Supreme Court Gay Marriage Ruling

By Robin Phillips

Yesterday the United States’ Supreme Court declared that the federal government had been violating the Constitution by defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

The court also declared that citizens of California who passed a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to a union between a man and a woman did not have legal standing to defend their own law.

Although the two landmark decisions pave the way for marriage to be redefined throughout all of America’s 50 states, the two rulings actually fall short of the high hopes of the homosexual lobby. In particular, they were disappointed that the court declined to declare same-sex ‘marriage’ to be a fundamental right.

In the first case, U.S. v. Windsor, the Court ruled that Section 3 of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause (“no state shall … deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws”) by defining marriage as a male-female union for federal purposes. But the liberal justices who struck down Section 3—Kagan, Sotomayor, Breyer, and Ginsburg—left intact Section 2 of DOMA which prevents states from being forced to recognize same-sex ‘marriages’ performed in other states.

By kicking the matter back to the states, the Court has acknowledged that the federal government has no authority to define “marriage” for purposes of federal law and programs. Although there are thousands of federal laws and programs that make reference to marriage, the federal government has conceded that it does not actually have the authority to say what marriage actually means for the purposes of these laws, and must be content to let the definition be determined by each state.

The second case before the Supreme Court—Hollingsworth v. Perry—concerned California’s controversial Proposition 8, a constitutional amendment that California voters enacted through a referendum but which California’s rulers subsequently refused to enforce. Instead of ruling on the merits of Proposition 8, the Court said that the citizens who passed the constitutional amendment didn’t have standing to defend their own law. What this actually means in practice for California is ambiguous and will be determined only by the passage of time. Once again, this ruling came as a mixed victory for supporters of same-sex ‘marriage’ since the court refused to grant attorney Ted Olsen’s request that the Court ‘discover’ a constitutional right to same-sex marriage that could be imposed across the country.

In their reluctance to offer a decisive pronouncement on the legitimacy of same-sex ‘marriage’, the Supreme Court has essentially kicked the decision back to the states. In so doing, they have virtually guaranteed years of bitter acrimony and debate.

After yesterday’s ruling, 30% of Americans will live in states that recognize same-sex marriage, given the expected addition of California. Twenty-nine states, on the other hand, currently have constitutional amendments defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman.  The real battle is just beginning as both sides line up for a costly state-by-state campaign that could further polarize the American people.

Tomorrow we will run a post looking at the larger spiritual implications of these rulings for the American people and for the world at large.

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