History > 2015 > USA > Gay Rights

Ms. DeBoer, left, and her partner, Ms. Rowse,

with their 2-year-old daughter, Rylee, at home in Hazel Park, Mich.

Guardianship of their four children was at the core of their decision

to challenge Michigan's ban on same-sex marriage.

Joshua Lott for The New York Times

One Couple’s Unanticipated Journey to Center of Landmark Gay Rights Case

NYT

JAN 24, 2015

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/25/
us/one-couples-unanticipated-journey-to-center-of-landmark-gay-rights-case.html  
 

Historic Day for Gays,

but Twinge of Loss

for an Outsider Culture

 

JUNE 26, 2015

The New York Times

By JODI KANTOR

From Capitol Hill in Seattle to Dupont Circle in Washington, gay bars and nightclubs have turned into vitamin stores, frozen yogurt shops and memories. Some of those that remain are filled increasingly with straight patrons, while many former customers say their social lives now revolve around preschools and playgrounds.

Rainbow-hued “Just Be You” messages have been flashing across Chase A.T.M. screens in honor of Pride month, conveying acceptance but also corporate blandness. Directors, filmmakers and artists are talking about moving past themes of sexual orientation, which they say no longer generate as much dramatic energy.

The Supreme Court on Friday expanded same-sex marriage rights across the country, a crowning achievement but also a confounding challenge to a group that has often prided itself on being different. The more victories that accumulate for gay rights, the faster some gay institutions, rituals and markers are fading out. And so just as the gay marriage movement peaks, so does a debate about whether gay identity is dimming, overtaken by its own success.

Thousands, including parents, babies and dogs, flocked to the Supreme Court after its ruling on same-sex marriage. Supporters spoke about how they thought the ruling helped maintain and support families. By Channon Hodge on Publish Date June 26, 2015. Photo by Albert Cesare/The Montgomery Advertiser, via Associated Press.

“What do gay men have in common when they don’t have oppression?” asked Andrew Sullivan, one of the intellectual architects of the marriage movement. “I don’t know the answer to that yet.”

John Waters, the film director and patron saint of the American marginal, warned graduates to heed the shift in a recent commencement speech at the Rhode Island School of Design. “Refuse to isolate yourself. Separatism is for losers,” he said, adding, “Gay is not enough anymore.”

No one is arguing that prejudice has come close to disappearing, especially outside major American cities, as waves of hate crimes, suicides by gay teenagers and workplace discrimination attest. Far from everyone agrees that marriage rights are the apotheosis of liberation. But even many who raced to the altar say they feel loss amid the celebrations, a bittersweet sense that there was something valuable about the creativity and grit with which gay people responded to stigma and persecution.

For decades, they built sanctuaries of their own: neighborhoods and vacation retreats where they could escape after workdays in the closet; bookstores where young people could find their true selves and one another. Symbols like the rainbow flag expressed joy and collective defiance, a response to disapproving families, laws that could lead to arrests for having sex and the presumption that to be lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender was shameful.

“The thing I miss is the specialness of being gay,” said Lisa Kron, who wrote the book and lyrics for “Fun Home,” a Broadway musical with a showstopping number sung by a young girl captivated by her first glimpse of a butch woman. “Because the traditional paths were closed, there was a consciousness to our lives, a necessary invention to the way we were going to celebrate and mark family and mark connection. That felt magical and beautiful.”

Ms. Kron is 54, and her sentiments seem to resonate among gay people of her generation and older. “People are missing a sense of community, a sense of sharing,” said Eric Marcus, 56, the author of “Making Gay History.”

“There is something wonderful about being part of an oppressed community,” Mr. Marcus said. But he warned against too much nostalgia. The most vocal gay rights activists may have celebrated being outsiders, but the vast majority of gay people just wanted “what everyone else had,” he said — the ability to fall in love, have families, pursue their careers and “just live their lives.”

Mainstream acceptance does not necessarily cause minority cultures to wither. Other groups have been both buffered and buoyed by greater inclusion. But being gay is different from being a member of an ethnic or religious minority. Many gay children are born into heterosexual families, and same-sex couples often have offspring who are straight. There is less continuity, several gay sociologists said, and there are fewer traditions or holidays that reinforce identity and unite the generations.

The unifying experience for many gay people is not marriage but coming out of the closet. In 1997, as Ellen DeGeneres rehearsed the sitcom scene in which her character came out, she broke into tears every time she rehearsed saying, “I’m gay.” She was welling up because of “shame, you know, self-hatred, and all of these feelings that society feeds you to tell you that you’re wrong,” she said in a later interview.

But many gay people in their teens, 20s and 30s today say the phrase “coming out of the closet” does not apply to them because they were never in one. For Ariel Boone of Oakland, Calif., who began to describe herself as queer in 2008, when she was 18, the time between when she realized her attraction to women and when she started telling others was “maybe 12 hours.”

Blaine Edens told her parents in 2013, when she was 22, sharing the news with her father in Arizona and her mother in Montana. They each said, “Yeah, we know. We’re sad it took you this long,” she said.

For too many artists and writers to count, being gay infused their work with an outsider sensibility, even when they were not explicitly addressing those themes. Their private lives and identity gave them “a cunning and sophisticated way of looking at the world and questioning its normative notions,” said Todd Haynes, the director of “Far From Heaven” and the coming film “Carol,” based on the lesbian romance novel “The Price of Salt,” by Patricia Highsmith.

Curators and art critics said they could not name a recent work about sexual orientation with the impact of Robert Mapplethorpe’s provocative portraits from decades ago — or that of Kara Walker’s gigantic 2014 sugar sculpture, a commentary on black women, plantations and whiteness, among other themes. In theater, playwrights say there will never be another “The Normal Heart,” Larry Kramer’s 1985 cri de coeur about AIDS, or “Angels in America,” Tony Kushner’s 1991 saga about the same topic. On many television shows, gay themes and humor are integrated seamlessly, almost casually, as on “Orange is the New Black” and “Broad City.”

Many gay artists, politicians and celebrities say they prefer life with fewer labels, that they enjoy the freedom of not being put into an identity-politics box or expected to behave a certain way. They “don’t feel the responsibility to speak for a community,” Dean Daderko, curator of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, said in a telephone interview.

When Pete Buttegieg, 33, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., told constituents that he was gay in an op-ed article this month, he emphasized that sexual orientation was “just a part of who I am,” along with being a naval reservist and a businessman. His article echoed the one in which Tim Cook, 54, the chief executive of Apple, came out last year. “I’m an engineer, an uncle, a nature lover, a fitness nut, a son of the South, a sports fanatic and many other things,” Mr. Cook said.

