YES!!!!!!

At some point they're gonna have to start paying fines for flooding the courts with these frivolous requests.

The great part of this is that it shows the courts don't feel there is immediate grounds for appeal.

Ye gods these attorneys for the State of Utah are the most bumbling bunch of amateurs. They make Lionel Hutz look like Ralph Waldo Emerson. They're now appealing their stay request to Sotomayor, even though their chances of success are zilch. After she refuses their stay, dare we hope they'll be suicidal enough to ask Scalia or Thomas to request that the entire SCOTUS issue a stay - after being turned down at EVERY lower level of the system? Could they actually THAT stupid?

Suck it harder, Seattleblues.

1. Ask for stay.
2. Stay denied.
3. Ask again.
4. Denied.
5. Try a different judge this time.
6. No.
7-22. Repeat 5 and 6 as needed.
23. Ask SCOTUS for a stay.
24. Stay denied.
25. Go back home to prepare appeal.
26. Lose appeal.
27. Go to 1

The definition of insanity.

What kind of a world is this, where you can't turn religious bigotry into law? If we can't do that, does the Republican Party have a purpose? Oh, tax cuts. I forgot.

@9 They're like pompous little bossy children. Or psychopaths. (Those are separate things, right?) Unless everyone's playing their games exactly the same as them, they get all upset. They can rationalize their rules all day long, but all it comes down to is they want everyone to let them tell them how to play.

So, if two little boys sit down with a tea set, NO ONE WILL EVER BE ABLE TO PLAY HOUSE AGAIN!!!

It's like that.

@9, 10: when you're a member of a religion that believes God used to be an ordinary man (and not a very nice man at that), and lives on a planet/star named Kolob, and tells you to wear special magic underwear, and lie to people about the religion's tenets if lying is what's needed to convert them, and has living Prophets who talk directly to God on the celestial hotline, and...

Well, anyway, you kind of get used to doing what the LDS church says and voting the way it instructs. Then smack in the middle of Zion, something like this happens. This is not supposed to happen. God is supposed to deflect this kind of thing away from Utah like a deflector dish in an old Star Trek episode. It's almost enough to make you start questioning whether the church Elders are really as on top of things as they're letting on.

@12 - It's nothing a little divine revelation can't clear up.

"God spoke to me. He says that gay people are okay now. Just as good as any monogamous black man, in fact."

The attorneys are not being stupid. They're doing what they're paid to do by their employer, the Church of the...uh, the State of Utah: explore absolutely every legal remedy there is. You don't stop in the middle when you're paid to do that, no matter what the issue is.

@13 Plus the more appeals you file the more billable hours you invoice. Everyone wins.

@14 It's all about money. Just like the Catholics. They have just the same percentage of gays as the rest of the world, only the Mormons and the Catholics are so closeted that they don't dare speak up for fear of....what? Freedom from the homophobic and (dare I say racist) doctrines of both religions? I won't even venture to guess how many of them are (shudder) republicans.

I hope someone in Utah files a FOIA request for how much taxpayer money the state is paying for all these appeals.

The other possibility is that Utah is simply going through the motions - yes because they have to defend state law - but not hanging their hats on the absurd argument they'd need to make. Better to fail and keep their professional integrity intact than insult the courts with sheer stupidity. So they keep referencing the same previous case submissions and hope it all goes away asap. Utah isn't conservative in a stupid, southern-style temper tantrum way. To the contrary it's very smart, educated and pragmatic. They know they're licked and have no intention of disgracing their legal cred as they accept certain defeat. Just going through the motions so they can say they tried.

@17, that could be the case.

Also, attorneys often run for office and they'll want to be able to say to their future constituents, "Hey, the courts were against us." All the other attorneys who will be their colleagues understand that business, so they've got all bases covered.

@17: I think the LDS church and its political power structure were shocked to their core by this. They have a mentality that God gave them Utah for their Very Own, and that regardless of what happened elsewhere Utah would be the last state to hold out against teh gays. Nate Silver's model predicted that Utah would be dead last of all the states to enact marriage equality. Furthermore, Judge Shelby is Mormon. He went to the U of U and clerked for a dozen years under a senior LDS federal judge, and came with the Orrin Hatch/Mike Lee Seal of Approval so the church leaders assumed that could be counted on to play his part for the faith. So confident were the church leaders and state officials that they would prevail that they didn't think it was necessary to put up much of a case. They asked Judge Shelby to issue a summary ruling from the bench, then later had the audacity to complain that Shelby didn't hold a trial! They were so overconfident that they were caught flatfooted by the ruling. They didn't have a written stay already prepared, a mistake any law student should have known better than to have made. Their lame excuse was that the stay was announced on the Friday before Christmas, and in the AG's office they were all busy doing other stuff. (No, I'm not making that up. It's in the transcript from Monday's hearing.)

Their total lack of preparation has hurt them at every level in the appeals process. The 10th turned them down TWICE last weekend for not following the rules for requesting a stay; then in their request to Shelby on Monday and on Tuesday in their third stay request to the 10th Circuit they screwed up YET AGAIN and failed to adequately respond to two of four required sections in the stay request.

These are not the sharpest tools in the shed. The legal defense strategy was originally developed by AG Swallow, who is facing prison and was forced to resign earlier this month. Swallow was replaced by acting AG Tarbet, whose expertise is in taxation and revenue - he's way out of his league here. Then yesterday the Governor finally named a new permanent AG whose first act was to can the entire Utah AG office and make them reapply for their jobs.

So I don't think their appeals strategy has anything whatsoever to do with billable hours. These guys are salaried so that's off the table. What's motivating the stay request is a combination of existentialist panic, a percieved fundamental threat to their belief system, unbelievably incompetent lawyering, and corruption/chaos in the office of the Utah Attorney General.

@19 - That makes Shelby's quoting from Scalia even more delicious. Appreciate the background!

Then yesterday the Governor finally named a new permanent AG whose first act was to can the entire Utah AG office and make them reapply for their jobs.

Ha ha ha!