SO FAR, AT LEAST, the SJC seems to be facing the controversy head-on. During the March 4 hearing, justices plunged into the debate over same-sex marriage by peppering attorneys with countless questions. Many of these inquiries came across as sympathetic to gay couples. Yogman, the assistant AG, hadn’t even finished the first sentence of her opening statement when Chief Justice Marshall interrupted. Wouldn’t Yogman " at least concede, " Marshall asked, that the issue before the court comes down to " whether the constitution prohibits the legislature from restricting marriage to certain people? " Minutes later, she seized on Yogman’s rationale for why the state should limit marriage to those who can naturally procreate. So, the justice wondered, should the court order heterosexual couples to divorce if they don’t bear kids? In a similar vein, Justice John Greaney pointed to the past ruling permitting gay adoption, then asked: " How do you reconcile what, to me, is a paradox? " Hadn’t the modern definition of family, as he put it, " gone far beyond the notion of two heterosexual people married and having children? "

Others, by contrast, seemed more receptive to the state. Just minutes into Bonauto’s oral argument, Justice Judith Cowin wanted to know why Massachusetts should do something that " virtually no other state has done. " And Justice Martha Sosman took the right-to-marry reasoning to task. Gay couples, she said, " are trying to change the definition of marriage. " If the court allowed gay marriage, she mused, what’s to stop polygamists from demanding the same protections? Asked Sosman, " What’s the difference between this and polygamy? " — to which Bonauto replied, " The question here is what’s the excuse for carving gay people off the right to marry. " Over time, the legislature and the courts have taken " sex " out of the marriage equation by stripping the state statute’s language of any gender-specific terms, she said. That, Bonauto continued, " is different than taking numerocity out of the equation. There’s nothing that this court or the legislature has done to suggest that any more than two people can marry. "

Of course, it’s hard to predict outcomes based on a half-hour hearing. Sometimes, justices ask tough questions simply to play devil’s advocate. " It’s dangerous to predict, " Silverglate says. Still, legal observers do expect one thing: the SJC won’t rubber-stamp the decision of Suffolk Superior Court judge Thomas Connolly, who said same-sex couples don’t have a constitutional right to marry. Boston attorney Sander Rikleen has undertaken several analyses to determine how often the SJC reverses lower courts. He based his studies on the 200 civil and criminal cases that the SJC had reviewed during the 1999-2000 and the 2000-’01 judicial years. In half the cases, Rikleen found, the justices had altered the lower court’s findings. Of those 100 instances, the SJC had completely thrown out the lower court’s order more than 35 times. The justices, he says, " don’t just affirm what happens below. In general, they’re willing to set out in a new direction. "

In this instance, experts note, the court could blaze a new trail in several ways. First, it could define gay people as a " suspect class, " the legal term for groups who have historically faced discrimination. That means that the court could throw out any state law that discriminated against people on the basis of sexual orientation — including a restrictive marriage law. " That’s the honest way to decide this, " says Baron, the BC professor. " Shouldn’t the law be based on what everybody knows — that the opposition to changing the marriage statute is animus-driven? " Though Baron hopes the justices would be " strong enough " to take this route, he considers it unlikely. Only one state court has ever deemed gay people a suspect class; in 1998, the Oregon Court of Appeals found that sexual orientation met such a classification, after ruling that the Oregon Constitution requires a state university to extend health- and life-insurance benefits to the partners of gay and lesbian employees (the Oregon Supreme Court declined to review the case). " Courts, " Baron says, " frequently shrink from accusing others of acting out of animus. "

Other paths also remain open for the SJC. The justices could declare that a " fundamental right to marry " does exist under the Massachusetts Constitution, which, in turn, would permit gay marriage; or they could follow the lead of Vermont. But any pro-same-sex-marriage ruling is sure to spark a fight at the State House. Though some opponents insist they back Vermont-style civil unions — " The state can go ahead and give homosexuals civil unions to protect them and their families, " Darling says — legislation has been filed that would define marriage as " the union between one man and one woman. " Just two days after the March 4 hearing, the House Speaker promised a legislative effort to outlaw gay marriage through a constitutional amendment if the SJC rules in favor of the seven couples — a move that struck many as a blatant attempt to pressure the court. At the same time, gay-rights advocates and their legislative allies are vigorously pursuing the issue through a pending bill that would permit gay marriage. Another would create civil unions. No matter what the court rules, says one State House observer, " somebody will make something hot out of it politically. "

For now, then, all advocates, legislators, and the plaintiffs can do is wait. As they bide their time, many gay-marriage supporters find hope in Vermont, in the simple fact that one state has done something to recognize gay couples under the law. But if the Vermont saga demonstrates anything, it shows that the " separate but equal " mentality first codified in the Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling (which upheld the legality of separate schools for black and white children) still thrives today. What the Vermont court did was to extract the rights of marriage from the status of marriage — something that gay-rights advocates hadn’t even imagined possible. The effect, in the end, is to brand gay people and their relationships as unworthy of civil marriage, and to bring back the notion of " separate but equal, " a concept that many civil-rights advocates believed had been put to rest when the Supreme Court issued its historic 1954 desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down the Plessy precedent. Time will tell whether the Massachusetts SJC achieves a Brown-like moment in ruling on Goodridge or opts for the relative safety of Plessy and paves the way instead for Vermont-style civil unions.