For decades, the cartoonist Alison Bechdel thrived on the edges of the publishing world, turning her comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For” into a sociology of lesbian life, its title a joke about supposed menace. Now “Fun Home,” which is based on her memoir, is a Broadway hit and winner of the Best Musical Tony. Theatergoers identify with its themes “without any mediating feeling of ‘now I’m watching this lesbian character,’ ” Ms. Kron said. “Sometimes I look at the audience and think, ‘Are there any gay people here?’ ”

There are. Beth Malone, who plays the adult Alison, said in an interview that young women sometimes waited for her at the stage door and whispered their plans for coming out, even with an unknowing parent standing a few feet away. This is why gay culture is unlikely to disappear: because there will always be young people discovering they are different from their families, several historians and sociologists said.

They also said that gay culture had a natural successor to which it is bequeathing its boundary-breaking qualities: queer culture, which questions rigid categories like male and female and gay and straight. Over the years, the relationship between the more established gay world and those who consider themselves transgender or queer has been strained at times. Some lesbians accuse transgender men of abandoning feminism, and some people who identify themselves as transgender or queer see gay men and women as too conformist.

Now one may be enabling the other, the societal discussion moving from “Is it O.K. for a man to marry a man?” to “Is gender as fixed as we assume?” In Northampton, Mass., a landmark lesbian community, the shift is visible on the streets. A generation ago, it was bracing to see lesbians with short haircuts strolling around, said Rachel Simmons, a writer and educator who came out in college. Recently, she recalled, she was jogging on the town bike path when a transgender man whipped by, shirt off, mastectomy scars revealed for all to see.

Meanwhile, in Provincetown, Mass., a longtime gay male summer capital, Mr. Sullivan continues to track what he has dubbed “the end of gay culture,” which he says erodes a little more each year. Lately, he said in an interview, he has noticed that the old gay bars have become popular sites for heterosexual bachelorette parties, the women showing up in sashes and white veils.

When they do, friends tease him about the consequences of the gay marriage fight he helped ignite. “See what you asked for?” they say.

A version of this news analysis appears in print on June 27, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Historic Day for Gay Rights, but a Twinge of Loss for Gay Culture.

Historic Day for Gays, but Twinge of Loss for an Outsider Culture,
NYT, JUNE 26, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/27/us/
scotus-same-sex-marriage-gay-culture.html

A Profound Ruling

Delivers Justice on Gay Marriage

JUNE 26, 2015

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

To the list of landmark Supreme Court decisions reaffirming the power and the scope of the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law — from Brown v. Board of Education to Loving v. Virginia to United States v. Windsor — we can now add Obergefell v. Hodges.

In a profound and inspiring opinion expanding human rights across America, and bridging the nation’s past to its present, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote: “The right to marry is a fundamental right inherent in the liberty of the person, and under the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment couples of the same sex may not be deprived of that right and that liberty.”

As news of the ruling came out on Friday morning, opponents of same-sex marriage struggled to fathom how the country they thought they understood could so rapidly pass them by. But, in fact, the court’s decision fits comfortably within the arc of American legal history.

As Justice Kennedy explained, the Constitution’s power and endurance rest in the Constitution’s ability to evolve along with the nation’s consciousness. In that service, the court itself “has recognized that new insights and societal understandings can reveal unjustified inequality within our most fundamental institutions that once passed unnoticed and unchallenged.”

For gays and lesbians who have waited so long for the court to recognize their relationships as equal to opposite-sex relationships, it was a remember-where-you-were-when-it-happened moment.

Addressing what he called “the transcendent importance of marriage,” Justice Kennedy wrote that “through its enduring bond, two persons together can find other freedoms, such as expression, intimacy, and spirituality. This is true for all persons, whatever their sexual orientation. There is dignity in the bond between two men or two women who seek to marry and in their autonomy to make such profound choices.”

Justice Kennedy’s focus on dignity and equality has been central to his majority opinion in each of the court’s three earlier gay rights cases. In 1996, the court held that states cannot deny gays, lesbians and bisexual people legal protection from discrimination. In 2003, it held that states cannot ban consensual sexual relations between people of the same sex. And in 2013, it struck down the heart of a federal law defining marriage as between one man and one woman.

In Friday’s ruling, Justice Kennedy emphasized the dignity and equality not only of same-sex couples, but of their families and children. “Without the recognition, stability, and predictability marriage offers,” he wrote, the children of these couples “suffer the stigma of knowing their families are somehow lesser.”

President Obama, who opposed same-sex marriage in his first presidential campaign but announced in 2012 that he had changed his mind, said the decision “affirms what millions of Americans already believe in their hearts: When all Americans are treated as equal, we are all more free.”

And yet, in the midst of all the hard-earned jubilation surrounding the decision, it was difficult not to think of the people who did not live to see this day.

People like John Arthur, who died in October 2013, only months after he married his partner of more than 20 years, Jim Obergefell, on the tarmac of Baltimore-Washington International Airport. They lived in Cincinnati, but Ohio would not let them marry; voters there had passed a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage in 2004. As Mr. Arthur lay on a stretcher, dying of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, he and Mr. Obergefell took a private medical jet to Maryland, where same-sex marriage is legal. They were married in a brief ceremony and then flew home.

When Ohio officials refused to put Mr. Obergefell’s name on his husband’s death certificate, he sued. Last November, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled against him and other couples challenging bans in Michigan, Kentucky and Tennessee. Same-sex marriage, the court said, is a “social issue” for voters, and not the courts, to decide. Friday’s decision reversed that ruling.

The humane grandeur of the majority’s opinion stands out all the more starkly in contrast to the bitter, mocking small-mindedness of the dissents, one each by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito Jr. and Antonin Scalia.

Faced with a simple statement of human equality, the dissenters groped and scratched for a way to reject it.

The chief justice compared the ruling to some of the most notorious decisions in the court’s history, including Dred Scott v. Sandford, the 1857 ruling holding that black people could not be American citizens and that Congress could not outlaw slavery in the territories; and Lochner v. New York, a 1905 case that is widely rejected today as an example of justices imposing their own preferences in place of the law.

He invoked the traditional understanding of marriage, which he ascribed to, among others, Kalahari bushmen, the Carthaginians and the Aztecs. But Justice Kennedy had a ready reply: “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.”

Justice Scalia mocked the ruling as a “judicial Putsch” and a threat to American democracy. “This is a naked judicial claim to legislative — indeed, super-legislative — power,” he wrote. “A system of government that makes the people subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers does not deserve to be called a democracy.”

