Your are absolutely correct, the lower courts have decided one way or another depending on their state's legal tradition, while the Federal Courts must measure against the U.S. Constitution and those courts' decisions have been remarkably uniform, especially in terms of what arguments they'll accept from the two parties.

> Should we all go boycott the Supreme Court as long as John Roberts is Chief Justice?

Well, you and I both know that you can't boycott a court. And losing votes against a decision don't matter much outside of an interesting historical footnote and some light reading of the dissenting opinions.

One of the really cool things about the U.S. legal system is that, at least it seems to me, that the higher the court, the better written the opinions are for the layman. SCOTUS opinions (and the dissenting side) are actually pretty easy reads.

> It's completely misleading to pretend that reasonable, non-bigoted people can't oppose gay marriage and/or can't believe that bans on gay marriage are constitutional and fair.

The ultimate problems is that, when measured by the U.S. Constitution (used by Federal judges and SCOTUS alike), a reasonable legal argument has yet to be presented. At best the arguments (if you read the court case transcripts and opinions) are grossly in contrast with a handful of Amendments and are presented purely as religious and traditionalist arguments -- but not legal arguments. More importantly is that Federal judges keep finding that those arguing against are not able to demonstrate any legal harm to themselves if gay marriage is made legal -- a very simple and low bar that millions of dollars in lawyers has yet to figure out.

So while arguments scoped to a State might succeed, because the State has different legal standards to measure against. It's just a matter of appealing it up to the Federal level where the standards of measure are different before the arguments no longer work.

There's all kinds of Federalist-style arguments that States should be able to be masters of their own destinies in this regard, but that's not the status of the U.S. legal system today.

I'll also note, that some of the State Supreme court decision against gay-marriage have been similarly interesting reading -- as in "we acknowledge that the arguments against gay-marriage are unconstitutional, but we'll go along with them anyway" a la Hawaii.

The beauty of course about our legal system is that the court only has to find a law in violation of a single amendment to strike it down.

If your interested, here's the decision and dissents about DOMA and Prop 8.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/7176...

https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/7176...

http://www.scribd.com/doc/35374462/California-Prop-8-Ruling-...

They're amazing reads. The last document affirms previously found decisions on the fundamental human right to marry which SCOTUS has found on several occasions and has not yet seen fit to decide against.

For the record, SCOTUS also frequently comes to decisions I disagree with, and I always find reading the decisions illuminating.

Here's one of the best discussions on this topic I've seen on the Internet. http://www.brambletonian.net/forums/topic/16509-the-conserva...

It's a little dated now, but still a good read and accurately predicts most of the Federal decisions that happened after this discussion.