Supreme Court: Same-sex couples have a right to marry in any state

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday declared that same-sex couples have a right to marry anywhere in the United States.

Gay and lesbian couples already can marry in 36 states and the District of Columbia. The court’s ruling means the remaining 14 states, in the South and Midwest, will have to stop enforcing their bans on same-sex marriage and recognize marriages performed in other states.

The outcome is the culmination of two decades of Supreme Court litigation over marriage, and gay rights generally.

Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority opinion, just as he did in the court’s previous three major gay rights cases dating back to 1996.

“No union is more profound than marriage,” Kennedy wrote, joined by the court’s four more liberal justices.

Tracie Bradacs, of Lexington, a state trooper and one of the plaintiffs in the federal same-sex marriage lawsuit filed in Columbia and resolved in a lower federal court last fall, said, “It’s a great day – not just for us, but for everyone.”

Bradacs and her spouse, Katie, an Air Force veteran, were married in Washington, D.C., in 2012 and had asked federal courts to require South Carolina to recognize that marriage. They have three children, and the Supreme Court’s decision had special meaning for them because it addressed the issue of gay couples with children.

“That’s one of the biggest reasons we filed this lawsuit, because of our kids, so they wouldn’t be treated any differently,” Tracie Bradacs said.

The majority opinion in Friday’s decision said, “As all parties agree, many same-sex couples provide loving and nurturing homes to their children, whether biological or adopted.”

But without the legal framework provided by marriage, children who live in same-sex-couple homes suffer, the opinion said.

“Without the recognition, stability, and predictability marriage offers, their children suffer the stigma of knowing their parents are somehow lesser,” the opinion said. “The marriage laws at issue thus harm and humiliate the children of same-sex couples.”

One of the Bradacs’ lawyers, John Nichols, said Friday that he was happy and stunned by the final paragraph in the majority opinion, which ends with the sentences, “They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.”

Malissa Burnette, the Columbia attorney for the two now-married Charleston women who filed a federal lawsuit last year, said, “I’m just so excited – it’s a full victory.”

Burnette said she had been worried that the Supreme Court would rule only that states had to give legal recognition to same-sex marriages performed in other states and not require all states to issue marriage licenses to gay couples.

“Thanks to the advocates and supporters from South Carolina and beyond who worked for decades to secure the freedom to marry, we can finally celebrate that our dream of nationwide marriage equality has become a reality,” said Jeff Ayers, interim executive director of South Carolina Equality.

The ruling will not take effect immediately because the court gives the losing side roughly three weeks to ask for reconsideration. But some state officials and county clerks might decide there is little risk in issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

The cases before the court involved laws from Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee that define marriage as the union of a man and a woman. Those states have not allowed same-sex couples to marry within their borders and they also have refused to recognize valid marriages from elsewhere.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Nov. 21 refused to block same-sex marriages in South Carolina.

Practically, though, marriage licenses were being awarded and couples were being wed as early as Nov. 19, after the S.C. Supreme Court allowed state probate judges to issue licenses.

But everything hinged on the U.S. Supreme Court.

“Love wins,” South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Jaime Harrison said. “Today the Supreme Court ruled that love is love and that marriage is a right for all our brothers and sisters, friends and neighbors, everyone. Marriage equality has been a long time coming, and now same-sex couples will be afforded the rights and protections they deserve.

“We will continue fighting to end discrimination of everywhere. Today is another winning round in that bout.”

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the dissenting justices, was blistering in his criticism of the majority decision as well as the justices who made that decision. He argued that the court had usurped the right of states and citizens to decide the matter themselves, eroding the nation’s very democracy.

“Today’s decree 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 wrote. “The opinion in these cases is the furthest extension in fact – and the furthest extension one can even imagine – of the court’s claimed power to create ‘liberties’ that the Constitution and its amendments neglect to mention.”

There are an estimated 390,000 married same-sex couples in the United States, according to UCLA’s Williams Institute, which tracks the demographics of gay and lesbian Americans. Another 70,000 couples living in states that do not currently permit them to wed would get married in the next three years, the institute says. Roughly 1 million same-sex couples, married and unmarried, live together in the United States, the institute says.

The two main issues addressed by Friday’s U.S. Supreme Court decision were directly on point with the two issues decided in late 2014 by two federal courts in South Carolina.

Last November, in the Bradacs case, U.S. Judge Michelle Childs of Columbia ruled that a state must recognize a same-sex marriage that took place in another state.

Also in November, federal Judge Richard Gergel of Charleston ruled on the other same-sex marriage issue in a case involving a Charleston couple who wanted to get married. The state had refused to issue a marriage license to Colleen Condon and Ann Bleckley. Gergel ruled that South Carolina does not have the power to deny a same-sex couple a marriage license or to refuse to recognize such an in-state marriage.

S.C. Attorney General Alan Wilson, citing South Carolina’s Defense of Marriage Act, has lost repeated battles in federal court in the Charleston and Columbia cases to stop South Carolina gay couples from marrying.

Wilson said Friday’s court ruling delivered a “devastating blow” to states’ rights.

On April 1 of this year, Wilson filed a 39-page amicus, or friend of the court, brief in which he asked the court to abide by the “original understanding” of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The 14th Amendment, passed in 1868, is the same “equal protection” and “due process” amendment that supporters of gay marriage used to win earlier cases.

But Wilson argued that gay couples don’t deserve the same protection of the 14th amendment as heterosexual couples.

“While undoubtedly there are applications of the Fourteenth Amendment unforeseen by its drafters, same-sex marriage is not one,” wrote Wilson, who also cited an 1873 legal treatise asserting marriage is “one man and one woman united in law for life.”

This story was originally published June 26, 2015 at 10:13 AM with the headline "Supreme Court: Same-sex couples have a right to marry in any state."