But that rant is wholly wrong. In American democracy, the judicial branch is the great bulwark against a majority’s refusal to recognize a minority’s fundamental constitutional rights. As Justice Kennedy wrote, “An individual can invoke a right to constitutional protection when he or she is harmed, even if the broader public disagrees and even if the legislature refuses to act.”

And within minutes of the ruling, there was resistance by some officials around the country. Louisiana’s attorney general, James Caldwell, said his state, one of 13 that still bans same-sex marriage, is not required to issue licenses to same-sex couples because the Supreme Court has not yet released an explicit order. Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, a Republican presidential candidate, called for a constitutional amendment allowing states to ban same-sex marriage.

Meanwhile, the dwindling number of Americans who oppose same-sex marriage have shifted tactics to rely on so-called religious-freedom laws, which they say allow them to, among other things, decline to provide business services for same-sex weddings.

Justice Kennedy said that Americans who disagree with same-sex marriage, for religious or other reasons, have the freedom to believe and to speak as they wish. “But when that sincere, personal opposition becomes enacted law and public policy, the necessary consequence is to put the imprimatur of the state itself on an exclusion that soon demeans or stigmatizes those whose own liberty is then denied.”

Still, the court did not give sexual orientation a special status, like race or gender, which would provide stronger protection against discriminatory laws.

More than four decades ago, a male couple in Hennepin County, Minn., applied for a marriage license and was denied. When their lawsuit reached the Supreme Court, the justices dismissed it “for want of a substantial federal question.”

In the years since, Americans’ attitudes toward gays and lesbians and the right to marry have changed dramatically. Before Friday’s ruling, same-sex marriage was already legal in 36 states and the District of Columbia, representing more than 70 percent of all Americans. A solid and growing majority now believes in marriage equality; among those ages 18 to 29, support is at nearly 80 percent.

Around the world the change has come even faster. Since 2000, 20 countries — from Argentina to Belgium to South Africa — have legalized same-sex marriage. In May, an Irish referendum on legalization won the support of nearly two-thirds of voters.

Justice Kennedy’s opinion will affect the course of American history, and it will change lives starting now.
 

A version of this editorial appears in print on June 27, 2015,
on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Marriage Equality in America.

A Profound Ruling Delivers Justice on Gay Marriage,
NYT, JUNE 26, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/27/opinion/
a-profound-ruling-delivers-justice-on-gay-marriage.html

Supreme Court Ruling

Makes Same-Sex Marriage

a Right Nationwide

 

JUNE 26, 2015

The New York Times

By ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON — In a long-sought victory for the gay rights movement, the Supreme Court ruled by a 5-to-4 vote on Friday that the Constitution guarantees a right to same-sex marriage.

“No longer may this liberty be denied,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority in the historic decision. “No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were.”

Marriage is a “keystone of our social order,” Justice Kennedy said, adding that the plaintiffs in the case were seeking “equal dignity in the eyes of the law.”

The decision, which was the culmination of decades of litigation and activism, set off jubilation and tearful embraces across the country, the first same-sex marriages in several states, and resistance — or at least stalling — in others. It came against the backdrop of fast-moving changes in public opinion, with polls indicating that most Americans now approve of the unions.

The court’s four more liberal justices joined Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion. Each member of the court’s conservative wing filed a separate dissent, in tones ranging from resigned dismay to bitter scorn.

In dissent, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said the Constitution had nothing to say on the subject of same-sex marriage.

“If you are among the many Americans — of whatever sexual orientation — who favor expanding same-sex marriage, by all means celebrate today’s decision,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. “Celebrate the achievement of a desired goal. Celebrate the opportunity for a new expression of commitment to a partner. Celebrate the availability of new benefits. But do not celebrate the Constitution. It had nothing to do with it.”

In a second dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia mocked the soaring language of Justice Kennedy, who has become the nation’s most important judicial champion of gay rights.

“The opinion is couched in a style that is as pretentious as its content is egotistic,” Justice Scalia wrote of his colleague’s work. “Of course the opinion’s showy profundities are often profoundly incoherent.”

Thousands, including parents, babies and dogs, flocked to the Supreme Court after its ruling on same-sex marriage. Supporters spoke about how they thought the ruling helped maintain and support families. By Channon Hodge on Publish Date June 26, 2015. Photo by Albert Cesare/The Montgomery Advertiser, via Associated Press.

As Justice Kennedy finished announcing his opinion from the bench on Friday, several lawyers seated in the bar section of the court’s gallery wiped away tears, while others grinned and exchanged embraces.

Justice John Paul Stevens, who retired in 2010, was on hand for the decision, and many of the justices’ clerks took seats in the chamber, which was nearly full as the ruling was announced. The decision made same-sex marriage a reality in the 13 states that had continued to ban it.

Outside the Supreme Court, the police allowed hundreds of people waving rainbow flags and holding signs to advance onto the court plaza as those present for the decision streamed down the steps. “Love has won,” the crowd chanted as courtroom witnesses threw up their arms in victory.

In remarks in the Rose Garden, President Obama welcomed the decision, saying it “affirms what millions of Americans already believe in their hearts.”

“Today,” he said, “we can say, in no uncertain terms, that we have made our union a little more perfect.”

Justice Kennedy was the author of all three of the Supreme Court’s previous gay rights landmarks. The latest decision came exactly two years after his majority opinion in United States v. Windsor, which struck down a federal law denying benefits to married same-sex couples, and exactly 12 years after his majority opinion in Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down laws making gay sex a crime.

In all of those decisions, Justice Kennedy embraced a vision of a living Constitution, one that evolves with societal changes.

“The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times,” he wrote on Friday. “The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions, and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning.”

This drew a withering response from Justice Scalia, a proponent of reading the Constitution according to the original understanding of those who adopted it. His dissent was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas.

“They have discovered in the Fourteenth Amendment,” Justice Scalia wrote of the majority, “a ‘fundamental right’ overlooked by every person alive at the time of ratification, and almost everyone else in the time since.”

“These justices know,” Justice Scalia said, “that limiting marriage to one man and one woman is contrary to reason; they know that an institution as old as government itself, and accepted by every nation in history until 15 years ago, cannot possibly be supported by anything other than ignorance or bigotry.”

Justice Kennedy rooted the ruling in a fundamental right to marriage. Of special importance to couples, he said, is raising children.

“Without the recognition, stability and predictability marriage offers,” he wrote, “their children suffer the stigma of knowing their families are somehow lesser. They also suffer the significant material costs of being raised by unmarried parents, relegated through no fault of their own to a more difficult and uncertain family life. The marriage laws at issue here thus harm and humiliate the children of same-sex couples.”

