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Equal Dignity in the Eyes of the Law
In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court of the United States has affirmed that the right to marry is “a fundamental right inherent in the liberty of the person,” and that “under the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment couples of the same-sex may not be deprived of that right and that liberty.” Obergefell v. Hodges, No. 14-556, slip op. at 22 (U.S. June 26, 2015) (majority opinion), available at http://1.usa.gov/1ON2rxf. The Court, in a 5-4 decision, held that “same-sex couples may exercise the fundamental right to marry in all States” and that “there is no lawful basis for a State to refuse to recognize a lawful same-sex marriage performed in another State” merely because the marriage is between members of the same sex. Id. at 28.
At issue in the consolidated cases before the Court were laws from four states ' Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee ' that prohibited same-sex marriage and denied recognition of same-sex marriages legally performed in other states. The Obergefell decision struck down not only those laws, but all state laws that denied same-sex couples the right to get and stay married. Twelve years after the first state legalized marriage between members of the same sex (see Goodridge v. Dep't of Pub. Health, 440 Mass. 309 (2003)), marriage equality thus became the law of the land.
The ruling in Obergefell was handed down on the second anniversary of the Court's decision in United States v. Windsor, 133 S. Ct. 2675 (2013). In Windsor, the Court had invalidated a provision of the Defene of Marriage Act (DOMA) that defined marriage as the union of a man and a woman for purposes of federal law. The Court ruled that DOMA, by its restrictive definition of marriage, sought to ' and did ' injure same-sex spouses, legally married under state law, by denying them the array of federal benefits enjoyed by heterosexual married couples. As in Windsor, the majority opinion in Obergefell was written by Justice Anthony Kennedy and joined by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan. And as in Windsor, the Court's most conservative Justices, including Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito, dissented in Obergefell.
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