Long after state policy on same-sex marriage has been decided as a matter of law, legislators often continue to introduce new bills that effectively reiterate the existing statute. These authors empirically investigate what could be driving this practice. While some bills may be intended for the passage of laws, other are means primarily as signals to politicians' constituents as to their standing on this controversial issue. The most interesting result, however, indicates that the practice is also intended to signal to state courts the continued involvement of the legislature, perhaps in hopes that this would impede a court from ruling in ways contrary to the politician's intent. This motive surfaced not only from actions of the legislature's own state court, but also when courts in other states ruled that their own state constitutions required same-sex marriages.

The author creates a four part typology of state defense of marriage amendments: court-stripping amendments that reserves the question strictly to the legislature; marriage definition amendments that install a one-man-one-woman definition of marriage into the constitution; amendments that ban same-sex marriage and comparable statuses; and amendments banning recognition and the legal incidents thereof. Butland then ascertains the differential impact of the equal protection analysis of Romer v.Evans, 517 U.S. 620 (1996), for each of the four amendment types, concluding that types 3 and 4 violate the Romer standards, while types 1 and 2 do not.