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined the majority opinion.

In dissent, Chief Justice Roberts said the majority opinion was “an act of will, not legal judgment.”

“The court invalidates the marriage laws of more than half the states and orders the transformation of a social institution that has formed the basis of human society for millennia, for the Kalahari Bushmen and the Han Chinese, the Carthaginians and the Aztecs,” he wrote. “Just who do we think we are?”

The majority and dissenting opinions took differing views about whether the decision would harm religious liberty. Justice Kennedy said the First Amendment “ensures that religious organizations and persons are given proper protection as they seek to teach the principles that are so fulfilling and so central to their lives and faiths.” He said both sides should engage in “an open and searching debate.”

Chief Justice Roberts responded that “people of faith can take no comfort in the treatment they receive from the majority today.”

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., in his dissent, saw a broader threat from the majority opinion. “It will be used to vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy,” Justice Alito wrote. “In the course of its opinion, the majority compares traditional marriage laws to laws that denied equal treatment for African-Americans and women. The implications of this analogy will be exploited by those who are determined to stamp out every vestige of dissent.”

Gay rights advocates had constructed a careful litigation and public relations strategy to build momentum and bring the issue to the Supreme Court when it appeared ready to rule in their favor. As in earlier civil rights cases, the court had responded cautiously and methodically, laying judicial groundwork for a transformative decision.

It waited for scores of lower courts to strike down bans on same-sex marriages before addressing the issue, and Justice Kennedy took the unusual step of listing those decisions in an appendix to his opinion.

Chief Justice Roberts said that only 11 states and the District of Columbia had embraced the right to same-sex marriage democratically, at voting booths and in legislatures. The rest of the 37 states that allow such unions did so because of court rulings. Gay rights advocates, the chief justice wrote, would have been better off with a victory achieved through the political process, particularly “when the winds of change were freshening at their backs.”

In his own dissent, Justice Scalia took a similar view, saying that the majority’s assertiveness represented a “threat to American democracy.”

But Justice Kennedy rejected that idea. “It is of no moment whether advocates of same-sex marriage now enjoy or lack momentum in the democratic process,” he wrote. “The issue before the court here is the legal question whether the Constitution protects the right of same-sex couples to marry.”

Later in the opinion, Justice Kennedy answered the question. “The Constitution,” he wrote, “grants them that right.”

Correction: June 26, 2015

An earlier version of this article misstated the time period since Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote the majority opinion in Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down laws making gay sex a crime. It is 12 years, not 10.

Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Nicholas Fandos contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on June 27, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘Equal Dignity’.

Supreme Court Ruling Makes Same-Sex Marriage a Right Nationwide,
NYT, JUNE 26, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/27/us/
supreme-court-same-sex-marriage.html

Gay Marriage’s Moment

JUNE 20, 2015

The New York Times

SundayReview | Op-Ed Columnist

Frank Bruni
 

REMEMBER the AIDS crisis? If you lived in a big American city during its spread, you were witness to constant sorrow and countless examples of gay people treated as second-class citizens.

One was almost certainly this: the steadfast, heartbroken man being shut out of his beloved’s final weeks — not allowed in the hospital room, not welcomed at the grave — because some family members disapproved and no law trumped their bigotry.

This was a recurring story, an infuriating leitmotif, and many gays and our allies remarked and railed that it wouldn’t be happening if committed same-sex relationships got the legal recognition that heterosexual ones did.

Sometimes we even used the word “marriage.”

That was 30 years ago.

Now we stand nervously and hopefully on the brink of a milestone. Before the end of June, a month associated with wedding bells and wedding cake, the Supreme Court will issue a major decision about the right of two men or two women to exchange vows in a manner honored by the government. It may well extend same-sex marriage to all 50 states, making it the law of the land.

Many Americans still oppose that. And some will argue, as they routinely do, that it has been forced on them much too quickly and that history can’t be rewritten in an instant.

Too quickly? An instant?

Nothing about this juncture feels quick if you soldiered through AIDS and the country’s awakening then to just how many gay, lesbian and bisexual Americans there are, just how profound our bonds can be, just how fiercely we’re willing to fight for them, just how ardently we ache to be included.

Nothing about it feels quick if you consider that Evan Wolfson, a chief architect of the political quest for same-sex marriage, wrote a thesis on the topic at Harvard Law School in 1983, or if you remember how passionately the issue of same-sex marriage was debated in the 1990s, when the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, was passed.

Nothing about it feels quick if you’re among or you know gay and lesbian Americans who, in a swelling tide, summoned the grit and honed the words to tell family members, friends and co-workers the truth of our lives. Our candor came from more than personal need. It reflected our yearning for a world beyond silence and fear, and we knew that the only way to get there was through these small, aggregate acts of courage.

Same-sex marriage isn’t some overnight cause, some progressive novelty, especially not when it’s put in its proper context, as part of a struggle for gay rights that has been plenty long, patient and painful.

Yes, the dominoes of marriage equality in individual states have tumbled with a surprising velocity. My first Op-Ed column, in June 2011, noted that New York had just become the sixth state in the country to legalize same-sex marriage. The count today is 37 states and Washington, D.C. I’m amazed at this still.

And I marvel that just over two years ago, Hillary Clinton hadn’t yet spoken up for marriage equality, which is now such a given among Democrats that they characterize Republicans’ resistance to it as damnably backward and baldly uncivilized. That’s an enormous change.

But it’s not so dizzying or difficult to comprehend when you think about the simple logic behind same-sex marriage: You can’t relegate the commitments and loves of an entire group of Americans to a different category, marked by a little pink asterisk, without saying that we ourselves don’t measure up. You can’t tell us that you consider us equal and then put perhaps the central, most important relationship in our lives in an unequal box. It’s a non sequitur and a nonstarter.

A Supreme Court judgment for marriage equality wouldn’t be a rash swerve into uncharted terrain. It would merely be a continuation of the journey of gay Americans — of all Americans — across familiar land, in the direction of justice. It would be a stride toward the top of the hill.

And the first steps go back much further than 2011, than DOMA, than AIDS, even than the Stonewall riots of 1969.

Next month, in fact, is the 50th anniversary of the first “annual reminder,” a picket in Philadelphia for gay civil rights. It commenced on July 4, 1965, with just a few dozen gays and lesbians, and occurred yearly through July 4, 1969, as “Gay Pioneers,” a short 2004 documentary, eloquently chronicles.

Three newer documentaries also underscore the sweat and tears that preceded the present moment. PBS just posted on its website “Limited Partnership,” the story of a committed gay couple’s efforts, starting in the 1970s, to prevent United States immigration officials from deporting one of them. On Monday, Yahoo Screen will introduce “Uniquely Nasty: The U.S. Government’s War on Gays,” which rewinds to the 1950s.

