Yet another voice, this one in The New Republic, adds to the chorus of gay advocates saying Olson and Boies may have made a monumental blunder on their legal strategy to push redefined marriage:

"...The lessons the gay litigators learned from the racial and gender civil rights movements led them to consider the federal courts in general and the Supreme Court in particular with extreme caution. When superlawyers David Boies and Ted Olson brought the head-on challenge to California’s antigay Prop 8 in 2009, they broke with this convention, and were heavily criticized for it. The ACLU’s Matt Coles called the suit a long shot and the marriage director for Lambda Legal said it was “risky and premature.”

... Justice Kennedy has delivered an almost unbroken series of conservative votes in the last several years, swinging almost not at all between the factions. It pays to remember that even after a series of cautious moves led to victory, when the women’s movement asked for  inclusion of pregnancy in disability benefits –  they lost decisively. The closest case to the Boies-Olson litigation in the women’s movement – Roe v. Wade-- triggered a four decade backlash. Once before the gay movement overplayed its hand ever so slightly with the Court and got a terrible decision upholding the criminal sodomy laws. Gays almost won the first sodomy case; the decision in Bowers v. Hardwick was only 5-4, so it was hardly a foolhardy risk. And yet, it does make you shiver."