Then today's decisions requiring the federal government to recognize same-sex marriages and overturning the voters of California concerning "one man, one woman" are consequences. Neither McCain nor Romney was all that conservative, but do you think
all of their appointees to the Supreme Court would have voted the same way as Obama's appointees on these questions?
I am really hard pressed to see how the same logic used with DOMA doesn't apply to polygamous or incestuous marriages. All we need is for one state to recognize either, and the federal government will be obligated to provide benefits. I could see Michigan recognizing polygamous marriages in the next twenty years, or perhaps Massachusetts, as a way of showing how open-minded and non-traditional they are.
UPDATE:
Library of Law & Liberty points to Justice Scalia's powerful dissent quoted at
The American Conservative:
The penultimate sentence of the majority’s opinion is a naked declaration that “[t]his opinion and its holding are confined” to those couples “joined in same-sex marriages made lawful by the State.” Ante, at 26, 25. I have heard such “bald, unreasoned disclaimer[s]” before. Lawrence, 539 U. S., at 604. When the Court declared a constitutional right to homosexual sodomy, we were assured that the case had nothing, nothing at all to do with “whether the government must give formal recognition to any relationship that homosexual persons seek to enter.” Id., at 578. Now we are told that DOMA is invalid because it “demeans the couple, whose moral and sexual choices the Constitution protects,” ante, at 23—with an accompanying citation of Lawrence. It takes real cheek for today’s majority to assure us, as it is going out the door, that a constitutional requirement to give formal recognition to same-sex marriage is not at issue here—when what has preceded that assurance is a lecture on how superior the majority’s moral judgment in favor of same-sex marriage is to the Congress’s hateful moral judgment against it. I promise you this: The only thing that will “confine” the Court’s holding is its sense of what it can get away with.
UPDATE 2: A comment on this post is important enough to escalate. Rich Rostrom explains why Scalia joined the majority in deciding that California Prop. 8 parties lacked standing:
The basis of the Prop 8 decision is simple.
Scalia and Roberts
guessed (or knew) that in a ruling on the merits, Kennedy and the
liberal bloc would invent a Constitutional right to same-sex marriage.
To
avoid this immediate calamity, they produced a ruling on standing which
satisfied Kagan, Breyer, and Ginsberg. It voids Walker's ruling against
Prop 8, but allows the District Court to strike it down for want of
defensee. However, it leaves open the possibility of defense by someone
with a different claim to standing.
It screws Californians and residents of any other state with the initiative, but that’s long term damage.
After
seeing Kennedy’s opinion on DOMA, this was probably the best possible
outcome. Someone at Volokh wrote that it was hard to understand
Kennedy’s reasoning. It’s actually simple. “Gay is OK! Anyone or
anything that is not Pro-Gay! is Bad. And the Constitution prohibits
anything the Right People (like me) think is Bad.”
