Wednesday, June 26, the Supreme Court of the United States struck down both the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Proposition 8 in a landmark victory for same-sex marriage proponents. Both cases were decided by 5-4 decisions.
In United States v. Windsor, the court found Section 3 of DOMA unconstitutional under the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the opinion for the majority and was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissenting. Kennedy, who has authored many of the courts prior decisions involving gay rights, wrote in his opinion that DOMA “violates basic due process and equal protection principles applicable to the Federal Government.”
Noah Cannon, president of The University of Alabama’s LGBTQ advocacy group Spectrum, said his first thoughts after the ruling were of the many married couples who are now recognized under federal law.
“I was really initially overwhelmed to hear the news,” Cannon said. “In my first reaction, my mind immediately went to the married couples I know who have been married in states where it’s legal, who live in Alabama, who now have access to over 1,100 new federal benefits.”
With Section 3, which defined “marriage” as the legal union between one man and one woman for federal purposes, ruled unconstitutional, same-sex couples married in states where their marriage is legal will now also be recognized by the federal government. However, Section 2 of DOMA, which allows states where same-sex marriage is illegal to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states, remains constitutional.
“It’s not recognized by Alabama, so state benefits still don’t apply to them,” Cannon said. “Federal benefits do.”
In his dissenting opinion, Justice Scalia accused the court of overstepping its bounds, calling the decision “legalistic argle-bargle” and the majority’s justification a “diseased root.” Justice Scalia went on to say the decision, “formally [declares] anyone opposed to same-sex marriage an enemy of human decency.”
In the other major case involving same-sex marriage, Hollingsworth v. Perry, the court held that the defenders of Proposition 8, a voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage in California, did not have legal standing to argue for the law and vacated every court decision since the original U.S. District Court ruling. That original ruling held that the state of California had no reasonable basis to refuse rights that had previously been afforded and Proposition 8 was therefore unconstitutional.
Taken together, the rulings are seen by many as a victory for states rights as well as the rights of same-sex couples. Cannon said the battle for same-sex marriage will likely be fought state-by-state.
“I think the Supreme Court, in a lot of ways, supported small government and states rights with their decision,” Cannon said. “I think we’re going to go back to a state-by-state battle, but we’ve already seen an influx of states in the past year. I think we will see a sharper incline in the number of states individually legalizing it. Whether Alabama will fall sooner or later on that scale, I don’t know, but I’m hoping it’s sooner.”
