A federal appeals court decision on gay marriage last week offers hope the country is on track to fully eliminate one of the great inequities of our time: the legal barriers to marriage equality.
The 9th District Court of Appeals decision, which struck down a California ban on same-sex marriage, is in many ways modest in scope and ambition.
It doesn’t claim a broad constitutional right to marriage. It doesn’t purport to extend to the whole country. And it hews closely to precedent, much of which, interestingly, was established in a U.S. Supreme Court case from Colorado.
Yet, it is a necessary brick in the pathway to equal marriage rights for gays and lesbians.
We share the ebullience of gay rights proponents who have celebrated the opinion from the three-judge panel.
U.S. Rep. Jared Polis, an openly gay lawmaker from Boulder, said the decision was “a victory for the cause of justice and the ideal that we are all created equal and are all equal before the law.”
The decision said a gay marriage ban approved by California voters in 2008 violates the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection clause.
Voters cannot “single out a disfavored group for unequal treatment and strip them, without a legitimate justification, of a right as important as the right to marry,” the decision said. It also leans heavily on a case from Colorado that sprang from a voter-approved, 1992 constitutional amendment. That measure prohibited adoption of local ordinances protecting against discrimination based on sexual orientation.
The Evans vs. Romer case landed in the Supreme Court, which held the state constitutional amendment violated equal protection rights.
The most recent decision said the issues in the Romer case, as it is known, are remarkably similar to those posed in the gay marriage ban.
Even more intriguing is that the Romer decision was written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, who could very likely be the swing vote on the California case if it makes it to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The story of the nation’s seesawing gay marriage battles is clearly echoed in Colorado’s history.
It doesn’t seem to be coincidence that state lawmakers are mulling a civil unions bill this session — different, to be sure, from gay marriage, but the topic does confront some of the same arguments and prejudices.
The issue is a long way from being resolved, both here and across the country. But the decision on the California marriage measure is a welcome step toward acknowledging gay Americans’ full civil rights.
