The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that Arkansas' birth certificate law is unconstitutional because it runs afoul of the high court's 2015 opinion legalizing same-sex marriage.

Two female same-sex couples petitioned the Supreme Court to review their case, which fought the Arkansas Department of Health's issuance of birth certificates bearing only the birth mother's name and not the female spouse. The health department's decision adhered to a provision of Arkansas law, which was rejected by a trial court but kept in place by Arkansas Supreme Court.

On Monday, the high court reversed and remanded the Arkansas high court's judgment in a per curiam opinion, meaning it was delivered on behalf of the entire court rather than signed by an individual justice writing the opinion. Justice Neil Gorsuch, however, issued a blistering dissent of the Supreme Court's decision that Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito both joined.

In explaining its decision to toss out the Arkansas birth certificate law, the Supreme Court said Arkansas chose to make its birth certificates "more than a mere marker of biological relationships." Arkansas did this by requiring the name of the birth mother's male spouse to appear on the birth certificate regardless of the male's biological relationship to the child, the court said.

Since a child's birth certificate can play an important role in "making medical decisions for a child or enrolling a child in school," the Supreme Court said same-sex parents lacked the same right afforded to opposite-sex parents.

"The state uses those certificates to give married parents a form of legal recognition that is not available to unmarried parents," the Supreme Court said in Pavan v. Smith. "Having made that choice, Arkansas may not, consistent with Obergefell, deny married same-sex couples that recognition."

Obergefell v. Hodges is the Supreme Court's 2015 opinion legalizing gay marriage that Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote.

Gorsuch, a former law clerk to Kennedy, dissented sharply from the Supreme Court's decision on Monday and appeared to take issue with the Obergefell decision's ambiguity. Gorsuch wrote that he thought the Supreme Court's summary reversal of the Arkansas Supreme Court decision was not warranted.

"To be sure, Obergefell addressed the question whether a state must recognize same-sex marriages," Gorsuch wrote in his dissent. "But nothing in Obergefell spoke (let alone clearly) to the question whether §20–18–401 of the Arkansas Code, or a state supreme court decision upholding it, must go.

"It seems far from clear what here warrants the strong medicine of summary reversal. Indeed, it is not even clear what the court expects to happen on remand that hasn't happened already. The court does not offer any remedial suggestion, and none leaps to mind."

The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear a case from Gorsuch's home state of Colorado involving a dispute about a baker's refusal to design and make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. The newest justice's dissent in the Supreme Court's decision in Pavan v. Smith may provide clues about the battle lines for upcoming disputes over social issues with the high court's gay marriage ruling.