Lately, courts all across the country have been standing up to religious (or sometimes what’s called “moral”) bias against the LGBTQ community. In one way, it is not surprising that there have been so many recent cases, because such bias is a pervasive part of the legal reality members of LGBTQ community face on an everyday basis. Nonetheless, theses sorts of court decisions seem to be, at this particular moment in time, flying out the doors of courthouses all over the country. I’ll take a moment to hit some of the high points before getting down to the real question: does it even matter?

In March of this year, a federal judge held that a lesbian teen’s First Amendment rights had been violated when the Itawamba County School District refused to allow her to bring a female date to the prom. The district had banned same-sex couples at the prom in the past, but Constance McMillen implored them to make an exception. The district refused, and McMillen, represented by the ACLU, sued them on First Amendment grounds. The federal judge agreed that her rights had been violated but refused to grant her request that the school still sponsor a prom to which she could bring a female date.

In another federal case, in July, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was unconstitutional. Section 3 reads as follows:

In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, or of any ruling, regulation, or interpretation of the various administrative bureaus and agencies of the United States, the word `marriage’ means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word “spouse” refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife.

This case, however, did not challenge the constitutionality of refusing to allow same-sex couples to marry. Rather, it challenged DOMA by arguing that the Equal Protection Clause requires the federal government to treat same-sex married couples from Massachusetts the same as heterosexual married couples from Massachusetts. Specifically, it pointed to health care retirement benefits as well as tax benefits. The District Court judge ruled that Section 3 of DOMA violated the Equal Protection Clause, stating that “this court is convinced that ‘there exists no fairly conceivable set of facts that could ground a rational relationship’ between DOMA and a legitimate government objective.” Judge Joseph Tauro did a clear job of delineating which level of scrutiny he employed, ultimately concluding that strict scrutiny need not even apply because Section 3 cannot “pass constitutional muster even under the highly deferential rational basis test.”

Just weeks before the Gill case, the Supreme Court handed down its opinion in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez. Members of the Christian Legal Society at Hastings College of Law challenged the school’s refusal to recognize them as an official student group. The school denied them this status because the group demanded that all officers embrace their collective opinion that homosexuality is a sin, an opinion in impermissible conflict with the school’s anti-discrimination policy. The Court ruled that the school retained the right to deny official status to groups that failed to follow the “all-corners” anti-discrimination policy but remanded the case to the Ninth Circuit. The case did little to advance the law in this area, most likely because this is really a question of policy.

Most recently, a United State District Court judge ruled that Eastern Michigan University (EMU) was within its rights to dismiss a counseling master’s student because she refused, on religious grounds, to counsel homosexual clients. EMU adheres to the American Counseling Association’s (ACA) ethical guidelines, which require that counselors work in neutral, non-judgmental ways—no matter their client’s moral, religious, or social beliefs. The ACA has definitively banned discrimination based on sexual orientation. Last year, the student in this case did not want to work with a homosexual client because they did not share the same moral values, and the student therefore referred the client to a different counselor. The District Judge ruled against the student, explaining that her dismissal was justified because no one required her to change her beliefs; rather, the ACA (and EMU) required that she set them aside in her professional role, something expected of all ACA counselors, no matter the issue.

In light of these cases, the LGBTQ community has many reasons to be excited. Still, I recommend no one begin counting their proverbial chickens. Anti-gay rights groups are already rallying behind the defeated parties in these cases, with vows to take their appeals to the Supreme Court.

And beyond that, many of these cases (e.g., Martinez) are saying a whole lot of nothing. Even if they were, though, groundbreaking cases will do nothing to change individuals’ minds. Were the Supreme Court to declare same-sex marriage a fundamental right and sexual orientation a suspect classification tomorrow, there are still many things that won’t get easier. Legitimization from the State is but one piece, one step in the correct direction.