Welcome back to Legal Geek. This week, we review the second of the two highlight decisions of the most recent Supreme Court term, which is Obergefell v. Hodges, all about gay marriage. I will also explain why I think this decision, while deemed as groundbreaking as Roe v. Wade and Brown v. Board of Education, is actually less important today than the healthcare decision we covered last month.
https://archive.org/details/LegalGeekEp50
Coming back from Nerdtacular, it strikes me that decisions like Obergefell is built on similar principles as our Frogpants, tadpool, diamond club etc. community. Regardless of your politics and beliefs, there's no denying that the decision to legalize marriage for all persons regardess of sexual orientation is a move for equal treatment of more people, and when we follow the Golden Rule and treat people equally, good communities tend to result.
The decision was based on the Equal Protection clause and due process under the 14th Amendment. The due process clause stops the government from depriving citizens of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. Many previous Supreme Court decisions have deemed "liberty" under the due process clause to include the fundamental rights to marry and have private sexual relations.
This includes decisions protecting interracial marriage in Lawrence v. Texas, protecting the right of prisoners to marry in Turner v. Safely, and protecting the rights of women as equals in marriage in multiple 1980's decisions. Furthermore, Obergefell was a logical extension of the decision 12 years ago making sodomy laws unconstitutional for infringing the liberty of gay people, and the decision 2 years ago to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act, which was just enacted to limit marriage to one man and one woman in 1995!
Furthermore, even Justice Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion, noted that public opinion was already moving in the same direction as this decision. Thus, this was just the next logical step based on court precedent as well as public opinion.
The right to marry has long been established as a fundamental right, which means there must be a compelling government interest to restrict this liberty. The states argued that the compelling government interest was keeping bonds between biological parents and their children, but this was gutted during oral argument by noting that not all marriages are intended to result in children, and adoptions are just as likely for homosexual couples as for heterosexual couples. There just was not enough argument for leaving this decision to the states instead of applying the Equal Protection clause.
So gay marriage is now legal in all states. The reason I believe this is not as big a deal as the healthcare decision is because healthcare would have gone away completely had that decision gone the other way and perhaps have never come back, while public opinion was eventually going to result in most if not all states reaching this conclusion about gay marriage. Furthermore, this is one small step in the large scale of obtaining equal rights for all parts of the LGBT community, as evidenced by the just-beginning public awareness and discussion of transgender people, so there's still a long way to go here.
The Bottom Line: for at least this court watcher, the decision to uphold Obamacare is a bigger deal than legalizing gay marriage, but both cannot be denied as highly memorable decisions that definitely craft the future of this country, and that is fun to watch, regardless of if you agree with the decisions or the logic.
Until next time, let's continue to strive for and make communities that treat everyone equally and with compassion, as that will make the world a more positive place to be in.
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