The apparent net effect will be the return of same-sex marriage to California, if the opinion is interpreted, as most believe it will be, by California officials although it may take time to see exactly how this plays out. The decision will be confined to California, although it adds a thirteenth state—the biggest and most populous one—to the list of those that allow gay marriage, and thus will have an outsized political effect.
The Prop. Justice Kennedy wrote the dissent, joined by Thomas, Alito, and Sotomayor. The decision overturning DOMA was long-sought, and is a major victory. The decision in the Prop. I was working in the White House at the time. Clinton signed the bill into law, neutralizing the issue.
But it had no immediate practical effect, as same-sex marriage was not recognized anywhere at the time. As more and more states recognized gay marriages, however, the law came to be seen as profoundly unfair and, according to recent polling, unpopular.
The case before the Court involved a claim by Edith Windsor, an eighty-three-year-old widow, for an estate-tax refund of over three hundred and sixty-three thousand dollars, which she was forced to pay because the federal government did not recognize her marriage to Thea Spyer, her partner of several decades, and, in the last years of her life, her wife.
Windsor will get her money back. But the ruling will affect many thousands of couples, perhaps none more dramatically than those gay Americans who are married to foreign nationals and who will now be allowed to sponsor their spouses for green cards. That provision was not under challenge. Follow Politics Now on Twitter and Facebook. David G. CDC shifts pandemic goals away from reaching herd immunity. Phasing out gasoline cars and coal: What the U.
She helped her husband start a far-right militia group. All Sections. About Us. B2B Publishing. Business Visionaries. Correctly predicting the Supreme Court's decision, Michael Klarman, a Harvard Law professor and author of Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage , argued that "[t]he Supreme Court will likely rule that the Constitution requires that same-sex couples be admitted to the institution of marriage. In so doing, the Court will have given — as it usually does — the majority of Americans the Constitution that they want.
The ruling will be widely hailed as the Brown v. Board of Education of the gay rights movement. Yet, as with Brown, the Court will be reflecting public opinion more than it shaped it. Also as with Brown, the Court will be rendering a decision that would have been nearly inconceivable only a couple of decades before it happened. Klarman's assertion that the Supreme Court would give "the majority of Americans the Constitution that they want" by ruling in favor of the couples reflects recent public opinion polls about same-sex marriage.
The Supreme Court's ruling in United States v. Windsor led, in part, to many states legalizing same-sex marriage and set the stage for Obergefell v. On June 26, , the Supreme Court struck down part of the Defense of Marriage Act and ruled that legally married same-sex couples are entitled to receive equal treatment under federal law. The ruling required that federal benefits for legally married opposite-sex couples, including Social Security, certain tax breaks and insurance benefits, be extended to legally married same-sex couples.
Prior to the ruling, HR - Defense of Marriage Act DOMA stated that "no State, territory, or possession of the United States or Indian tribe shall be required to give effect to any marriage between persons of the same sex under the laws of any other such jurisdiction or to any right or claim arising from such relationship.
It also gave the states the right to create an alternative definition of marriage, if they chose to do so. In the court's ruling, Justice Anthony Kennedy explained why he, and the four other justices who joined him in the majority, ruled that part of DOMA violated the Constitution. He wrote, "What has been explained to this point should more than suffice to establish that the principal purpose and the necessary effect of this law are to demean those persons who are in a lawful same-sex marriage.
This requires the Court to hold, as it now does, that DOMA is unconstitutional as a deprivation of the liberty of the person protected by the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution. They wrote, "DOMA instructs all federal officials, and indeed all persons with whom same-sex couples interact, including their own children, that their marriage is less worthy than the marriages of others. The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and to injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity.
By seeking to displace this protection and treating those persons as living in marriages less respected than others, the federal statute is in violation of the Fifth Amendment. This opinion and its holding are confined to those lawful marriages. The dissenting members agreed on the constitutionality of DOMA. Although the justices struck down part of DOMA, they did not address the constitutionality of same-sex marriage. According to NPR , David Boies, an attorney who fought to overturn Proposition 8 , said that "the DOMA case made it clear that the court would agree that banning gay marriage is a violation of the Constitution.
Four same-sex marriage cases were consolidated by the Supreme Court under the title Obergefell v. Hodges when the Court granted the petitioners cert on January 16, Hodges from Ohio , Tanco v.
Haslam from Tennessee , DeBoer vs. Snyder from Michigan and Bourke v. Beshear from Kentucky. What they are seeking, they stress, is an equal right to enter the long-standing institution of marriage, with access to that institution being a 'fundamental right. And, in that sense, this argument is an invitation to the Court not to see what is at issue as a bold plea to fashion a new right out of whole cloth — one of the main arguments made against same-sex marriage.
Ohio and Tennessee defended the right of the states to decide whether or not to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states.
Michigan defended the right of the states to ban same-sex marriage. Kentucky defended the right to ban same-sex marriage and the right not to recognize same-sex marriage. Hodges on April 28, The court limited the argument to two questions:. Reversing the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit , the Supreme Court held on June 26, , that same-sex marriage is a protected right under the Constitution. State bans prohibiting same-sex marriages were struck down, and all states must recognize same-sex marriages performed out of state.
Kennedy identified four "principles and traditions" that provided precedent for the protection of same-sex marriage under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment:. Kennedy also noted marriage equality can be "derived" from the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Pointing to the interracial marriage case, Loving v. Virginia , Kennedy wrote, "Indeed, in interpreting the Equal Protection Clause, the Court has recognized that new insights and societal understandings can reveal unjustified inequality within our most fundamental institutions that once passed unnoticed and unchallenged. Responding to criticism that democratic debate should not have been substituted with judicial action, Kennedy noted there has been "far more deliberation than this argument acknowledges," including referenda, legislative debates, grassroots campaigns, scholarly writing, and the more than amicus filings in Obergefell.
0コメント