And a week later, HBO will begin showing “Larry Kramer: In Love & Anger,” about the irrepressible AIDS activist who wrote — and lived — “The Normal Heart.” Watch it. I can’t predict your response to Kramer’s dudgeon and decibel level, but I can guarantee that you won’t ever again regard the forward march of L.G.B.T. Americans as easy or trendy or fleet.

Alfred Kinsey told Americans in the late 1940s just how common same-sex activity was. The Mattachine Society, one of the earliest gay rights groups, appeared in 1950, in Los Angeles. The Daughters of Bilitis, a lesbian political organization, appeared in 1955, in San Francisco.

From those seeds, the legalization of same-sex marriage flowered, and no shortage of harsh winters intervened.

There have been ruined careers, scuttled adoptions, sanitized obituaries. There have been millions of same-sex couples who were married in the eyes of each other, of everyone around them and of any truly righteous god, and they waited and waited for the government to catch up.

Ask Jim Obergefell. His is one of the cases that the Supreme Court is about to decide. He sued Ohio to have his name added as a surviving spouse on the death certificate of his husband, who died in 2013. It wasn’t just a few years before then that they began making their life together. It was two decades earlier.

Ask Edie Windsor. Her protest of the estate taxes that she was ordered to pay — but that a widow with a dead husband instead of a dead wife would have been spared — prompted the Supreme Court to gut DOMA two years ago.

She was married in Canada in 2007. When her wife first proposed to her, she gave Windsor a brooch instead of a ring, so that the diamond didn’t prompt questions from co-workers.

That was in 1967: nearly half a century ago. So don’t tell her that the idea of same-sex marriage needs more time to ripen.
 

I invite you to visit my blog, follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/frankbruni and join me on Facebook.

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A version of this op-ed appears in print on June 21, 2015, on page SR3 of the New York edition with the headline: Gay Marriage’s Moment.

Gay Marriage’s Moment, NYT, JUNE 20, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/opinion/sunday/
frank-bruni-gay-marriages-moment.html

Bigotry, the Bible

and the Lessons of Indiana

APRIL 3, 2015

The New York Times

SundayReview | Op-Ed Columnist

Frank Bruni

THE drama in Indiana last week and the larger debate over so-called religious freedom laws in other states portray homosexuality and devout Christianity as forces in fierce collision.

They’re not — at least not in several prominent denominations, which have come to a new understanding of what the Bible does and doesn’t decree, of what people can and cannot divine in regard to God’s will.

And homosexuality and Christianity don’t have to be in conflict in any church anywhere.

That many Christians regard them as incompatible is understandable, an example not so much of hatred’s pull as of tradition’s sway. Beliefs ossified over centuries aren’t easily shaken.

But in the end, the continued view of gays, lesbians and bisexuals as sinners is a decision. It’s a choice. It prioritizes scattered passages of ancient texts over all that has been learned since — as if time had stood still, as if the advances of science and knowledge meant nothing.

It disregards the degree to which all writings reflect the biases and blind spots of their authors, cultures and eras.

It ignores the extent to which interpretation is subjective, debatable.

And it elevates unthinking obeisance above intelligent observance, above the evidence in front of you, because to look honestly at gay, lesbian and bisexual people is to see that we’re the same magnificent riddles as everyone else: no more or less flawed, no more or less dignified.

Most parents of gay children realize this. So do most children of gay parents. It’s a truth less ambiguous than any Scripture, less complicated than any creed.

So our debate about religious freedom should include a conversation about freeing religions and religious people from prejudices that they needn’t cling to and can indeed jettison, much as they’ve jettisoned other aspects of their faith’s history, rightly bowing to the enlightenments of modernity.

“Human understanding of what is sinful has changed over time,” said David Gushee, an evangelical Christian who teaches Christian ethics at Mercer University. He openly challenges his faith’s censure of same-sex relationships, to which he no longer subscribes.

For a very long time, he noted, “Many Christians thought slavery wasn’t sinful, until we finally concluded that it was. People thought contraception was sinful when it began to be developed, and now very few Protestants and not that many Catholics would say that.” They hold an evolved sense of right and wrong, even though, he added, “You could find scriptural support for the idea that all sex should be procreative.”

Christians have also moved far beyond Scripture when it comes to gender roles.

“In the United States, we have abandoned the idea that women are second-class, inferior and subordinate to men, but the Bible clearly teaches that,” said Jimmy Creech, a former United Methodist pastor who was removed from ministry in the church after he performed a same-sex marriage ceremony in 1999. “We have said: That’s a part of the culture and history of the Bible. That is not appropriate for us today.”

And we could say the same about the idea that men and women in loving same-sex relationships are doing something wrong. In fact the United Church of Christ, the Episcopal Church and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) have said that. So have most American Catholics, in defiance of their church’s teaching.

And it’s a vital message because of something that Indiana demonstrated anew: Religion is going to be the final holdout and most stubborn refuge for homophobia. It will give license to discrimination. It will cause gay and lesbian teenagers in fundamentalist households to agonize needlessly: Am I broken? Am I damned?

“Conservative Christian religion is the last bulwark against full acceptance of L.G.B.T. people,” Gushee said.

Polls back him up. A majority of Americans support marriage equality, including a majority of Catholics and most Jews. But a 2014 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute showed that while 62 percent of white mainline Protestants favor same-sex marriages, only 38 percent of black Protestants, 35 percent of Hispanic Protestants and 28 percent of white evangelical Protestants do.

And as I’ve written before, these evangelical Protestants wield considerable power in the Republican primaries, thus speaking in a loud voice on the political stage. It’s no accident that none of the most prominent Republicans believed to be contending for the presidency favor same-sex marriage and that none of them joined the broad chorus of outrage over Indiana’s discriminatory religious freedom law. They had the Iowa caucuses and the South Carolina primary to worry about.

Could this change? There’s a rapidly growing body of impressive, persuasive literature that looks at the very traditions and texts that inform many Christians’ denunciation of same-sex relationships and demonstrates how easily those points of reference can be understood in a different way.

Gushee’s take on the topic, “Changing Our Mind,” was published late last year. It joined Jeff Chu’s “Does Jesus Really Love Me?” published in 2013, and “Bible, Gender, Sexuality: Reframing the Church’s Debate on Same-Sex Relationships,” by James Brownson, which was published in 2013.

Then there’s the 2014 book “God and the Gay Christian,” by Matthew Vines, who has garnered significant attention and drawn large audiences for his eloquent take on what the New Testament — which is what evangelicals draw on and point to — really communicates.

