A San Francisco federal judge struck down the California same-sex marriage ban known as Proposition 8 earlier this month, and the case was immediately appealed to the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

On Monday, those appellate judges set a hearing for December and put gay marriages on hold pending appeal. They made only one comment relating to legal issues, asking the pro Prop 8 team to say why the case should not be dismissed due to lack of standing -- a term for the right to appeal.

Strictly speaking, the California state government would be the proper body to represent the pro-Prop 8 case, but neither the governor nor the attorney general is willing to pursue it. The defense of the ban was so far made by an independent group that must prove its right to appeal.

The appeals court will make its decision on standing as the first step in its ruling on the case after the December hearing. If it decides that the Prop 8 proponents don't have standing, the judges won't even look at the main argument, following standard judicial policy of making rulings as narrow as possible.

Proposition 8 passed in November 2008, unleashing a nationwide furor as liberals wondered how the trend-setting state could fall in line with the roughly 40 others that ban same-sex unions and social conservatives boasted their cause truly had national backing.

That sparked the federal court case, with a very unusual twist -- the state defendants, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, and Attorney General Jerry Brown, a Democrat, did not defend the ban and will not appeal the pro-gay-marriage decision.