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 Religious leaders are calling on members of the Supreme Court’s liberal wing to recuse themselves from the blockbuster gay marriage case that the court will begin considering on Tuesday. 
  
 Standing on the steps of the Supreme Court, Scott Lively, president of Abiding Truth Ministries, told reporters he’s filing a motion with the Supreme Court calling for the recusal of Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan. 
  
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 “Justices Ginsburg and Kagan, knowing full well that unique legal issues regarding the definition of marriage would soon come before them, deliberately officiated at so-called homosexual wedding ceremonies creating not merely the appearance of bias, but an actual and blatant conflict of interest,” he said. 
  
 “In my personal view they have committed an unparalleled breach of judicial ethics by elevating the importance of their own favored political cause of gay rights above the integrity of the court and of our nation.” 
  
 The case before the court, known as Obergefell v. Hodges, stems from a 6th Circuit Court of Appeals decision to uphold same-sex marriage bans in Ohio, Tennessee, Michigan and Kentucky. The court has grouped the appeals from the couples in the four states together and will hear two and a half hours of arguments Tuesday morning, 90 minutes more than the court typically allows. 
  
 In their rulings, the justices will seek to answer whether states are required to license a marriage between two people of the same sex and whether states have to recognize same-sex marriage licenses from other states under the 14th Amendment. 
  
 Lively said Kagan and Ginsburg's “vividly demonstrated disposition” in favor of the same-sex couples shows they are unable to render a fair judgment. 
  
 He and more than a dozen leaders of anti-gay-marriage groups stood behind a wall of empty cardboard filing boxes stacked on the steps of the court on Monday morning. 
  
 The boxes — 60 in all — were there to "symbolically" represent 300,000 restraining orders that Faith2Action President Janet Porter said will be delivered to the Supreme Court and to Congress to keep the justices from ruling on gay marriage. 
  
 “We have appealed to Congress to restrain the judges, and the good news is Congress has heard our cry,” Porter said. 
  
 Last week, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) introduced the Restrain the Judges on Marriage Act of 2015, which would remove jurisdiction to rule on gay marriage from federal courts. In the Senate, Sen. Ted Cruz Rafael (Ted) Edward CruzGroup aiming to draft Beto O’Rourke unveils first 2020 video Howard Dean looking for a 'younger, newer' Democratic nominee in 2020 Congress can stop the war on science MORE (R-Texas) has introduced The Protect Marriage from the Courts Act, which would also limit the federal courts’ jurisdiction to consider same-sex marriage cases. 
  
 “Congress has the ability to remove appellate jurisdiction,” Porter said. “What that means is, we can actually take from them their right to rule on marriage before they even rule on marriage.” 
  
 During the press conference, Larry Sternbane, 51, stood quietly back behind the crowd holding a sign that read, “Don’t like gay marriage? Don’t get gay married.” 
  
 “This right here is the last gasp of a group that is losing this issue in the public square,” he said. “They are talking to themselves. There are a bunch of tourists listening, and the only ones clapping when somebody ends is them.” ||||| Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the West conference room at the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post via Getty) 
  
 Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the 82-year-old leader of the Supreme Court’s minority liberal wing, has cast aside her usual restraint in the past months and left little doubt where she stands on the upcoming gay marriage case. 
  
 The Supreme Court hears arguments in the case, Obergefell v. Hodges, on Tuesday, and will most likely announce in June whether states will still be allowed to ban same-sex marriage and refuse to recognize the rights of couples married in other states. 
  
 Ginsburg, a former civil rights lawyer, has been uncharacteristically outspoken in advance of one of the most significant civil rights decisions in decades. In August, she became the first Supreme Court justice to officiate at a same-sex wedding. Since then, she’s highlighted the big shift in public opinion on gay marriage in interviews and public speeches, breaking from her usual reticence when it comes to talking about upcoming cases. In February, Ginsburg told Bloomberg that it “would not take a large adjustment” for Americans to accept nationwide marriage equality, given the “enormous” change in people’s attitudes about same-sex marriage. New York Times columnist Gail Collins wrote in January that Ginsburg has a “strong hunch” about the way the case will turn out. “I would be very surprised if the Supreme Court retreats from what it has said about same-sex unions,” Ginsburg told Collins, referencing the 2012 decision that found the federal government must recognize same-sex marriages. 
  
