Bob Franken

You’ve got to hand it to the Supreme Court: It’s hard to pin down an agenda. The justices closed with a flourish, standing up for equality with their rulings on gay marriage.

Actually, one of them was a nonruling, but in the process of, in effect, rejecting a case for procedural reasons, they let stand lower-court rulings that overturned a ban on same-sex marriage in California. More importantly, in the other big case, they overturned the so-called Defense of Marriage Act, which denied federal matrimonial benefits to all but male-female couples. Justice Anthony Kennedy, in his majority opinion...