Virginia’s Attorney General, Mark Herring welcomed the recent decision and says Virginia will no longer defend its constitutional ban on gay marriage.

Despite waves of anti-homophobic sentiments in some states in response to the emerging Same-sex marriage revolution, state court rulings appear to be facilitating change towards embracing equality for LGBT people.

Camilla Taylor,national director of the marriage project at Lambda Legal said “We’ve reached a watershed where public officials feel ashamed of discriminating against people and are sensitive to the fact that they could go down in history as being on one side or the other of a struggle for civil rights.”

It is thought that there are about 20 federal cases where same-sex couples are seeking to challenge their state’s ban on same-sex marriage or because the state will not recognise their same-sex marriage from another state.

Virginia became the latest state last week to rule that a prohibition against same-sex marriage was unconstitutional when US District Court Judge Arenda Wright Allen endorsed the legal analysis of federal judges in Utah and Oklahoma. All of the rulings found that the prohibition against same-sex marriage was a violation of the 14th amendment. However, Utah and Oklahoma are appealing the rulings.

Professor Douglas NeJaime, a law academic at the University of California, said these “are all states that politically weren’t going to move to same-sex marriage any time soon. The courts are forcing their hands. We seem to have all of the lower courts going in the one direction in saying that Windsor applies to these state laws so that the states have to recognise same-sex marriage.”