New York Times

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected a request to halt same-sex marriages in Oregon. The court’s one-line order gave no reasons for declining to issue a stay.

Many gay and lesbian couples have gotten married in Oregon since a May 19 decision from Judge Michael J. McShane of Federal District Court in Eugene, Ore., struck down the state’s ban on such marriages.

“With marriages continuing in Oregon, we have 44 percent of the country living in a freedom-to-marry state,” said James Esseks, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union, which represented some of the plaintiffs in the Oregon case. Same-sex marriages are permitted in 19 states and the District of Columbia.

State officials had declined to appeal Judge McShane’s decision. Oregon’s attorney general, Ellen F. Rosenblum, told the Supreme Court that there was “no rational basis on which to defend the state’s same-sex marriage ban.”

The request to the Supreme Court that the decision be stayed came instead from the National Organization for Marriage, which opposes same-sex marriage.

The organization’s brief reminded the justices that they had issued a stay in January of a federal trial judge’s ruling allowing same-sex marriages in Utah. But that request had come from state officials.

In declining to grant its request for a stay, the justices may have harbored doubt about whether the group had suffered the sort of direct injury that would give it standing in the case, National Organization for Marriage v. Geiger.

Last June, in Hollingsworth v. Perry, the Supreme Court ruled that proponents of Proposition 8, a voter initiative that had banned same-sex marriage in California, did not have standing to appeal a ruling striking it down.

In a companion decision issued the same day, the court struck down the part of the federal Defense of Marriage Act that barred the federal government from granting benefits to married same-sex couples.

That second decision, United States v. Windsor, has provided the basis for an unbroken string of victories for gay rights advocates, as trial judges around the nation have cited it in striking down state bans on same-sex marriage.

Decisions from federal appeals courts in some of those cases are expected shortly, and the question of whether there is a constitutional right to same-sex marriage could return to the Supreme Court in its next term, which starts in October.