Rachel Finkle

Mr. Lacey
Government
March 10th, 2016
Same-Sex Marriage
Same-sex marriage has been legal in the United States since June 26, 2015, when
the United States Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that state-level bans on
same-sex marriage are unconstitutional. The court ruled that the denial of marriage
licenses to same-sex couples and the refusal to recognize those marriages violates the
Due Process and the Equal Protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment of the
Constitution. The ruling overturned a Baker v. Nelson (Same Sex Marriage Laws
History).
Baker v. Nelson was a Supreme Court case that ruled that state laws limiting
same-sex marriage were not unconstitutional. It was decided on October 15th, 1971. Two
Univesity of Minnesota students who were gay activists applied for a marriage license in
Minneapolis, and the clerk, Gerald Nelson, denied the request soely based on the fact that
they were both male. The couple filed a suit in a district court in an attempt to force him
to issue the license. They argued that Minnesota's marriage statutes contained no explicit
requirement that applicants be of different sexes. If the statutes did require different-sex
couples, however, Baker claimed this would violate the First Amendment (freedom of
speech and of association), Eighth Amendment (cruel and unusual punishment), Ninth
Amendment (unenumerated right to privacy), and the Fourteenth Amendment
(fundamental right to marry under the Due Process Clause and sex discrimination
contrary to the Equal Protection Clause). The trial dismissed their claims and ordered the
clerk not to issue the license (Appellant's Jurisdictional Statement).
The legal issues surrounding same-sex marriage in the United States are
determined by the nation's federal system of government, in which the status of a person,
including marital status, is determined in large measure by the individual states The
Defense of Marriage Act was enacted in 1996. DOMA's Section 2 says that no state need
recognize the legal validity of a same-sex relationship even if recognized as marriage by
another state.. This complicates things, however, because this means a couple could be
married in one state, and then move to another and find their marriage unrecognized,
losing all benefits. DOMA's Section 3 defined marriage for the purposes of federal law as
a union of a man and a woman (Wermiel).

In the Supreme Court case United States v. Windsor the Supreme Court held that
restricting U.S. federal interpretation of "marriage" and "spouse" to apply only to
heterosexual unions, by Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), is
unconstitutional under the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment. Edith Windsor
and Thea Spyer were a same-sex couple lawfully married in Ontario, Canada. While
living in New York, Spyer passed away, leaving the estate to Windsor. Windsor sought to
claim the federal estate tax exemption for surviving spouses. She was barred from doing
so by Section 3 of DOMA, which provided that the term "spouse" only applied to
marriages between a man and woman. She filed a lawsuit against the federal government
on November 9th, 2010 seeking a refund because DOMA singled out legally married
same-sex couples for "differential treatment compared to other similarly situated couples
without justification." On June 6, 2012, Judge Barbara S. Jones ruled that Section 3 of
DOMA was unconstitutional and ordered the federal government to issue the tax refund,
including interest. As a result of the Windsor decision, married same-sex couples have
federal tax benefits, military benefits, federal employment benefits, and immigration
benefits (Complaint: Windsor v. United States).
On January 16, 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear four cases, on appeal
from the Sixth Circuit, on whether states may constitutionally ban same-sex marriages or
refuse to recognize such marriages legally performed in another state. The cases were:
Obergefell v. Hodges, Tanco v. Haslam, DeBoer v. Snyder, and Bourke v. Beshear.
Decided by Obergefell on June 26, 2015, it was declared that same-sex couples have the
constitutional rights to marry and to have their marriages recognized. Obergefell
therefore overturned the Court's own prior ruling in Baker (Williams). Officials in
fourteen counties in three states are still unwilling to issue licenses to same-sex couples.
Those wishing to marry within the state must travel to another part of the state in order to
obtain a license. This includes officials in ten Alabama counties, one Texas county, and
three Kentucky counties (Ballotpedia).

Works Cited
Appellant's Jurisdictional Statement, Baker v. Nelson, Supreme Court docket no. 711027, at
3-4 (statement of the case); Court Won't Let Men Wed, N.Y. Times, Jan.
10, 1971 at 65.
Ballotpedia, Local government responses to Obergefell v. Hodges, updated 02 Oct 2015
"Complaint: Windsor v. United States" (PDF). aclu.org. p. 21. Retrieved June 27, 2013.
"Same Sex Marriage Laws History". National Conference of State Legislatures.
Retrieved
August 1, 2012.

Wermiel, Stephen (March 23, 2012). "SCOTUS for law students: The Defense of
Marriage
Act and the Constitution". SCOTUSblog. Retrieved September 23, 2014.
Williams, Pete (June 26, 2015). "Landmark: Supreme Court Rules Same-Sex Marriage
Legal Nationwide". NBC News. Retrieved June 26, 2015.