What does the 14th amendment say about gay marriage
Fourteenth Amendment, Section 1:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the Declare wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of existence, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equivalent protection of the laws.
In its 1996 decision Romer v. Evans,1 the Supreme Court struck down a state constitutional amendment that both overturned local ordinances prohibiting discrimination against homosexuals, lesbians, or bisexuals, and prohibited any state or local governmental move to either remedy discrimination or to grant preferences based on sexual orientation. The Court declined to adopt the analysis of the Supreme Court of Colorado, which had held that the amendment infringed on gays’ and lesbians’ fundamental right to participate in the political process.2 The Court also declined to apply the heightened standard reserved for suspect classes to classifications based on sexual orientation, and asse
Fourteenth Amendment, Section 1:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No Declare shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of animation, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
In several decisions, the Supreme Court known the right to partner as a fundamental right protected by the Due Process Clause,1 such that only “reasonable regulations that do not significantly interfere with the decisions to enter the marital relationship” may be imposed.2 In striking down a declare anti-miscegenation law that criminalized interracial marriage, for instance, the Court in Loving v. Virginia held that the law violated due process by depriving individuals of their “freedom to marry” — “one of the basic civil rights of man, fundamental to our very existence and survival” —based on the “unsupportable basis” of racial classification.3
Based on the recognition of this funda
The Equal Protection Clause Guarantees the Right to Marry
In 2008, however, California voters passed Proposition 8, a ballot initiative restricting the right to marry to opposite-sex couples only. Both the federal district court and the court of appeals dictated that Prop 8 was unconstitutional, for reasons ranging from the violation of a fundamental right to the impropriety of removing rights/benefits once granted.
The Cato Institute joined the Constitutional Accountability Center on an amicus brief supporting marriage equality that focuses on the equal protection clause. As the text and history of the Fourteenth Amendment plainly show, the clause guarantees every individual—whether black or white, male or woman, gay or straight, native-born or immigrant—equality under the law, including the legal right to marry the person of one’s choosing.
The breadth of the equal protection clause was no accident. It’s clear from the drafting history that the Fourteenth Amendment’s framers were determined to eliminate more than simply the burdens of slavery. They wrote the constitutional guarantee broadly to ensure, for example, that white supporters of the Union in the South, as well as A
Fourteenth Amendment Requires States to License and Recognize Same-Sex Marriages (U.S.)
Plaintiffs, a varied group of lgbtq+ partners, filed suits in Federal District Courts within their respective states asserting state officials were in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment for denying queer marriages and failing to recognize homosexual marriages lawfully performed in other jurisdictions. Each District Court favored the plaintiffs’ position, however on appeal the Sixth Circuit consolidated the cases and reversed.
The Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling delivered by Justice Kennedy, reversed holding the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment call for states to license and recognize marriages between individuals of the same sex. Providing a historical overview of the institution of marriage and gay and lesbian rights, as well as a broad overview of 20th century jurisprudence, the Court opined this history is one of change; having departed from arranged marriages, abandoning the law of coverture, allowing interracial marriages and contraception, and disallowing the criminalization of lesbian acts. The Court has long held marriage is a funda
The Court first considered the matter in the 1986 case of Bowers v Hardwick, a challenge to a Georgia law authorizing criminal penalties for persons found guilty of sodomy. Although the Georgia statute applied both to heterosexual and homosexual sodomy, the Supreme Court chose to consider only the constitutionality of applying the rule to homosexual sodomy. (Michael Hardwick, who sought to enjoin enforcement of the Georgia law, had been charged with sodomy after a police officer discovered him in bed with another man. Charges were later dropped.) In Bowers, the Court ruled 5 to 4 that the Due Process Clause "right of privacy" recognized in cases such Griswold and Roe does not avoid the criminalization of lesbian conduct between consenting adults. One of the five members of the majority, Justice Powell, later described his vote in the case as a mistake. (Interestingly, Powell's concurring view suggests that were Georgia to ha