I may have been wrong ... again

OK, so I try not to make a habit of being wrong but at least I'm willing to man up and say so when it happens. With all the recent hubbub about the Prop 8 ruling in California I ended up reading the US constitution again looking for references to marriage. It was then when I came across the 10th amendment:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The standard interpretation of this amendment is that all legal issues which are not explicitly the jurisdiction of the federal government remain a matter for the individual states to decide for themselves. It follows that some higher court may indeed rule that the Prop 8 ruling is none of the federal government's business and that the ban should stand. I hope not but it certainly seems possible. Having said that, the 14th amendment problem remains and the real legal question is how to determine a resolution between two conflicting parts of the constitution. In the words of Ned Flanders, that's a noodle scratcher.