Not only is the high court unlikely to take the case, on the grounds that it is a strictly local issue, but Bishop Jackson risks a countersuit to stop his attempt to overturn the marriage law on the grounds that it is a thinly-disguised attempt to enshrine an anti-gay religious doctrine into public law, a clear violation of both the Establishment of Religion Clause of the First Amendment and the Religious Test Clause (Article VI, Section 2) of the U.S. Constitution.

Gay and lesbian couples clearly have a Fourteenth Amendment constitutional right to marry — the same right that interracial couples won in 1967 when the Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, struck down laws that banned racially mixed unions.

It is a right that a right that gay and lesbian couples earned in 2003 when the high court, in Lawrence v. Texas, struck down the last remaining anti-sodomy statutes, fully decriminalizing same-gender sexual relationships and removing the last legal barrier to gay and lesbian couples marrying.

And it is a right that no state can deny to gay and lesbian couples — as the Supreme Court ruled in 1996, in Romer v. Evans, when the justices struck down a voter-approved measure in Colorado that repealed all state and local laws that outlawed anti-gay discrimination and barred the future enactment of any similar laws.

The time has come — indeed, it is long overdue — for supporters of same-gender marriage to make this an issue of gays and lesbians’ constitutional rights. The Constitution is the supreme law of this country — It says so in Article VI, Section 2. Gay and lesbian couples have a constitutional right to marry — and no religious dogma against homosexuality can trump it. Bishop Jackson and other anti-gay religious leaders must stop trying to make their anti-gay dogma the law of the land.

As to the U.S. Supreme Court, it is unlikely to take the case. For one thing, there is no clear federal question in the case.