I think you mean the 49th most fabulous state. The 49th least fabulous state would be the 2nd most fabulous state, no? 
And here is their ‘excuse’;
There really wasn’t a Federal question in 1972. The APA was still classifying homosexuality as a mental disorder and (IIRC) no state was giving marital-type protections to homosexuals. But once states started giving homosexuals custodial rights and then employment protections and then civil-union type rights and finally marriage rights, Federal question issues started being raised, because all those things started raising cross-state legal issues. Had Minnesota courts gone the other way in 1972 and legalized gay marriage, all the Federal question issues would have arisen that much sooner.
That’s simply the nature of a common law system. New facts arise which cause new precedent, and those precedents in turn create new facts on the ground which then give rise to new precedents (and so on and so on…)
The “art of the possible.” It simply would not have been possible then. It could conceivably have led to the impeachment of one or more Supreme Court Justices, and would certainly have been a major campaign issue for both Congress and the Presidency.
Necessary compromises are not pretty nor admirable, but they’re the very stuff of a working constitutional system. It took a damn Civil War to cope with the slavery issue. We can be happy that the Gay Rights revolution was far less bloody than the Civil Rights struggles of the 60’s. Far fewer lynchings. We’ve grown up that much, at least.
Eh? Trial courts were compelled to rule against gay couples by Baker v. Nelson. Even if they had ruled for the plaintiffs, the circuit courts would have reversed them. If you want to change a precedent, you need legislation or new facts. Judges didn’t have those facts available to them until fairly recently.
And in other news, that Colorado bakery that refused service to make a cake for a gay wedding has lost their case! A win for civil rights and a win for the good guys! 
Yes and no. Depends on the judge really. Judges like Scalia or Black are originalists (or textualists as they prefer) and believe in going with the law as written and ignoring case law.
That’s not what textualism means, and it’s not a synonym for originalism.
Over the past twenty years, textualism, the interpretive approach that looks to the Constitution’s original public meaning, has established itself as the dominant form of originalism, supplanting intentionalism, the interpre- tive approach that interprets the Constitution in accordance with Framers’ and ratifiers’ intent. Textualists ground their approach in democratic the- ory, contending that the Constitution is best understood as reflecting the choices of “We the People.” They also contend that textualism constrains judicial discretion and thus is superior to other forms of constitutional inter- pretation that ultimately lack an anchor other than in the subjective values of judges.1
As the name of the movement suggests, textualism’s search for original public meaning centers on the Constitution’s text.Home - Northwestern University Law Review
On stare decisis (adhering to judicial precedent): "The Court’s reliance upon stare decisis can best be described as contrived. It insists upon the necessity of adhering not to all of Roe, but only to what it calls the ‘central holding.’ It seems to me that stare decisis ought to be applied even to the doctrine of stare decisis, and I confess never to have heard of this new, keep-what-you-want-and-throw-away-the-rest version."Antonin Scalia - Wikiquote