The Power of a sentence...

Breaking ranks with a wide array of other federal courts, and coming close to setting up almost certain review by the Supreme Court, a divided federal appeals court in Cincinnati on Thursday upheld bans on same-sex marriage in four states. Dividing two to one, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit overturned lower-court rulings in cases from Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee.

It ruled that the Supreme Court’s one-line decision in the 1972 case of Baker v. Nelson, saying that a challenge to a state ban on same-sex marriage did not raise “a substantial federal question,” is a still intact precedent, and it binds the lower courts.