In yesterday’s Washington Post, Supreme Court reporter Robert Barnes posed what he called a “Supreme Court mystery”: “Has Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. embraced the court’s same-sex marriage decision that he so passionately protested two years ago?” But the clear answer to Barnes’s question is no.

To be sure, it is an open question whether the Chief Justice joined the recent per curiam opinion in Pavan v. Smith, which held that the Court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges justified summary reversal of a ruling by the Arkansas supreme court. But let’s assume that the Chief Justice did join the per curiam majority. All that such joinder would necessarily signal, as Barnes acknowledges only towards the end of his pseudo-mystery, is that Roberts thought that “Obergefell as precedent … covered the Arkansas case, whether he liked it or not.” It certainly wouldn’t signal that he now suddenly thought that it had been rightly decided, or that it shouldn’t be overruled, much less that he “embraced” it.

I’m reminded of Jeffrey Toobin’s bizarre suggestion a few years ago (see my point 2 here) that Justice Scalia’s joinder in Justice O’Connor’s unanimous opinion in Ayotte v. New Hampshire (2006) meant that he had “embrac[ed]” her undue-burden standard for abortion regulations.

Barnes also errs in asserting that the dissenters in Pavan “said the court should have accepted the case for full briefing and argument because the outcome wasn’t nearly as clear-cut as the majority claimed.” (Emphasis added.) No. Justice Gorsuch’s dissent (which, in the face of an unhinged attack, I explained here) says only that summary reversal was improper. It does not address whether the Court should instead have granted or denied review.