Evaluating its sparse invocations of homosexuality, he notes that there wasn’t any awareness back then that same-sex attraction could be a fundamental part of a person’s identity, or that same-sex intimacy could be an expression of love within the context of a nurturing relationship.

“It was understood as a kind of excess, like drunkenness, that a person might engage in if they lost all control, not as a unique identity,” Vines told me, adding that Paul’s rejection of same-sex relations in Romans I was “akin to his rejection of drunkenness or his rejection of gluttony.”

And Vines said that the New Testament, like the Old Testament, outlines bad and good behaviors that almost everyone deems archaic and irrelevant today. Why deem the descriptions of homosexual behavior any differently?

Creech and Mitchell Gold, a prominent furniture maker and gay philanthropist, founded an advocacy group, Faith in America, which aims to mitigate the damage done to L.G.B.T. people by what it calls “religion-based bigotry.”

Gold told me that church leaders must be made “to take homosexuality off the sin list.”

His commandment is worthy — and warranted. All of us, no matter our religious traditions, should know better than to tell gay people that they’re an offense. And that’s precisely what the florists and bakers who want to turn them away are saying to them.

I invite you to visit my blog, follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/frankbruni and join me on Facebook.

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A version of this op-ed appears in print on April 5, 2015, on page SR3 of the New York edition with the headline: Same-Sex Sinners?.

Bigotry, the Bible and the Lessons of Indiana,
NYT, APRIL 3, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/frank-bruni-same-sex-sinners.html

Judge Defies Gay Marriage Law

 

FEB. 8, 2015

The New York Times

By ALAN BLINDER

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — In a dramatic show of defiance toward the federal judiciary, Chief Justice Roy S. Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court on Sunday night ordered the state’s probate judges not to issue marriage licenses to gay couples on Monday, the day same-sex marriages were expected to begin here.

“Effective immediately, no probate judge of the State of Alabama nor any agent or employee of any Alabama probate judge shall issue or recognize a marriage license that is inconsistent” with the Alabama Constitution or state law, the chief justice wrote in his order.

The order, coming just hours before the January decisions of United States District Court Judge Callie V. S. Granade were scheduled to take effect, was almost certainly going to thrust this state into legal turmoil. It was not immediately clear how the state’s 68 probate judges, who, like Chief Justice Moore, are popularly elected, would respond to the order.

Since Judge Granade moved last month to declare Alabama’s prohibitions against same-sex marriage unconstitutional, the chief justice has insisted that the probate judges were not required to abide by her decisions. But, in an interview on Wednesday, he said he thought he could do little more than guide the probate judges on how to respond.

“I think I’ve done what I can do: advise the state court probate judges that they’re not bound by any ruling of the Federal District Court,” he said.

But by Sunday night, the chief justice, faced with the prospect of many judges allowing same-sex marriages to move forward, acted, in part, “to ensure the orderly administration of justice within the State of Alabama.”

Reached by telephone late Sunday night, Ben Cooper, chairman of the board of the gay rights group Equality Alabama, said that same-sex couples expected to be issued marriage licenses Monday morning.

“We are continuing to move forward tomorrow,” Mr. Cooper said. “If we walk in and licenses are refused, if they do not comply with the federal order, then these probate judges could be personally liable,” said Mr. Cooper, who added that he expected legal actions to be filed against the individual probate judges if they do not issue the licenses.

Some judges across the state had already signaled they would do nothing to aid gay couples and, in some instances, any couples. “Marriage licenses and ceremonies are no longer available at the Pike County Probate Office,” the office said.

And Washington County Probate Judge Nick Williams released a “declaration in support of marriage” in which he said he would “only issue marriage licenses and solemnize ceremonies consistent with Alabama law and the U.S. Constitution; namely, between one man and one woman only, so help me God.”

Several judges elsewhere announced variations of those plans after a push by Chief Justice Moore, who rose to national prominence in the early 2000s when he defied a federal judge’s order to remove a Ten Commandments monument from a Montgomery building and was subsequently ousted from his post leading the high court. He staged a political comeback, became chief justice again in 2013, and has in recent weeks said that Alabama’s probate judges are not bound by a federal trial court’s decisions. His argument has deep resonance in a place where a governor, George Wallace, stood in a doorway of the University of Alabama in 1963 in an unsuccessful bid to block its federally ordered integration.

Although much has changed from Wallace’s era, Chief Justice Moore had used a series of strongly worded letters and memorandums to insist that Judge Granade, an appointee of President George W. Bush who joined the federal bench in 2002, had instigated a grave breach of law.

The result had been a legal and cultural debate rife with overtones of history, closely held religious beliefs and a chronically bubbling mistrust of the federal government that was expected to play out at Alabama’s courthouses Monday.

“I didn’t start this,” Chief Justice Moore said last week of the controversy. “This was a federal court case pushed on our state.”

Judge Granade has signaled that she expects probate judges to carry out her decisions, and judges, before the chief justice’s order, had often said they would.

“With all due respect to Chief Justice Moore, he’s on the Alabama Supreme Court, and he’s not a federal judge,” said Alan L. King, a probate judge in Jefferson County, said last week.

The chief justice’s misgivings speak to widespread concerns here about federal overreach and same-sex marriage in Alabama, where about 81 percent of voters in 2006 supported a constitutional amendment banning gay nuptials. Few here doubt the force of his belief that Judge Granade’s orders hold only “persuasive authority,” and not binding power, on Alabama judges.

“My guess is that is actually the way Roy Moore sincerely understands the federal-state relationship,” said Joseph Smith, a judicial politics expert at the University of Alabama. “He’s also an elected politician, and he knows who his constituency is.”

So he has for now turned his words against Judge Granade.

“She can’t order them to recognize the unconstitutionality of the Sanctity of Marriage Amendment by her views,” the chief justice said in a telephone interview during which he quoted Alabama statutes verbatim and resisted comparisons to Wallace.

Despite Chief Justice Moore’s protests, some analysts see parallels between his arguments now and those Wallace advanced in his own time.

“It’s a very similar strain of ideology: the state’s rights, resisting the national tide, resisting liberal movements in policy,” Dr. Smith said.

Some legal scholars say that the chief justice may be correct in his interpretation of the immediate scope of the federal court’s rulings and how they apply to the probate judges. But his eagerness in pronouncing his views unnerved some in Alabama who feared that it might stir local judges to resist Judge Granade.

“I don’t want to see judges make the same mistakes that I think were made in this state 50 years ago, where you have state officials not abiding by federal orders,” said Judge Steven L. Reed of Montgomery County, who added, “The legacy always hangs over us until we show that we’re beyond it.”