 Two anti-gay-marriage groups, the National Organization for Marriage and the American Family Association, have since called on Ginsburg to recuse herself, arguing that she can no longer be impartial. They’ve also targeted Justice Elena Kagan for officiating at a same-sex marriage, asking her to step down from the case, too. 
  
 Legal experts say the calls for recusal are unwarranted, given the 2012 ruling that the federal government must recognize same-sex marriages in states that allow them. The constitutional issue at stake in the current case is whether states can ban same-sex marriage at all. Officiating at a same-sex marriage in a jurisdiction that already allows it does not call into question the justices’ impartiality on that question, according to Columbia Law School professor Jamal Greene. 
  
 SLIDESHOW: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A look back >>> 
  
 The earlier gay rights decision gives Ginsburg more leeway to comment on the issue generally. Though the court did not find a fundamental right to marriage, the majority opinion held that same-sex marriages have an essential “dignity” like any other marriage and that the federal government does not have a good reason to discriminate against them by refusing to recognize them. 
  
 “She’s not saying anything that she hasn’t said in an opinion,” said Margo Schlanger, a former Ginsburg clerk who is now a law professor at the University of Michigan. “So it’s not like, ‘Wow, that’s a new one and the court hasn’t ruled on it since Baker v. Nelson,’” she said, referencing the 1972 case that upheld a state same-sex marriage ban after the court refused to hear the appeal. 
  
 Read More ||||| WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court is set to hear historic arguments in cases that could make same-sex marriage the law of the land. 
  
 Janet Porter pf Faith2Action, displays a Restraining Order while speaking at a Restrain the Judges news conference in front of the Supreme Court in Washington, Monday, April 27, 2015. The opponents of... (Associated Press) 
  
 Sean Varsho, 28, of Chicago, left, and Brandon Dawson, 26, of Warrenton Va., have been waiting in line for the past three days for a seat for Tuesday's Supreme Court hearing on gay marriage, Monday, April... (Associated Press) 
  
 Greg Quinlan of the New Jersey Family Policy Council, gestures while speaking at a Restrain the Judges news conference in front of the Supreme Court in Washington, Monday, April 27, 2015. The opponents... (Associated Press) 
  
 A rainbow colored flag, seen through an American flag, flies in front of the Supreme Court in Washington, Monday, April 27, 2015, as the Supreme Court is set to hear historic arguments in cases that could... (Associated Press) 
  
 The justices are meeting Tuesday to offer the first public indication of where they stand in the dispute over whether states can continue defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman, or whether the Constitution gives gay and lesbian couples the right to marry. 
  
 The court is hearing extended arguments, scheduled to last 2 ½ hours, which also will explore whether states that do not permit same-sex marriage must nonetheless recognize such unions from elsewhere. 
  
 Same-sex couples can marry in 36 states and the District of Columbia. 
  
 The cases before the court come from Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee, four of the 14 remaining states that allow only heterosexual marriage. Those four states had their marriage bans upheld by the federal appeals court in Cincinnati in November. That is the only federal appeals court that has ruled in favor of the states since the Supreme Court in 2013 struck down part of the federal anti-gay marriage law. 
  
 Justice Anthony Kennedy has written the court's three prior gay rights decisions, including the case from two years ago. All eyes will be on Kennedy for any signals that he is prepared to take the final step in granting marriage rights to same-sex couples. 
  
 Such an outcome was inconceivable just a few years ago. 
  
 The first state to allow gay and lesbian couples to marry was Massachusetts, in 2004. Even as recently as October, barely a third of the states permitted it. Now, same-sex couples can marry in 36 states and the District of Columbia, a dramatic change in the law that has been accompanied by an equally fast shift in public opinion. 
  
 The main thrust of the states' case is to reframe the debate. 
  
 "This case is not about the best marriage definition. It is about the fundamental question regarding how our democracy resolves such debates about social policy: Who decides, the people of each state or the federal judiciary?" John Bursch, representing Michigan, wrote in his main brief to the court. 
  
