Just happened upon this a moment ago.
It sounds dull and boring right? Well it isn't. I'll explain why over the fold...with a bit of elaboration on the original text at the end.
I'm not an attorney and will undoubtedly botch the explanation here; I presume others more savvy will correct my errors (please be gentle).
SmithKline Beecham involved a relatively uninteresting civil suit in the Ninth Circuit about the licensing and pricing of HIV medications. What made it interesting was that during the trial, a potential juror was booted off using a peremptory challenge (known as a Batson challenge), apparently when it became known he was gay. The ultimate result was a finding by the district court, upheld by the Ninth Circuit, that sexual orientation is subject to heightened scrutiny and because of that, sexual orientation may not be used as a basis to challenge a potential juror during jury selection. One of the judges on the Ninth Circuit asked the court for an en banc review of that part of the court's ruling. Today the Ninth denied that request, meaning that, at least within the Ninth Circuit, on all legal matters where it becomes pertinent, sexual orientation will be considered a suspect class.
I don't think anyone remembers which side won the actual court case. But issue of whether the sexual orientation of a juror can come into play in terms of juror selection became far more important. In Sevcik vs Sandoval the state withdrew its defense of that state's marriage equality ban based on the juror selection issue raised by SmithKline Beecham. The circuit court decided not to conduct an en banc review the sexual orientation aspect of the decision which I believe had been upheld on appeal. This is a significant victory not only for marriage equality but for LGBT rights generally.
Semi-update:
One of the significant things about the initial ruling is that it represented one of the first applications of the Windsor decision and certainly the first one that was not in some way related to marriage equality. Instead it took the Supreme Court's reasoning in Windsor and noted that the way the decision was written indicated that the Windsor ruling did not use rational basis to strike down the Section 3 of DOMA, which meant that the court had, even though it did not specifically say so, used a heightened form of scrutiny when considering how cases involving discrimination based sexual orientation were to be treated.
Neither party to the case had appealed the Ninth Circuit's ruling that sexual orientation is to be viewed as a suspect class. The request for an en banc review came from a Ninth Circuit judge who had not previously been part of the original case or the appeal. This is referred to as a sua sponte call and the judge who requested the en banc review is not identified. However, three judges dissented from the Ninth Circuit's decision not to hear the case en banc. Those judges were O'Scannlain, Bybee and Bea, who I believe are the three most conservative members of the Ninth Circuit. Bybee is rather notorious for having argued, while part of the Bush administration, in favor of the Bush II administration's use of torture. He is also a BYU law school graduate. It seems reasonable to assume it was one of these three judges who requested the en banc review.