But there had been only limited talk of plans for sweeping defiance by probate judges, including those who say that same-sex marriages conflict with their religious views. In Geneva County, Judge Fred Hamic said Wednesday he would issue licenses to gay couples but that they would have to go somewhere else to wed. “I believe I would be partaking in a sin, and I sin every day, don’t get me wrong,” he said. “This is one sin I do not have to participate in, not that you have to participate in any sin.”

For many here, it is unsurprising that Chief Justice Moore emerged as a strident voice in a social debate after the dispute about the Ten Commandments display, known as “Roy’s Rock,” forced him from power.

“Unfortunately, sometimes it makes for very good politics here to be seen as opposing federal intervention, whether it’s from a court or a federal agency,” said David G. Kennedy, who represents two women involved in a case that prompted Judge Granade’s decision. “The situation here is that this is not federal intervention. It’s not federal intervention at all. What it is, is a federal court declaring what same-sex couples’ rights are under the federal Constitution.”
 

Richard Fausset contributed reporting from Montgomery, Ala.

A version of this article appears in print on February 9, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Judge Defies Gay Marriage Law.

Judge Defies Gay Marriage Law,
FEB 8, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/09/us/gay-marriage-set-to-begin-in-alabama-amid-protest.html

One Couple’s Unanticipated Journey

to Center of Landmark Gay Rights Case

JAN. 24, 2015

The New York Times

By JULIE BOSMAN

HAZEL PARK, Mich. — On a snowy night in 2011, April DeBoer, Jayne Rowse and their three children were driving in their minivan down a rural road when a truck, attempting to pass another vehicle, came barreling toward them.

“At the last second, he swerved off the road and veered into a field,” Ms. DeBoer recalled. “I don’t think Jayne and I would have survived the impact. It was that moment, that realization, that we needed to get things in order.”

They figured they could draw up wills and assign custody of their children during a quick meeting with a lawyer. Instead, they are headed to the United States Supreme Court.

After talking to a lawyer in Detroit, Ms. Rowse and Ms. DeBoer were stunned to discover that, as a gay couple living in Michigan, they were unprotected under the law: Michigan does not allow two unmarried people to jointly adopt a child, so their children were technically adopted by a single parent, either Ms. Rowse, 50, or Ms. DeBoer, 43. Each parent legally had no claim to the children her partner had legally adopted.

If either parent died, they realized, the survivor would not just face the devastation of losing a loved one. A judge could easily order any child adopted by a deceased parent to live with a distant relative or in foster care. The survivor would face the disintegration of the couple’s family.

“It was scary,” Ms. DeBoer said. “All along we thought we could protect our children, and we couldn’t.”

On Jan. 16, the Supreme Court agreed to hear their federal lawsuit challenging Michigan’s ban on same-sex marriage, as well as cases brought by couples in Ohio, Tennessee and Kentucky. The court is expected to decide by June whether all 50 states must allow gays and lesbians to marry.

Its ruling will come on the heels of Supreme Court victories for supporters of same-sex marriage. Last fall, the court let stand appeals court rulings that allowed same-sex unions in five states, and in 2013, a landmark decision on same-sex marriage, United States v. Windsor, struck down a section of the Defense of Marriage Act that banned federal benefits for same-sex couples who were married in states that allowed the unions.

Days after they received word that the Supreme Court would hear their case, they were still marveling at the twists and turns that had gotten them there.

The couple met in 1999 through mutual friends. Ms. DeBoer had just endured a bruising divorce — asked how many years she was married, she said, “Too many years” — and had not come out to her family and friends. Ms. Rowse and Ms. DeBoer began attending nursing school around the same time, encouraging each other through the grueling work, and dating off and on.

After they finally became a couple, they celebrated their union in 2008 with a commitment ceremony attended by some 30 relatives and friends. And they tentatively spoke of their wishes to be parents. “We talked more about starting a family and having kids,” Ms. DeBoer said, “with the possibility of maybe someday we’d be able to get married.”

They first tried to conceive naturally, with the help of a sperm donor, and it worked: Ms. DeBoer became pregnant with triplets. But joy turned to despair when she had a miscarriage, losing all three babies in the first trimester.

After that, they moved to adoption. “It was too much,” Ms. DeBoer said. “I couldn’t go through the physical or emotional stuff again.”

They have adopted four children. On paper, Ms. Rowse adopted Nolan, 6, and Jacob, 5; Rylee, 2, and Ryanne, 4, legally belong to Ms. DeBoer. Two of the children have developmental disabilities and require special care.

One morning last week, their sunny living room was packed with the furniture of family life. A portable crib was set up near the fireplace, picture books were scattered on the floor and a dog snoozed in the corner.

Until a few years ago, the couple were too busy managing their lives and their children to get too involved in the debate in the United States over gay rights.

“We belonged to one gay and lesbian parent group,” Ms. Rowse said as Rylee wriggled onto her lap. “That’s it.”

Their close call with the truck that day in 2011 led them to a lawyer, Dana Nessel, who advised them that she could draw up guardianship papers, but that they would be nearly worthless legally. She urged them instead to file a federal lawsuit challenging the adoption law in Michigan. When Ms. Nessel, a co-counsel for the family, went to gay rights groups asking for their support, they all declined, telling her that she would lose the case.

“None of the organizations were interested in doing challenges of this sort,” Ms. Nessel said. “But I thought their story was so compelling. And I thought the adoption code was appalling and needed to be rectified.”

Undeterred, they filed a lawsuit and went before a United States District Court judge, Bernard A. Friedman, a Reagan nominee who in 2001 had ruled that the University of Michigan Law School’s affirmative action policies were unconstitutional.

In Judge Friedman’s courtroom that day in 2012, he suggested that Ms. DeBoer and Ms. Rowse radically change course. Amend your claim to take on Michigan’s law banning same-sex marriage, he said, referring to the measure that voters approved in 2004.

“We felt the judge’s implication was clear — either amend the proceedings to challenge the marriage ban, or the entire case could be dismissed,” Ms. Nessel said, recalling her shock. “April and Jayne, as much as they wanted to get married and adopt their kids, never set out to challenge the marriage ban.”

After a two-week trial last March, Judge Friedman ruled in their favor, setting off a brief window of time when more than 300 gay and lesbian couples were married in Michigan.

Ms. Rowse and Ms. DeBoer were not among them. They wanted to wait until the law was perfectly clear and every same-sex couple in Michigan had the right to be married. (The United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit overturned Judge Friedman’s ruling in November, halting same-sex marriages in Michigan and three other states.)

