Supreme Court Rules for Nationwide Gay Marriage Equality
Victory! Let the Pride party begin!
It's 5-4. Chief dissents, joined by Scalia and Thomas.
Holding:
Fourteenth Amendment requires a state to license a marriage between two
people of the same sex, And to recognize a marriage between two people
of the same sex when a marriage was lawfully licensed and performed out
of state.
The Court's opinion relies on the dual rationales of fundamental rights AND equal protection.
The
opinion appears to echo Windsor in its dual rationales: Marriage is a
fundamental right in which homosexual couples must share, and it would
also be a violation of equal protection to extend that right only to
heterosexual couples.
Victory! Let the Pride party begin!
Supreme Court rules gay couples nationwide have a right to marry
The Supreme Court on Friday
delivered a historic victory for gay rights, ruling 5 to 4 that the
Constitution requires that same-sex couples be allowed to marry no
matter where they live and that states may no longer reserve the right
only for heterosexual couples.
The
court’s action marks the culmination of an unprecedented upheaval in
public opinion and the nation’s jurisprudence. Advocates called it the
most pressing civil rights issue of modern times, while critics said the
courts had sent the country into uncharted territory by changing the
traditional definition of marriage.
“Under
the Constitution, same-sex couples seek in marriage the same legal
treatment as opposite-sex couples, and it would disparage their choices
and diminish their personhood to deny them this right,” Justice Anthony
Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion. He was joined in the ruling by
the court’s liberal justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer,
Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
All
four of the court’s most conservative members — Chief Justice John G.
Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A.
Alito Jr. — dissented and each wrote a separate opinion, saying the
court had usurped a power that belongs to the people.
Reading
a dissent from the bench for the first time in his tenure, Roberts
said, “Just who do we think we are? I have no choice but to dissent.”
In
his opinion, Roberts wrote: “Many people will rejoice at this decision,
and I begrudge none their celebration. But for those who believe in a
government of laws, not of men, the majority’s approach is deeply
disheartening.”
Scalia
called the decision a “threat to American democracy,” saying it was
“constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine.”
There
were wild scenes of celebrations on the sidewalk outside the Supreme
Court, as same-sex marriage supporters had arrived early, armed with
signs and rainbow flags. They celebrated the announcement of a
constitutional right to something that did not legally exist anywhere in
the world until the turn of the new century.
This
country’s first legally recognized same-sex marriages took place just
11 years ago, the result of a Massachusetts state supreme court
decision. Now, more than 70 percent of Americans live in states where
same-sex couples are allowed to marry, according to estimates.
The
Supreme Court used cases from Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee,
where restrictions about same-sex marriage were upheld by an appeals
court last year, to find that the Constitution does not allow such
prohibitions.
The
questions raised in the cases were left unanswered in 2013, when the
justices last confronted the issue of same-sex marriage. A slim majority
of the court said at the time that a key portion of the Defense of
Marriage Act — withholding the federal government’s recognition of
same-sex marriages — was unconstitutional. In a separate case, the court
said procedural issues kept it from answering the constitutional
question in a case from California, but that move allowed same-sex
marriages to resume in that state.
Since
then, courts across the nation — with the notable exception of the
Cincinnati-based federal appeals court that left intact the restrictions
in the four states at issue — have struck down a string of state
prohibitions on same-sex marriage, many of them passed by voters in
referendums.
When
the Supreme Court declined to review a clutch of those court decisions
in October, same-sex marriage proliferated across the country.
Couples may now marry in 37 states and the District of Columbia.
Public
attitudes toward such unions have undergone a remarkable change as
well. A recent Washington Post-ABC poll showed a record 61 percent of
Americans say they support same-sex marriage. The acceptance is driven
by higher margins among the young.
When
the justices declined in October to review the string of victories
same-sex marriage proponents had won in other parts of the country, it
meant the number of states required to allow gay marriages grew
dramatically, offering the kind of cultural shift the court often likes
to see before approving a fundamental change.
The
Obama administration had urged the court to find that the Constitution
requires such restrictions be struck down, and Solicitor General Donald
B. Verrilli Jr. made the case on behalf of the administration at the
court’s oral arguments in April.
“In
a world in which gay and lesbian couples live openly as our neighbors,
they raise their children side by side with the rest of us, they
contribute fully as members of the community . . . it is simply
untenable — untenable — to suggest that they can be denied the right of
equal participation in an institution of marriage, or that they can be
required to wait until the majority decides that it is ready to treat
gay and lesbian people as equals,” he said.
The combined cases now before the Supreme Court are known as Obergefell v. Hodges.
No comments:
Post a Comment