be pressured (in the form of governmental encouragement of marriage through a combination of sticks and carrots) to marry, but that gay couples, unable as they are to produce children wanted or unwanted, are model parents—model citizens really—so have no need for marriage. Heterosexuals get drunk and pregnant, producing unwanted children; their reward is to be allowed to marry. Homosexual couples do not produce unwanted children; their reward is to be denied the right to marry. Go figure.

MORE: Wisconsin argued that its interests were: 1. tradition, 2. concern about the unforeseen consequences of change, 3. a desire to leave the question to democratic decisionmaking, and 4. concern about damaging marriage. The most serious of the 4 arguments is tradition, and Posner vividly articulates why tradition per se means nothing:

There are good traditions, bad traditions pilloried in such famous literary stories as Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” and Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” bad traditions that are historical realities such as cannibalism, foot-binding, and suttee, and traditions that from a public-policy standpoint are neither good nor bad (such as trick-or-treating on Halloween). Tradition per se therefore cannot be a lawful ground for discrimination—regardless of the age of the tradition. Holmes thought it “revolting to have no better reason for a rule of law than that so it was laid down in the time of Henry IV.” Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., “The Path of the Law,” 10 Harv. L. Rev. 457, 469 (1897). Henry IV (the English Henry IV, not the French one—Holmes presumably was referring to the former) died in 1413. Criticism of homosexuality is far older. In Leviticus 18:22 we read that “thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.”...

Wisconsin points out that many venerable customs appear to rest on nothing more than tradition—one might even say on mindless tradition. Why do men wear ties? Why do people shake hands (thus spreading germs) or give a peck on the cheek (ditto) when greeting a friend? Why does the President at Thanksgiving spare a brace of turkeys (two out of the more than 40 million turkeys killed for Thanksgiving dinners) from the butcher’s knife? But these traditions, while to the fastidious they may seem silly, are at least harmless. If no social benefit is conferred by a tradition and it is written into law and it discriminates against a number of people and does them harm beyond just offending them, it is not just a harmless anachronism; it is a violation of the equal protection clause....

The state elaborates its argument from the wonders of tradition by asserting, again in its opening brief, that “thousands of years of collective experience has [sic] established traditional marriage, between one man and one woman, as optimal for the family, society, and civilization.” No evidence in support of the claim of optimality is offered, and there is no acknowledgment that a number of countries permit polygamy—Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Sudan, Morocco, and Algeria—and that it flourishes in many African countries that do not actually authorize it, as well as in parts of Utah. (Indeed it’s been said that “polygyny, whereby a man can have multiple wives, is the marriage form found in more places and at more times than any other.” Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage 10 (2006).) But suppose the assertion is correct. How does that bear on same-sex marriage? Does Wisconsin want to push homosexuals to marry persons of the opposite sex because opposite-sex marriage is “optimal”? Does it think that allowing same-sex marriage will cause heterosexuals to convert to homosexuality? Efforts to convert homosexuals to heterosexuality have been a bust; is the opposite conversion more feasible?

Posner distinguishes tradition from morality and notes that neither Indiana nor Wisconsin asserted morality as a ground for rejecting same-sex marriage. Morality is the state interest that dare not speak its name.