Ever since the court handed down its DOMA decision yesterday, it has become increasingly clear that we are one lawsuit away from gay marriage being ensconced as a Constitutional right. My hunch is that such a lawsuit will come sooner rather than later, and that the matter could end up before the Supreme Court in relatively short order. President Obama is already saying that gay marriages performed legally in one state should be recognized by every other state in the union. This matter will be litigated, and—as Scalia noted in his dissent—that other shoe is going to drop.

Today the Supreme Court handed down two decisions on gay marriage: one dealing with California’s ban on gay marriage (a.k.a. Proposition 8) and the other with the federal Defense of Marriage Act (a.k.a. DOMA). In neither case did the Court do anything to slow down the advance of gay marriage in the United States. In the Prop 8 case, the majority decided that the plaintiffs did not have standing to argue this case before the Supreme Court. It remains to be seen what the exact implications of this will be, but for the time being it looks like gay marriage will resume in California.

The Supreme Court just struck down section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as the union of one man and one woman. In doing so, the court issued a sweeping judgment that in my view will lead to a constitutional right to gay marriage in very short order. One test case should do the trick. Justice Kennedy wrote the majority opinion, and there are some elements in it that are chilling—as Justice Scalia makes clear in his scathing dissenting opinion. The Court’s majority holds in contempt anyone who defines marriage as the union of one man and one woman. Scalia writes:

Ben Domenech has a must-read commentary on gay marriage and the future of religious liberty. He argues that most of the public debate about gay marriage is peripheral chatter—spousal benefits, raising children, or redefining a foundational social institution. He contends that the fundamental issue in this debate is whether religious liberty will continue in the United States. I wish I could reprint the entire column here, but I can’t. Here’s a snippet: