3 Assignments

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Marriage Equality Chapter 12

Learning Objectives

 After reading this chapter, you will be able to:

 12.1 Summarize the history of marriage equality as an issue in the United States up to the June 26, 2015 Obergefell Supreme Court decision.

 12.2 Critically analyze the arguments for and against marriage equality, the place of religion in the argument, and the role of utilitarian moral

reasoning in the debate.

 12.3 Discuss the different moral arguments for and against marriage

equality after reading selections by Senator John Cornyn, Sally Kohn, and Cleve Jones, as well as Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion from the Supreme Court bench.

Supreme Court grants Marriage

Equality  On June 26, 2015, The United States Supreme Court declared

marriage equality the law of the land. In a historic 5-4 civil rights

decision turning on both equal protection under the law and due

process liberty interests for all Americans, the court decided the

Obergefell v. Hodges case in favor of equality, making the United

States of America the 21st country in the world to have full marriage

equality for all its citizens. The decision voiced the need to grant

that right to all citizens and, in Justice Anthony Kennedy’s issued

majority opinion, also expounded movingly on the dignity of all

persons and on the power of love.

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 “No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the

highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family,” wrote

Justice Anthony Kennedy in the majority opinion. “In forming a

marital union, two people become greater than they once were. As

some of the petitioners in this case demonstrate, marriage

embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would be to

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.”

DOMA

 Few if any moral and legal debates in our lifetime have moved as

fast as the question of marriage equality.

All but unimaginable a generation ago, as of this writing, marriage

equality has become the law in the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain,

Canada, South Africa, Norway, Sweden, Portugal, Iceland,

Argentina, Denmark, France, Brazil, Uruguay, New Zealand, Great

Britain, and Scotland. The United States, like Mexico, has regional

marriage equality; that is, some states have it and some ban it.

However, in the United States, a landmark 2013 U.S. Supreme Court

decision declared the Federal Defense of Marriage Act (known as DOMA) unconstitutional.

Focus on Interracial Marriage

 In 1958, two Virginia residents, a black woman and a white man

who were in love, decided to drive across the Potomac to

Washington, D.C. and get married.

Interracial marriage was forbidden in Virginia by the 1924 Racial

Integrity Act, a so-called anti-miscegenation law that was the norm in many states along with other forms of racial discrimination that

denied American citizens civil rights because of who they were.

After their wedding, Mildred Loving and Richard Loving returned to

their home in Central Point just north of Richmond. Virginia state

police broke into their house in the middle of the night and arrested

them.

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Not Adam and St(eve)

 Natural Law and then the consequentialist arguments of the harm

that allowing interracial marriage would cause to the American

family. “Almighty God created the races, black, white, yellow,

malay [sic] and red, and placed them on separate continents,”

declared the trial judge Leon M. Bazile. “And, but for the

interference with this arrangement there would be no cause for

such marriage. The fact that he separated the races shows that he

did not intend for the races to mix.” One can suppose that if God

had intended for the races to mix, he would have made everyone

beige.

A parallel argument, more recent, is that God created Adam and

Eve, not Adam and Steve.

1967 Law Overturened

In 1967 the U.S. Supreme Court in a unanimous decision struck down

the Virginia law and, by legal implication, all other antimiscegenation

laws in the books at the time in roughly one-third of the United States.

In his historic ruling, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote that “There can be

no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial

classifications violates the central meaning of the Constitution’s Equal

Protection Clause.”

This was a civil rights issue.

In 2012, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored

People passed a resolution endorsing same-sex marriage as a civil

right.