Fuck Yeah: SCOTUS Declares Gay Marriage Legal In All States
LatestHell yes: the Supreme Court has struck down all federal bans on same-sex marriage. What a beautiful day for basic common sense, civil rights, and human dignity. The vote was 5-4.
The case was Obergefell v. Hodges, a group of consolidated cases that asked the justices to decide whether the Fourteenth Amendment required a state to issue a marriage license to two people of the same sex, and to recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex when the license was issued in another state.
The link to the majority decision and the dissents — each of the four disseneters wrote their own dissent — is here. The majority opinion, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy and joined by Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Ginsburg, closes with a particularly beautiful passage on why we care about marriage as an institution, and why it should be open to everyone:
No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right. The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit is reversed.
The dissenters were, as you might expect, the more conservative justices: Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, and Alito.