This seems to me a very puzzling draft. I don't understand the history or sociology at all. Even when Bowers v. Hardwicke was decided, let alone at the time of the decision in Lawrence, criminal sodomy prosecutions had essentially ceased in the US; similarly, when Loving v. Virginia was decided, although most of the States of the former Confederacy prohibited marriages between black and white people, such marriages were elsewhere recognized, and any such couple in the US had practical access to legal marriage on equal terms with everyone else.

But the Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education was by no means a decision made after the reality of social change had occurred, as Cooper v. Aaron and the rest of the history of "massive resistance" showed. So your historical interpretations seem to me more or less the reverse of a natural understanding of what happened, in the relationship between judicial articulation and the modification of societal mores.

I don't understand the analytical posture of the draft, either. There isn't anyone who seriously believes, I think, that the courts endanger their authority in deciding that equal protection requires the issuance of a marriage license to any pair of competent, unmarried citizens who want one. And a Supreme Court empowered to decide the constitutionality of federal statutes generally has as much authority to determine the constitutionality of DOMA as of the ACA. I don't think any lawyer would seriously argue otherwise. Treating political posturing or radio salesmanship as analytical argument is a category mistake. And not even in making that mistake are you analytically precise: Governor Christie, for example, is engaged in the even more complex contortion required to explain why he thinks making marriage law should not be the province of the legislature, merely because his has put him to the inconvenience of signing a law that would doom his present in the national Republican party. His absurdities have nothing to do with the courts at all, the matter having moved even further out of his hands.

Nor do I understand the "how long must we wait" language, at all. In the first place, any couple wishing to get married in the United States may now do so, regardless of sexual composition, cheaply and swiftly. In the second place, marriage itself is a vestigial institution of little practical importance. I've managed to live a long heterosexual life without the slightest need for it, and I don't foresee any likelihood that my mother and her partner, to take another example within my own family, are likely to require it even if California law finally seesaws back to the point at which they could do so. Nor my youngest brother and his (female) partner, whose union has lasted more than twenty years now, and bids fair to last thirty more. In the third place, it is apparent that the animus against marriages between men or between women is generationally bound to those born in the first three quarters of the twentieth century, and will disappear year by year now, as all our sociography shows. The world's hard problems are the ones which involve something important, for which there are no evasions or workarounds,and which aren't steadily and remorselessly solving themselves.

Nonetheless, we have two national parties, and one will not appoint or confirm Supreme Court justices who are committed to requiring nationwide recognition of "same-sex marriages." We must therefore wait, to be precise about it, until the Democrats win enough national elections to appoint a majority of the Court, or until the support of culturally-conservative religious people born before 1975 is no longer of significant interest to the Republicans.

I don't really know how to improve this draft, because I don't know what it's underlying ambition really is. Are you writing an essay in favor of allowing "same-sex marriage"? As you can see around you every day, with a clarity that should take some of the bite out of the remaining bigotries, the culture is so far already with you, that the effort is almost cliché. But your introduction both claims this is somehow about the strategy for achieving legal equality, which seems evidently untrue and is never followed up, and also somehow about whether the courts are doing less than they should for unfounded reasons of concern for their authority, which seems to me equally insubstantial. I think the most promising approach is to quarry out from the various surface phenomena here the idea of your own that you want to add to the discussion. Then you can put it in a couple of clear sentences at the beginning, illustrate the new points for the reader, draw out some implications, and address significant objections.