 Other arguments by the states and more than five-dozen briefs by their defenders warn the justices of harms that could result "if you remove the man-woman definition and replace it with the genderless any-two-persons definition," said Gene Schaerr, a Washington lawyer. 
  
 The push for same-sex marriage comes down to fairness, said Mary Bonauto, who will argue on behalf of the plaintiffs. The people who have brought their cases to the Supreme Court are "real people who are deeply committed to each other. Yet they are foreclosed from making that commitment simply because of who they are," she told reporters last week. 
  
 Arguments made by Bonauto, other lawyers for same-sex couples and more than six-dozen supporting briefs have strong echoes of the 1967 Loving v. Virginia case, in which the Supreme Court struck down state bans on interracial marriage. In that case, the justices were unanimous that those bans violated the constitutional rights of interracial couples. 
  
 No one expects unanimity this time. But many believe the justices will take the final step toward what gay rights supporters call marriage equality, in part because they allowed orders in favor of same-sex couples to take effect even as the issue made its way through the federal court system. 
  
 That was action through inaction, as other judges played a major role over the years. Only 11 states have granted marriage rights to same-sex couples through the ballot or the legislature. Court rulings are responsible for all the others. 
  
 A decision is expected in late June. 
  
 ___ 
  
 Follow Mark Sherman on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/shermancourt . ||||| The scene outside the Supreme Court today felt a lot like a football game tailgate party -- and for supporters and opponents of same-sex marriage who have spent days camped out to score a seat, Tuesday's oral arguments are the Super Bowl. 
  
 The justices will hear arguments into two related questions: one, whether states must allow same-sex couples to marry; and two, whether states must recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere. 
  
 There were at least sixty groups -- mainly supporters, but also some opponents -- who had been waiting on the corner of First and East Capitol Streets for days, hoping for a coveted chair inside the courtroom. 
  
 Frank Colasonti Jr. and his husband James Ryder of Birmingham, Michigan, were among the first in line. They said they had been there since Friday evening, snoozing in sleeping bags and hiding under tarps when it rained. But the partners for 27 years, husbands for the last one, said this argument was too important not to try to attend. 
  
 "We really never thought ..." Colasonti said before getting choked up. 
  
 "We really never thought we'd see it in our lifetime," Ryder said, finishing his husband’s sentence. 
  
 "It really never seemed like an option that it would ever happen," he continued, noting that they had filed their income taxes jointly for the first time this year. 
  
 The couple was among some 300 spouses who married on a single day in 2014 when Michigan's gay marriage ban was temporarily lifted. Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder later said he would not contest the validity of those marriages although the ban was reinstated. 
  
 Michigan is one of four states arguing in favor of their same-sex marriage bans. The others are Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee. 
  
 Besides the many same-sex couples and their families who flocked from those states, there were many law students who wanted to see a case that future classes will likely study. 
  
 "However this is decided it's going to be one of the most iconic and well-read cases in casebooks so this is going to be really exciting to be here," Wyatt Fore, a third-year law student at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor said. He said he had been in place, lawn chair and law books in tow, since Friday night. 
  
 Emotions and opinions on both sides of Tuesday's arguments run high, but at this unique gathering of legal minds, students, same-sex couples and pastors, the tendency is to live and let live -- or in this case, wait and let wait. 
  
 Pastor Rick Grogan of Fort Worth, Texas, acknowledged that he was one of the few opponents of same-sex marriage camped out, a buoy in a sea of Human Rights Campaign banners and rainbow flags. 
  
 "You've got, what, 20-something states who have banned it in their constitution. Now, nine people are going to tell the whole nation what to do," he said, sprawled on a blanket with an opened Bible in his hand. 
  
 But he said the discourse among his neighbors had been respectful. After all, if people toss footballs around during a pre-game tailgate, why wouldn't they engage in elevated debate before a Supreme Court argument? 
  
 "Even though people disagree, it's been pleasant so far," Grogan said. 
  
 As he spoke, a group of same-sex marriage supporters from Kentucky posed for a group picture, just steps away. ||||| Hard to imagine any of that happening to John Roberts . 
  
