From SCOTUSblog: A one-two punch to the nation’s most prominent antigay laws

Prof. Suzanne Goldberg, who analyzed the marriage equality cases for Justice Watch when they were argued before the Supreme Court, has now analyzed the decisions for SCOTUSblog:

The late Dr. Thea Spyer and her wife,
Edith Windsor, who won her case today.

The Court’s decisions in Windsor and Perry – the first major gay rights rulings in a decade – are a one-two punch to the nation’s most prominent antigay laws.  Today, the Court has brought an end to the damage wrought by the federal Defense of Marriage Act on countless same-sex couples throughout the United States and left in place Proposition 8’s invalidation by the federal district court.

Neither decision is surprising but both are gratifying.  And both reinforce the dramatic shift in the Court’s approach to gay rights – and to gay people.  Just over a generation ago, in the Court’s 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick ruling, the Court held that it was “at best facetious” that a gay person would have a constitutional right to sexual intimacy in his apartment.  Today, Justice Kennedy, in his Windsor opinion, writes that DOMA’s burden “demeans” same-sex couples and “humiliates tens of thousands of children now being raised by same-sex couples.”

Put simply, it was almost unimaginable, when the gay rights movement took hold in the 1970s, or even as legal victories started to mount in the 1980s and 1990s, that the nation’s highest Court would find that a federal law unconstitutionally interfered with the “equal dignity of same-sex marriages.”

Yet reaching this conclusion was not a constitutional stretch. ...

Read the full post at SCOTUSblog
Read AFJ's response to the decisions