USSC today, overturned the portion of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) that allowed refusal of federal equal status for all married couples. Was it necessary – absolutely! Was it right – even more absolutely (if you can have more than absolute, lol) In Loving v. Virginia, a landmark civil rights decision of the United States Supreme Court which invalidated laws prohibiting interracial marriage, SCOTUS determined that marriage partners of different races were protected by the Constitution as having equal marriage rights. The case was brought by Mildred Loving, a black woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, who had been sentenced to a year in prison in Virginia for marrying each other. Their marriage violated the state's anti-miscegenation statute, the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which prohibited marriage between people classified as "white" and people classified as "colored." The Supreme Court's unanimous decision held this prohibition was unconstitutional, overturning Pace v. Alabama (1883) and ending all race-based legal restrictions on marriage in the United States.
Today’s ruling is little more than a logical extension of this decision to include same sex couples as well as mixed race couples. The wonder is that there was not a unanimous decision doing so! Antonin Scalia in his minority dissension claimed SCOTUS had no jurisdiction in the current case. By his standards, SCOTUS should have had no jurisdiction in Loving either! The four dissenting justices all have their own baggage. Scalia’s earlier public pronouncements have made it quite clear he is a homophobe. Clarence Thomas is simply, not SCOTUS material, and the other two generally sway whichever way the doctrinal wind blows.
As I have previously written, the real issue here is that 200 years of state to state reciprocity ought to be the issue. I may not, as a citizen of New York, believe that some Georgia bumpkin with an 80 IQ should be licensed to drive, but I must honor his valid Georgia driver’s license in my state as long as he obeys the law. Similarly, I may not require a tourist to buy auto insurance in my state. Many states offer reciprocity to other states’ citizens in many areas; Alaska, for example offers Bar admittance to attorneys from about 25 other states who have been passed the bar exam in their respective states’.
No state requires a legally married heterosexual couple, regardless of race or nationality, to remarry in their state! All states respect every other state’s marriages, which is interesting, because they might be civil, Wiccan, Islamic, Jewish, you name it. No problem. Pay taxes, file jointly, get survivor benefits, etc. If the Federal Government allows even one state to decide which marriages they will recognize we are on a slippery slope, as this precedent could be extrapolated to other things. (like driving, paying higher sales tax, etc, for out of staters).
SCOTUS did the right thing because of just that - it was the right thing. All the religious persons, bless their hearts, who laud this as an answered prayer would do well to remember that the status as it was , was also due to the machinations of religious folks who felt just as strongly that they were right as those who thought DOMA wrong and that DOMA was God answering their prayers. This was, pure and simply, a legal decision based on 5 persons interpreting the constitution one way and 4 others another way. In another time, with another court, it might not have happened. Remember, Pat Robertson prayed for disease to remove several liberal justices not so long ago.
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