I reported last week that the U.S. Supreme Court could have decided to hear an Arkansas case over birth certificates for children of same-sex couples but put it off at least for a week.
Noted today is the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court again failed to issue an order on this case and the fact that the court requested the record of the case May 23 from the Arkansas Supreme Court. So perhaps something is cooking.
This is the case in which the Arkansas court said against science and reason that heterosexual married couples were entitled to presumptive listing on birth certificates but same-sex married couples were not. The majority opinion made the claim that this is done for biological recordkeeping reasons, since both parents in a same-sex partnership could not be parents. They are thus required to get court clearance as parents while heterosexual parents — though beneficiaries of donor sperm or egg for pregnancy — face no such challenge. It seems an affront to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the same-sex marriage case — a fact even the Arkansas attorney general, now officially defending the discrimination in birth certificate issuance, had all but conceded during oral arguments on the case before the Arkansas Supreme Court.
Also on hold is the Colorado case over a baker who refused to bake a cake for a same-sex marriage.