 The retirement talk started around 2011, when the Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy wrote an essay in The New Republic arguing that both Ginsburg and Justice Stephen Breyer should quit while there was still a Democratic president to nominate replacements. “What’s more, both are, well, old,” he added uncharitably. 
  
 As time moved on, the focus shifted almost exclusively to Ginsburg (“Justice Ginsburg: Resign Already!”). Perhaps that’s simply because she is older than Breyer, who is now 76. Or perhaps there’s still an expectation that women are supposed to be good sports, and volunteer to take one for the team. 
  
 From the beginning, Ginsburg waved off the whole idea. (“And who do you think Obama could have nominated and got confirmed that you’d rather see on a court?”) Anyway, since Republicans took control of the Senate in January, it’s become pretty clear that ship has sailed. 
  
 “People aren’t saying it as much now,” she said with what sounded like some satisfaction. 
  
 Obviously, a time will come. But as far as clarity on the bench, productivity and overall energy go, that time doesn’t at all seem to be at hand. Her medical history is studded with near disasters — colon cancer in 1999, and pancreatic cancer 10 years later. Both times she returned to the bench quickly. (In the latter case, Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky apologized for predicting she’d probably be dead within nine months.) Last year she had a stent placed in one of her coronary arteries. That happened on a Wednesday, and the court’s public information officer quickly told reporters that Ginsburg “expects to be on the bench on Monday.” 
  
 HER physical fierceness is legend. Scalia, her improbable good friend, once recounted a summer when he and Ginsburg had both snagged a gig teaching on the French Riviera. “She went off parasailing!” he told The Washington Post. “This little skinny thing, you’d think she’d never come down.” She has since given up that sort of recreation, but she still works out twice a week in the Supreme Court gym with her personal trainer. Plus there are the daily stretching exercises at home. At night. After work. 
  
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 It’s the combination of Ginsburg’s woman-hear-me-roar history, her frail-little-old-lady appearance and her role as the leader of the Supreme Court’s dissident liberals that have rallied her new fan base, particularly young women. 
  
 The second woman to be appointed to the Supreme Court, she’s part of the generation who came of age after World War II and led a revolution that transformed women’s legal rights, as well as their role in the public world. There’s a famous story about the dean at Harvard Law inviting Ginsburg and her tiny group of fellow female law students to dinner, then asking them how they’d justify having taken a place that could have gone to a man. Ginsburg was so flustered she answered that her husband, Marty, was a law student and that it was very important for a wife to understand her husband’s work. 
  
 “That’s what I said,” she nodded. 
  
 The dean, Ginsburg said, told her later that he had asked only because “there were still doubting Thomases on the faculty and he wanted the women to arm him with stories.” You have to wonder if the dean was trying to rewrite history. Or maybe joking. But Ginsburg believed the explanation: “He was a wonderful man, but he had no sense of humor.” 
  
 During law school Marty Ginsburg developed testicular cancer . Ruth helped him keep up with his work by bringing him notes from his classes and typing up his papers, while also taking care of their toddler, Jane. Plus, she made the Harvard Law Review. This is the kind of story that defines a certain type of New Woman of Ginsburg’s generation — people whose gift for overachievement and overcoming adversity is so immense, you can see how even a nation of men bent on maintaining the old patriarchal order were simply run over by the force of their determination. (Ginsburg herself isn’t given to romanticizing. Asked why the women’s rights revolution happened so quickly, she simply said: “Well, the tide was in our favor. We were riding with winners.”) 
  
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 Ginsburg was married for 56 years — Marty died in 2010. She has a son, a daughter and four grandchildren, one of whom called and said “Bubbe, you were sleeping at the State of the Union!” after the cameras caught her famous nap. She travels constantly. The day we talked, she was preparing to go off to a meeting of the New York City Bar, where she would introduce Gloria Steinem , who would deliver the Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Distinguished Lecture on Women and the Law. A few weeks earlier, at a gathering of the Association of American Law Schools, Ginsburg had introduced her old friend Professor Herma Hill Kay, recipient of the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Lifetime Achievement Award. When you reach this kind of stature, there are lots of echoes. 
  
 She’s spent much of her life being the first woman doing one thing or another, and when it comes to the retirement question, she has only one predecessor to contemplate — her friend Sandra Day O’Connor, the first female Supreme Court justice, who left the bench at 75 to spend more time with her husband, John, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease . 
  
 “She and John were going to do all the outdoorsy things they liked to do,” Ginsburg recalled. But John O’Connor’s condition deteriorated so swiftly that her plans never worked out. Soon, Ginsburg said, “John was in such bad shape that she couldn’t keep him at home.” 
  
 O’Connor has kept busy — speaking, writing, hearing cases on a court of appeals and pursuing a project to expand civics education. But it’s not the same as being the swing vote on the United States Supreme Court. “I think she knows that when she left that term, every 5-4 decision when I was in the minority, I would have been in the majority if she’d stayed,” Ginsburg said. 
  
 Besides not retiring, another thing Ginsburg is planning not to do is write her memoirs. “There are too many people writing about me already,” she said. There’s an authorized biography in the works, along with several other projects to which she has definitely not given a blessing. 
  
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 “But now — this is something I like,” she said, picking up a collection of essays, “The Legacy of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.” The justice also seems to be looking forward to an upcoming “Notorious R.B.G.” book, written by Shana Knizhnik, who created the blog, and Irin Carmon of MSNBC. The name started as a play on the name of the Brooklyn gangsta rapper Notorious B.I.G. , but it’s taken on a life of its own as a younger-generation tribute to Ginsburg. 
  
 “The kind of raw excitement that surrounds her is palpable,” Carmon said. “There’s a counterintuitiveness. We have a particular vision of someone who’s a badass — a 350-pound rapper. And she’s this tiny Jewish grandmother. She doesn’t look like our vision of power, but she’s so formidable, so unapologetic, and a survivor in every sense of the word.” 
  
 So Ginsburg is planning to be on the bench when the Supreme Court decides mammoth issues like the future of the Affordable Care Act and a national right for gay couples to marry. She says she doesn’t know how the health care case will turn out. But like practically every court observer in the country, she has a strong hunch about which way gay marriage will go: “I would be very surprised if the Supreme Court retreats from what it has said about same-sex unions.” 
  
 The speed with which the country has already accepted gay rights was, she theorized, just a matter of gay people coming out, and the rest of the country realizing that “we all knew and liked and loved people who were gay.” She recalled Justice Lewis Powell, who told his colleagues he had never met a gay person, unaware that he’d had several gay law clerks. “But they never broadcast it.” 
  
 The National Organization for Marriage, a conservative group, recently demanded that Ginsburg recuse herself from the case since she had said that it would not be difficult for the American public to accept a ruling in favor of a national right to gay marriage. 
  
 Don’t hold your breath. ||||| It’s come to this: Even those who most strongly oppose gay marriage think the Supreme Court is likely to support a constitutional right to same-sex unions — and are looking beyond Tuesday’s legal arguments to demand that Congress intervene. 
  
 Wielding placards supporting “traditional marriage” and reciting prayers for divine intervention, pastors and other social conservatives who gathered on the court’s steps Monday sounded resigned to a ruling they believe would be deeply damaging to the nation. 
  
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 “We recognize that we are at a crossroads like never before in this nation’s history,” the American Decency Association’s Bill Johnson said, urging gay-marriage opponents to hope for the best but brace for the worst. “I would just say to each one of us that there is still that possibility that, despite the darkness of the day, that God answers prayers.” 
  
 “We now perhaps are days away from this very court telling us that holy matrimony between one man and one woman, ordained by God in the Garden of Eden … is merely a relic of a bygone era,” added Kay Daly of the Coalition for a Fair Judiciary. “I’m hopeful but, at the same time, I have a great deal of trepidation.” 
  
 On Tuesday, the court will hear arguments on same-sex marriage cases that could lead to a ruling forcing every state to certify gay unions. The justices’ endorsement of such a sweeping constitutional right was almost unthinkable even a decade ago, but jurisprudence has changed so quickly — alongside public opinion — that even two of the court’s most die-hard conservatives, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, seemed to concede earlier this year that the court was moving toward granting a right to marry. 
  
