Later that day, Thurgood Marshall, arguing for the NAACP Legal Defense fund, told the Court, “I take the flat position that this ‘battle between the sovereigns’ was decided by the Constitution when it was adopted. That was settled some years ago.”

The Little Rock dispute brought federal troops to Central High. It led to the landmark opinion in Cooper v. Aaron, the only one in history signed by all nine Justices, which proclaimed that “the federal judiciary is supreme in the exposition of the law of the Constitution,” and that Brown “is the supreme law of the land.” All state officials, the Court noted, take an oath to support the federal Constitution. “No state legislator or executive or judicial officer can war against the Constitution without violating his undertaking to support it.”

The phantom “battle of the sovereigns,” however, lives on in the backwoods of the American mind; it emerges when passions run high, reason sleeps, and Americans who know better allow themselves to contemplate resistance to legal change.

Alas, we may be living through such a time. As The New York Times notes, state legislatures in the Bible Belt are openly flirting with laws designed to thwart any Supreme Court decision requiring recognition of gay marriage. Some local officials are demanding to be allowed to discriminate against same-sex couples on personal religious grounds. Publicity hounds like Mike Huckabee and Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore have begun dragging out moth-eaten “massive resistance” arguments that the Supreme Court’s decisions are not binding on dissenting states. And perhaps worst of all, private lawyers advising state government agencies in both Florida and Alabama have floated the Faubus notion. If a federal trial court sets aside a state same-sex marriage ban, they have “advised,” that decision isn’t “law”: It binds only the parties to the case. State officials—county clerks or probate judges—are free to ignore it.

The answer to this argument is the same today as it was in 1958. It was well summarized by Judge Robert Hinkle after Florida’s county clerks were advised by a private law firm that they could refuse to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, even after the Supreme Court had refused to stay Hinkle’s order striking down the marriage ban. His individual injunction binds only the named parties, to be sure, the judge wrote. But the Constitution binds every clerk, and “the Constitution requires the Clerk to issue such licenses.”

The judge put recalcitrant clerks on notice that if they refused to do so, the couples involved could join his lawsuit and, if victorious in higher courts, recover attorney fees from the state (and perhaps from the clerks themselves).

In other words, no sovereignty shucking or jurisdictional jiving will, in the long run, prevail. If the Supreme Court, as seems likely, finds that same-sex couples have an equal right to marry, those who stand in the courthouse doors will certainly lose, and possibly pay.