From Bill Duncan at the Marriage Law Foundation:

The Maryland court decision on marriage that you mentioned in the Corner
this morning is long on conclusions but short on reasoning. The case was
brought by the ACLU on behalf of nine same-sex couples and one individual
who believed he might later want to marry. They claimed that the current
marriage law discriminated on the basis of sex and sexual orientation and
that it took away the plaintiffs fundamental right to marry. The court only
addressed the sex discrimination claim, essentially concluding that the use
of a “sex-based classification” (using sex-specific terms in defining
marriage) in the statute triggers strict scrutiny under the state Equal
Rights Amendment. Using this stringent test, the court decided that there
was no rational basis for the discrimination in the statute much less a
compelling reason. In doing so, the judge had to reject four justifications
offered by the state. First, she held that the statute is not related to the
goals of promoting procreation and child-rearing by married couples or of
promoting the best interest of children because (1) there is no evidence
that the legislature actually believes that opposite-sex marriage is the
optimal setting for children and (2) the ideas that opposite-sex married
couples are more stable or better parents are “broad unsupported
generalizations.” Second, the court held that the state interest in
“ensuring constitutional activity within its borders” outweighed its’
interest in uniformity with other jurisdictions. Third, the judge decided
that treatment of same-sex couples as “essentially equivalent with respect
to the effects of marriage” in other areas of the law undercuts the policy
of not allowing them to marry (the state had argued that the marriage law
was fine since same-sex couples could get benefits in other ways. Finally,
she held that “[t]radition and societal values alone cannot sustain an
otherwise unconstitutional classification.”