In a moment that would have been unimaginable 50 years ago—when a handful of protestors demonstrated for gay rights in front of Independence Hall—the Supreme Court ruled in 2015 on the legality of marriage between same-sex couples.
On June 26, 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court held, in Obergefell v. Hodges, that the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the 14th Amendment require every state to allow same-sex couples to marry and to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states.
“The limitation of marriage to opposite-sex couples may long have seemed natural and just, but its inconsistency with the central meaning of the fundamental right to marry is now manifest. . . .[L]aws excluding same-sex couples from the marriage right impose stigma and injury of the kind prohibited by our basic charter.”
—Justice Anthony Kennedy for the majority in Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015
Jim Obergefell marries John Arthur aboard a private medical jet on July 11, 2013. Photograph by Glenn Hartong/AP
Ohio residents Jim Obergefell and his partner of two decades John Arthur wished to marry knowing that John was terminally ill with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Ohio, however, had passed a state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.
With help from family and friends, Jim chartered a medical plane to Maryland where same-sex marriage was legal and he and John married on July 11, 2013. John died three months later, and as the couple had planned, Jim sued to be listed as the surviving spouse on John’s death certificate.
After several federal courts of appeals held that state bans on same-sex marriage were unconstitutional, one appellate court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, upheld bans in that circuit. One of the cases before the Sixth Circuit came from Ohio, where James Obergefell and his husband, John Arthur, had been denied recognition of their out-of-state marriage. The split of authority among the circuits led inevitably to Supreme Court review. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court concluded that state bans of same-sex marriage violated the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees individuals due process and equal protection under the law.
Jim Obergefell on the steps of the Texas Capitol during a rally in Austin, Texas. Photograph by Eric Gay/AP
Anthony M. Kennedy, Justice of the United States of America. Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States, Photographer: Steve Petteway, undated.
Justice Anthony Kennedy’s decision for the Court’s majority used now-much-quoted language about the importance of marriage. “[The] petitioners’ plea,” he wrote, “is that they do respect [marriage], respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.”
Four Supreme Court justices dissented from Obergefell’s holding. The opinions strike somewhat different themes, but they generally expressed an unwillingness to apply the 14th Amendment’s due process provisions expansively. The opinions also criticized the Court for interrupting the national political dialogue occurring in the states on the validity of same-sex marriage.
John G. Roberts, Jr., Chief Justice of the United States of America. Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States, Photographer: Steve Petteway, 2005.
“Five lawyers have closed the debate and enacted their own vision of marriage as a matter of constitutional law. Stealing this issue from the people will for many cast a cloud over same-sex marriage, making a dramatic social change that much more difficult to accept.”
—Chief Justice John Roberts in his dissent in Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015