The Armchair Jurist

The US Supreme Court earlier today ruled in the much awaited decision of Obergefell v Hodges that states (in the United States) must allow same-sex couples to marry and that they must recognize same-sex marriages from other states.

To say that this was a landmark decision in US law would be as big an understatement as the phrase “JarJar Binks is the most hated character in the Star Wars universe.” Simply put: there has been few bigger cases before this tribunal since the abortion and death penalty cases of the 1970s.

So what did the Court decide?

Before getting to that it is important to understand how this issue made it to the highest court in United States.  By way of background: before today thirty-seven of the states that make up the United States had entered into law statutes that recognize same-sex marriage.  The other states had not and, more to the point, did not recognize the marriages of those same-sex couples that had taken place in other states.  The lead plaintiff has married his partner in an approving state but they resided in Ohio which did not recognize same-sex marriage.  When his husband died, Jim Obergefell wanted to be listed on his death certificate as his spouse but was denied.  He took his case to Court seeking that recognition.

There has been much made of the issues before the Court but the key question can really be distilled down to one simple statement:

Under the Constitution of the United States, do same-sex couples have the same right to marry as their opposite-sex counterparts regardless of where they reside?

The majority of the Court (made up of Justices Kennedy, Bader Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan) resoundingly held that those couples do have those rights.  Here, in five bullet points, is why:

• The Supreme Court has long recognized the right to marry as a fundamental right under the US Constitution.
• All of the same principles that have applied to opposite-sex marriage in the previous decisions of the Court apply equally to same-sex marriage and the recognition of out-of-state same-sex marriages.
• Laws prohibiting same-sex couples from marrying “harm and humiliate the children” of those couples by depriving them of “the recognition, stability, and predictability” marriage offers.
• There is no difference between same- and opposite- sex couples with respect to the principal that marriage is a building block of “our national community” from the moral support given to married couples to the legal benefits and rights that they enjoy.
• The reason the US has a Constitution is that some rights are too important to leave up to the democratic process and same-sex couples should not wait any longer for those rights to be recognized.

Of course, the dissenters on the Supreme Court have been forcefully against the decision of the majority.  The prose in those dissents has waivered from the precise (Chief Justice Roberts) to the shrill (Justices Thomas and Scalia).  If you remove the emotive language from the dissents the key argument made in defiance of this ruling is simply that the issue of same-sex marriage is one that should not be dealt with by the Courts but rather should be dealt with by the government of each state.  The dissenters say the majority have overused their power in making this decision.

Ultimately, whatever the dissenters say, the law of the United States is now clear that same-sex couples have the same right to marry as opposite-sex couples.  This is a momentous  day in the history of the United States.