No Second-Class Citizens – No Second-Class Marriages

The District of Columbia, along with nine states, did not wait for the Supreme Court to do the right thing. We passed our own marriage equality law in 2009. Yet some would use D.C. and the handful of marriage equality states against the majority of LGBT Americans to counsel a go-slow approach to recognizing the fundamental right to marry. But the majority of LGBT Americans live in states that have already rushed to take away their right to marry at the highest level – their state constitutions. California went further and showed what a determined rights-denying majority can do even after its highest state court protects the right to marry. An audacious California majority moved against its LGBT minority to do what the Bill of Rights forbids. They declared themselves the arbiter of fundamental rights with Proposition 8 and attempted to trump their own high court and rescind the fundamental right to marry.

An even larger and more threatening majority in the United States Congress has used the Defense of Marriage Act to insinuate itself into the exclusive marital jurisdiction of the states by recognizing some marriages and denying others. Only the Court can tell Congress that the federal government must recognize all lawful marriages and cannot federalize marriage in order to deny marriage benefits. Only the Court can tell California that it cannot marry a couple one day and unmarry them the next. The Court has already said that marriage is a fundamental right. It cannot now say marriage is fundamental only for straight couples.

If this is one nation, indivisible, when a gay couple is married in one state, they are married in the United States.

No second-class citizens – no second-class marriages.

Published: March 26, 2013