The Ohio law, which also bars marital benefits for unmarried partners - homosexual or heterosexual - is the latest success for a campaign that began in 1996 when Congress passed its Defense of Marriage Act.
Since then, 37 state legislatures have jumped on the bandwagon with so-called DOMA laws. Pennsylvania and Delaware lawmakers approved bans on same-sex marriage in 1996. New Jersey lawmakers have not done so.
"The [Massachusetts] court is bucking a trend," said Kristie Rutherford, director of state and local affairs for the conservative Family Research Council, based in Washington. "These states have anticipated what Massachusetts would do and . . . enacted these laws to preempt it."
The scope and restrictions of state laws on marriage could affect anybody who moves from one state to another. The federal government traditionally has stayed out of such regulation, letting states decide whether to recognize one another's laws.
To advocates of marriage rights and benefits for gays and lesbians, the state-by-state trend is really a "last-ditch political campaign by the right wing to . . . freeze as much discrimination in place before they lose the battle," said Evan Wolfson, executive director of the New York-based group Freedom to Marry.
Wolfson likened the Massachusetts court to the first state court in the 1940s that overturned a ban on interracial marriage, despite widespread public skepticism and opposition by a majority of states at the time.
"Some state had to go first," Wolfson said.
Despite the trend, gay, lesbian and civil rights activists have made some inroads. They have staved off DOMA laws in about a dozen states and won explicit guarantees of some marital benefits by private companies, some municipalities, including Philadelphia, and a few states, most recently New Jersey.
