US supreme court split on same-sex union

WASHINGTON: In its storied existence of over 225 years, the US Supreme Court has heard cases on such seminal matters as slavery, segregation, free speech, executive privilege and right to privacy. But few issues have electrified America the way its sitting on same-sex marriage Tuesday did, because of what could result in the acceptance of a broader, more expansive definition of marriage, long held to be union of a man and a woman.
Marriage is the bond between a person who never remembers anniversaries and another who never forgets them, the versifier Ogden Nash joked, perhaps unwittingly not mentioning any gender. No such levity attended the deliberations before the Supreme Court, but the argument essentially centered on that very point (gender) as proponents and opponents of same-sex marriage duked it out before a nine-judge full bench that is thought to be evenly split 4/4 among conservatives and liberals with one swing vote.
Everything that was debated before the court on Tuesday seemed to suggest that same-sex marriage is now a fait accompli that is widely accepted (in 36 states) in America, with only constitutional niceties to be sorted out. At issue is whether the minority of states that still ban same sex marriage in the US should be allowed to do so, or whether the apex court can impose a redefinition of marriage on all fifty states.
The traditionalists, typically conservative, argued that marriage is a matter for elected state lawmakers to regulate. Not so, countered liberal proponents of same-sex marriage: the US Constitution requires states to give all people within their jurisdiction "equal protection of the laws," which essentially means they cannot restrict marriage to heterosexuals. The court also has to decide whether the 14 states that do not permit same-sex marriage should recognize such unions from 36 other states which do.
((That issue is what brought the matter to the Supreme Court in what is formally called the Obergefell v. Hodges case. A gay real-estate agent from Cincinnati, Ohio, Jim Obergefell married John Arthur in 2013 in the brief window between Arthur’s death (he had been suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) and the Supreme Court decision in the United States v Windsor case. The Windsor case held that restricting U.S. federal interpretation of "marriage" and "spouse" to apply only to heterosexual unions was unconstitutional. The ruling allowed Edith Windsor to claim federal estate tax exemption for surviving spouses, since it implicitly recognized her marriage to her female companion Thea Spyer.
In the Obergefell case, the state of Ohio, which does not recognize same-sex marriage, also declined to accept his marriage to John Arthur that was conducted in Maryland, which recognizes gay marriage. The two men had actually flown to Maryland in a special medically equipped plane and got married on the tarmac of a Maryland airport even as Arthur was dying, but Ohio declined to recognize Obergefell’s spousal rights, much less the marriage.
On Tuesday, Oberfgefell, who was present in the Supreme Court, heard )) the justices muse over whether scholars and society needed more time to deliberate on the matter since marriage has been understood as the union between one man and one woman for "millennia-plus time." It is only in the last one decade that same-sex marriage has come to be accepted quite rapidly and widely in America.
"It's very difficult for the court to say 'We know better,'" Justice Antony Kennedy, who is considered the crucial swing vote, told Mary Bonauto, a lawyer representing same-sex couples.
No such doubts assailed the demonstrators outside. "A Moral Wrong Cannot Be a Civil Right" read a poster on the conservative side of the debate. "Not Long Ago, Our Marriage Was Illegal" countered a poster by a mixed race man-woman couple, demanding "Marriage Equality For All."
In the melee, JP Singh and Chuck Johnson, a mixed-race, same-sex couple, beamed with pride and expectation. "We can’t be hypocritical and preach democracy and human rights to rest of the world when we won’t grant them to our own citizens,” said Singh, a professor of Global Affairs and Cultural Studies at George Mason University.
The Supreme Court is expected to rule on the matter in June.