 Thus, those who inveighed against the evils of same-sex marriage outside the court building on Monday were already looking past the justices to Congress, urging lawmakers to support legislation that would strip federal courts of jurisdiction over marriage-related litigation and forbid officials from spending federal funds to enforce whatever the Supreme Court holds in a ruling expected by late June. 
  
 Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) introduced a bill last week that would make both such moves. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has proposed a similar measure, along with a constitutional amendment that would prohibit the federal government from interfering with state gay-marriage bans. 
  
 The anti-gay-rights activists’ concern that they may need such measures is not without foundation. While the comments of legal pundits are easy to dismiss as mere speculation, the court’s most conservative justices also seem to be among those who see the writing on the wall. 
  
 In February, when the Supreme Court refused to block an appeals court ruling requiring Alabama to recognize same-sex marriage, Thomas and Scalia joined to warn that the justices’ refusal to step in “may well be seen as a signal of the Court’s intended resolution” of the marriage cases it will hear Tuesday. 
  
 The pair of conservative justices never made exactly clear if they agreed or disagreed with the likely public assessment of where the court would come out, but their overall tone suggested that a ruling in favor of same-sex marriage might be inevitable. 
  
 Many legal observers predicted it would be at least several years before the issue of same-sex marriage returned to the high court after a pair of decisions the justices issued in 2013. One landmark, 5-4 ruling in the case of Windsor v. U.S. struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act. But the justices passed up on technical grounds a case out of California where they could have resolved the issue definitively. 
  
 The move punted the issue back to the lower federal courts, which acted with surprising speed and near-unanimity to strike down gay-marriage bans across the country. 
  
 “I don’t know if it’s a rocket docket,” said Daly. “This is dangerous in a lot of ways … It’s gratifying in one sense. It’s terrifying in another.” 
  
 However, some conservatives believe the court actually acted too slowly, particularly when it decided last October not to take up appeals from five states that asked the justices to confront the issue head-on. That gave other courts more time to issue more rulings in favor of same-sex marriage, eventually spreading the practice to 37 states. The flurry of rulings, and the justices’ refusal to stay them, created a kind of on-the-ground momentum that could be hard for the justices to reverse. 
  
 “The combination of this broadly worded but deeply confusing opinion in Windsor, coupled with their refusal to take responsibility for what lower courts have done with it, is significant,” said University of Richmond Law professor Kevin Walsh. “Once it became clear what lower courts were doing with the decision in Windsor, [the justices] should have addressed whether the Constitution requires recognizing same-sex marriage.” 
  
 A crowd gathering in advance of Tuesday's Supreme Court hearing on gay marriage. | M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO 
  
 In January, the high court finally agreed to wade into the issue again, granting review to cases from Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee after the federal appeals court with jurisdiction over those states — the Sixth Circuit — bucked the trend and ruled against same-sex marriage rights. 
  
 There’s a broad expectation that the Supreme Court is likely to rule at least 5-4 in favor of a federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage, with Republican-appointed Justice Anthony Kennedy joining the court’s Democratic appointees expected to back such a right. 
  
 A total of five lawyers are expected to square off during the scheduled 2½ hours of argument Tuesday. 
  
 Two private attorneys — Mary Bonauto of Gay and Lesbian Advocates & Defenders and Douglas Hallward-Driemeier, a former lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Solicitor General — will argue in favor of same-sex marriage rights, as will Solicitor General Donald Verrilli. 
  
 Arguing for the four state bans on gay marriage will be former Michigan Solicitor General John Bursch and Joseph Whalen, who works in the office of Tennessee’s solicitor general. 
  
 Advocates for same-sex marriage rights are expected to argue that there’s no rational basis for prohibiting same-sex couples from marrying and that, even if there were, measures that discriminate against gays and lesbians should be subjected to heightened scrutiny that such bans can’t possibly meet. 
  
 The lawyers for the states counter that there are a variety of reasons to allow states to enforce such bans, including a respect for voters who put the measures in place. Other reasons revolve around a kind of autonomy for states, as well as longtime justifications for same-sex marriage bans, including promoting male-female marriages, and encouraging procreation and child rearing. 
  
