BREAKING: U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that states can no longer ban same-sex couples from getting married
— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) June 26, 2015
Update:
Via Reuters:
The Supreme Court ruled on Friday that the U.S. Constitution provides same-sex couples the right to marry in a historic triumph for the American gay rights movement.
The court ruled 5-4 that the Constitution’s guarantees of due process and equal protection under the law mean that states cannot ban same-sex marriages. With the ruling, gay marriage will become legal in all 50 states.
Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing on behalf of the court, said that the hope of gay people intending to marry “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.”
Kennedy, a conservative who often casts the deciding vote in close cases, was joined in the majority by the court’s four liberal justices.
In a dissenting opinion, conservative Justice Antonin Scalia says the court’s decision shows it is a “threat to American democracy.”
The ruling “says that my ruler and the ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court,” Scalia said.
From the Scalia dissent:
And this:
“If, even as the price to be paid for a fifth vote, I ever joined an opinion for the Court that began: ‘The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity,’ I would hide my head in a bag. The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.”
Once again, it is about federal government control over an issue that should be within the hands of the legislative bodies of the states.
Scalia also said that the Supreme Court has become a “threat to democracy”.
Here is the full decision.
HT: Donna, Blue Sky