New Jersey on Wednesday stopped short of becoming the second state in the nation to legalize same-sex marriage by judicial fiat.
The state's high court, while declaring unconstitutional state laws that deny same-sex couples the financial and social benefits and privileges given to married heterosexuals, held that fixing the problem is a legislative task -- and gave lawmakers 180 days in which to do it.
"At this point, we do not consider whether committed same-sex couples should be allowed to marry, but only whether those couples are entitled to the same rights and benefits afforded to married heterosexual couples," a divided court wrote in Lewis v. Harris, A68-05.
"Cast in that light, the issue is not about the transformation of the traditional definition of marriage, but about the unequal dispensation of benefits and privileges to one of two similarly situated classes of people."
The justices did not require the Legislature to amend the civil marriage statutes to include same-sex couples but only to come up with a statutory scheme that affords same-sex couples the same rights and benefits as those statutes.
Details here from the New Jersey Law Journal via Law.com. Read the Court's opinion.