In a huge decision released just now, today the US Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that bans on same-sex marriages were unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment. Justice Kennedy wrote the majority opinion, joined by Kagan, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor.
This is a great day for the LGBT community and for everyone who believes in equal rights.
The ruling seems to go well beyond what I expected but I will write more about this later when I have had time to read the opinions and dissents. Unfortunately today is a very busy day for me.
But for now, all I will say is congratulations to those who fought so hard for this day.
There is a great quote from Kennedy
“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.”
Scalia is losing his shit over the decision. He says an evangelical is needed on the supreme court
From what I could see in Robert’s dissent (and I only skimmed), he bases it all on the way things are and the will of the people. He doesn’t seem to try and pretend that the opponents have any sort of rational basis, that falls to Alito’s dissent, who somehow accepts the “it’s for procreation” argument.
@2 gshelley
From what I gathered, it was more of a dismissal that such a right has any constitutional grounds with a side of Tradition on the side.
A commenter at the NPR blog made the point that the fact that the four dissenters each penned their own opinion suggests that they couldn’t agree on the basis of their disagreement, further suggesting that their opinions were personal, not legal.
Both the Roberts dissent and the Scalia dissent repeatedly make charges of jucidial activism. They point out (as though it were a novel finding) that the justices are all lawyers. It’s great to see some self-hating lawyers, isn’t it? And that a judicial decision takes options away from the legislature. And that the justices are not elected.
These things have always been true, even when the court has made conservative decisions or bad decisions. So why whine about it just because you lost?
Matt G, that is a very interesting point. It does strongly suggest that they don’t have a coherent legal argument against SSM, doesn’t it? Usually the dissenters just sign on to the primary dissent, with maybe a clarification here or there (at least in the big cases, that I pay attention to). This strikes me as “No you’re so wrong about why this is a bad decision that I’ll just write my own dissent.”
It’s rather like when creationists say all the fossils in the human lineage are clearly, obviously either apes or humans, without any kind of transitional form. Yet if you ask which are which, you get a completely different answer depending on which creationist you ask.