Lawyers for the state are expected to argue that decisions on same-sex marriages are best left to the popular vote and that children benefit from having parents in heterosexual relationships. But if the Supreme Court rules in Ms. Rowse and Ms. DeBoer’s favor, their wedding day may come soon.

They are nervously awaiting their trip to Washington — their first visit to the nation’s capital.

“I think that’s just going to be overwhelming, seeing the justices,” Ms. Rowse said. “We’re optimistic and hopeful that they’re going to be on the right side of history.”

One Couple’s Unanticipated Journey
to Center of Landmark Gay Rights Case,
JAN 24, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/25/us/one-couples-unanticipated-journey-to-center-of-landmark-gay-rights-case.html

Supreme Court

Set to Decide Marriage Rights

for Gay Couples Nationwide

 

JAN. 16, 2015

The New York Times

By ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to decide whether all 50 states must allow gay and lesbian couples to marry, positioning it to resolve one of the great civil rights questions in a generation before its current term ends in June.

The decision came just months after the justices ducked the issue, refusing in October to hear appeals from rulings allowing same-sex marriage in five states. That decision, which was considered a major surprise, delivered a tacit victory for gay rights, immediately expanding the number of states with same-sex marriage to 24, along with the District of Columbia, up from 19.

Largely as a consequence of the Supreme Court’s decision not to act, the number of states allowing same-sex marriage has since grown to 36, and more than 70 percent of Americans live in places where gay couples can marry.

The cases the Supreme Court agreed to hear on Friday were brought by some 15 same-sex couples in four states. The plaintiffs said they have a fundamental right to marry and to be treated as opposite-sex couples are, adding that bans they challenged demeaned their dignity, imposed countless practical difficulties and inflicted particular harm on their children.

The pace of change on same-sex marriage, in both popular opinion and in the courts, has no parallel in the nation’s history.

Gay rights advocates hailed the court’s move on Friday as one of the final steps in a decades-long journey toward equal treatment, and they expressed confidence they would prevail.

“We are finally within sight of the day when same-sex couples across the country will be able to share equally in the joys, protections and responsibilities of marriage,” said Jon W. Davidson, the legal director of Lambda Legal.

Supporters of traditional marriage said the Supreme Court now has a chance to return the issue to voters and legislators.

“Lower court judges have robbed millions of people of their voice and vote on society’s most fundamental relationship — marriage,” said Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, a conservative policy and lobbying group. “There is nothing in the Constitution that empowers the courts to silence the people and impose a nationwide redefinition of marriage.”

The Supreme Court’s lack of action in October and its last three major gay rights rulings suggest that the court will rule in favor of same-sex marriage. But the court also has a history of caution in this area.

It agreed once before to hear a constitutional challenge to a same-sex marriage ban, in 2012 in a case called Hollingsworth v. Perry that involved California’s Proposition 8. At the time, nine states and the District of Columbia allowed same-sex couples to marry.

When the court’s ruling arrived in June 2013, the justices ducked, with a majority saying that the case was not properly before them, and none of them expressing a view on the ultimate question of whether the Constitution requires states to allow same-sex marriage.

But a second decision the same day, in United States v. Windsor, provided the movement for same-sex marriage with what turned out to be a powerful tailwind. The decision struck down the part of the Defense of Marriage Act that barred federal benefits for same-sex couples married in states that allowed such unions.

The Windsor decision was based partly on federalism grounds, with Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s majority opinion stressing that state decisions on how to treat marriages deserved respect. But lower courts focused on other parts of his opinion, ones that emphasized the dignity of gay relationships and the harm that families of gay couples suffered from bans on same-sex marriage. In a remarkable and largely unbroken line of more than 40 decisions, state and federal courts relied on the Windsor decision to rule in favor of same-sex marriage.

The most important exception was a decision in November from a divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati. Writing for the majority, Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton said that voters and legislators, not judges, should decide the issue.

That decision created a split among the federal appeals courts, a criterion that the Supreme Court often looks to in deciding whether to hear a case. That criterion had been missing in October.

The Sixth Circuit’s decision upheld bans on same-sex marriage in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee. The Supreme Court agreed to hear petitions seeking review from plaintiffs challenging those bans in each state.

The court said it will hear two and a half hours of argument, probably in the last week of April. The first 90 minutes will be devoted to the question of whether the Constitution requires states “to license a marriage between two people of the same sex.”

The last hour will concern a question that will be moot if the answer to the first one is yes: whether states must “recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex when their marriage was lawfully licensed and performed out of state.”

The court consolidated the four petitions, not all of which had addressed both questions.

Two cases — Obergefell v. Hodges, No. 14-556, from Ohio, and Tanco v. Haslam, No. 14-562, from Tennessee — challenged state laws barring the recognition of same-sex marriages performed elsewhere.

“Ohio does not contest the validity of their out-of-state marriages,” the plaintiffs seeking to overturn the ban wrote in their brief seeking Supreme Court review. “It simply refuses to recognize them.”

State officials in Ohio had urged the justices to hear the case. “The present status quo is unsustainable,” they said. “The country deserves a nationwide answer to the question — one way or the other.”

Gov. Bill Haslam of Tennessee, a Republican, took a different approach from those of officials in the other states whose cases the Supreme Court agreed to decide. He did what litigants who have won in the lower court typically do: He urged the justices to decline to hear the case.

The Michigan case, DeBoer v. Snyder, No. 14-571, was brought by April DeBoer and Jayne Rowse, two nurses. They sued to challenge the state’s ban on same-sex marriage.

In urging the Supreme Court to hear their case, they asked the justices to do away with “the significant legal burdens and detriments imposed by denying marriage to same-sex couples, as well as the dignity and emotional well-being of the couples and any children they may have.”

Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican, joined the plaintiffs in urging the Supreme Court to hear the case.

The Kentucky case, Bourke v. Beshear, No. 14-574, was brought by two sets of plaintiffs. The first group included four same-sex couples who had married in other states and who sought recognition of their unions. The second group, two couples, sought the right to marry in Kentucky.

In his response to the petition in the Supreme Court, Gov. Steven L. Beshear, a Democrat, said he had a duty to enforce the state’s laws. But he agreed that the Supreme Court should settle the matter and “resolve the issues creating the legal chaos that has resulted since Windsor.”
 

A version of this article appears in print on January 17, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Justices to Decide Marriage Rights for Gay Couples.

Supreme Court Set to Decide Marriage Rights for Gay Couples Nationwide,
NYT, JAN 15, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/17/us/supreme-court-to-decide-whether-gays-nationwide-can-marry.html