 While it hasn’t received much discussion, there is a potential twist in how the court could rule on same-sex marriage. 
  
 When the justices agreed to hear the four cases in January, the court not only asked lawyers to address the issue of whether the Constitution requires states to allow gay couples to marry but also added a question about whether states should be required to recognize marriages approved in other states. 
  
 That raises the possibility that a majority of judges could stop short of requiring states to allow same-sex couples to marry, but insist that states accept as married any couple legally married in another state. That would allow states to maintain their same-sex marriage bans, but cure some of the problems gay and lesbian married couples face relating to hospital visitation, inheritance, divorce and child-raising. 
  
 Gay rights advocates sounded confident Tuesday that the massive shift in public opinion in favor of same-sex marriage would propel the justices toward the more sweeping ruling. 
  
 “Simply put, this isn’t a question any longer of a country evolving. This country has evolved,” Human Rights Campaign President Chad Griffin said, echoing President Barack Obama’s language as his position on the issue morphed from opposing gay marriage to embracing it. 
  
 “Now, it’s just a question of when our laws will finally catch up,” Griffin added. 
  
 The plaintiff whose name leads off the cases the Supreme Court will hear Tuesday, Jim Obergefell of Ohio, said he’s surprised at how quickly the country has come to accept same-sex marriage in the wake of the last pair of rulings from the justices in 2013. 
  
 “The last two years it’s been amazing how much has changed and how quickly it’s changed,” said Obergefell, who married his terminally ill, long-term partner John Arthur in an unusual ceremony aboard a medical aircraft at the Baltimore airport in 2013. Arthur died a few months later. Obergefell is fighting for the right to be listed as Arthur’s husband on his death certificate. 
  
 “What I hope will happen in June is long overdue, but I have to be happy that it is on the verge of happening,” Obergefell said. ||||| Lawyers and friends of Kennedy are reluctant to speak for the record, but most of them do not believe his views on gay rights stem from personal experience, such as having a child, relative or close friend who is gay. Instead, Kennedy's friends and former law clerks point to a repeated theme running through his court opinions — that the Constitution protects "dignity" and "decency," two concepts that sometimes align him with liberals. |||||
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assistant: Arguments are set to begin this morning in Obergefell v. Hodges, a group of appeals from couples in four states that will force the Supreme Court to confront whether gay marriage is a constitutional right in all states, the Hill reports. Some things to know: Per the AP, the court will hear extended arguments that are scheduled to last 2 ½ hours (90 minutes more than usual, the Hill notes). Also on the docket: to determine whether states that don't recognize gay marriage must recognize those performed in other states; currently, same-sex couples can marry in 36 states and DC, the AP reports. The four states in this particular case—Ohio, Tennessee, Michigan, and Kentucky—are among the 14 that don't allow same-sex marriage, the AP notes. A federal appeals court upheld bans in all four states in November. At least 60 groups of both supporters and opponents of gay marriage have been camped outside the court for days to vie for a seat inside, ABC News reports. James Ryder, who came with his husband, told ABC "we really never thought we'd see it in our lifetime." Religious leaders yesterday called for the removal of liberal justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan, per the Hill. The president of the Abiding Truth Ministries—who last week wrote on BarbWire that the "natural family" must be protected by an "angry mob" with "pitchforks and torches"—said Ginsburg and Kagan's officiations at same-sex marriages creates "an actual and blatant conflict of interest." Ginsburg, the first Supreme Court justice to officiate at a same-sex wedding, has made no bones about her stance: In January, she predicted she had a "strong hunch" how this case will end up and that "I would be very surprised if the Supreme Court retreats from what it has said about same-sex unions." Justice Anthony Kennedy, who's written the court's three previous decisions on gay rights, will as usual be under the microscope, the AP notes. Kennedy—who's been described by colleague Antonin Scalia as "a hand-wringer who agonizes over close cases," per the Los Angeles Times—has repeatedly employed the terms "dignity" and "decency" in his decisions. Both sides seem to think the court will greenlight gay couples' rights. "We now perhaps are days away from this very court telling us that holy matrimony between one man and one woman … is merely a relic of a bygone era," one activist tells Politico. The ruling is expected in late June.