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UPDATED: Supreme Court Rules Same-Sex Marriage To Be Law Of The Land Nationwide In Historic Ruling

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In a 5-4 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court has just handed down one of the most consequential civil rights decisions in its history.

Same-sex couples have the constitutional right to marry, and states cannot take that right away from them, says the U.S. Supreme Court in a 5-4 ruling handed down moments ago. The decision requires all 50 states and all U.S. territories to recognize all legally-performed marriages from all jurisdictions, and to extend marriage to same-sex couples. In short, the court’s decision requires all states to treat marriages of same-sex couples exactly as they treat marriages of different-sex couples.

The United States now becomes one of about 21 countries that have extended marriage to same-sex couples.

Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority opinion. The Chief Justice, John Roberts, along with Justices Alito, Thomas, and Scalia dissented. 

The case, Obergefell v. Hodges, was filed by Jim Obergefell, a man whose legally-married husband died. Obergelfell sued to have his name placed on his husband’s death certificate.

READ: Here’s The Full Supreme Court Decision Finding Same-Sex Couples Have The Right To Marry

The Court heard four same-sex marriage cases in April, all from the 6th Circuit Court of appeals, the only appellate court that ruled states may practice marriage discrimination against same-sex couples. That decision was in Michigan’s DeBoer v. Snyder, a case filed by two women, both pediatric emergency room nurses, who have adopted four special needs children and wanted to marry so they could jointly adopt each child. 

On April 28, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in cases from each of the four states that comprise the 6th Circuit: Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee. It had challenged plaintiffs and defendants to answer two questions:

Question 1: Must states allow same-sex couples to marry under the United States Constitution? 
Question 2: Must states recognize the legal marriages entered by same-sex couples in other jurisdictions?

The Court this morning answered yes to both.

UPDATE – Watch: Obama Speaks On Marriage Win – ‘A Victory For America’ (Full Video And Text)

Today’s historic ruling may well be one of the most important civil rights rulings since 1967’s Loving v. Virginia, in which the Supreme Court struck down banning interracial marriage, and paved the way for today’s decision by stating marriage is a civil right.

Along the way, in 2003, the Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas ruled all bans on sodomy were unconstitutional and that criminalizing same-sex relationships is a violation of privacy rights.

In 2013’s U.S. v. Windsor, the Court struck down Section 3 of DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996 that banned the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages, in a historic case brought by Edie Windsor of New York. Windsor had married her partner of four decades, Thea Spyer, in Canada shortly before Spyer’s death. The IRS demanded she pay $363,000 in inheritance taxes that she would not have had to incur had she been married to a man.

Since the DOMA decision two years ago, state marriage bans have fallen at historic speed, and the support for same-sex marriage has escalated faster than any other social issue. Today, polls find that up to 60 percent of Americans support the right of same-sex couples to marry, and the majority of Americans also wanted the Supreme Court to decide in favor of a national, 50-state right to marry.

UPDATE: Tweets Of The Day: President Obama And A Gazillion Democrats Celebrate Supreme Court Marriage Win

Before today’s ruling, same-sex marriage was legal in 37 states and one U.S. territory. Of the remaining 13 states, bans remained in place in the four states of the 6th Circuit. In the remaining nine states, rulings or decisions were placed on hold in deference to the impending Supreme court ruling.

There will assuredly be a backlash, as the religious right has promised. The Southern Baptist Convention, which boasts 16 million members, has vowed to defy the ruling. At least two current Republican presidential candidates, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, have signed a pledge to defy today’s ruling. Every Republican likely and declared GOP presidential candidate is formally opposed to same-sex marriage. Some high-ranking state officials, like Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, have suggested they will not follow today’s ruling.

While today’s historic ruling advances civil right for LGBT Americans, this is far from the completion of the fight for equality. As more and more same-sex couples marry, they can still be fired in the majority of states for being gay. Just yesterday President Barack Obama again called on Congress to pass ENDA to protect LGBT employees.

UPDATE: WATCH: Pres. Obama Calls Marriage Lead Plaintiff Jim Obergefell – ‘We’re Really Proud Of You’

 

This is a breaking news and developing story and has been updated.
Stay with The New Civil Rights Movement all day for reports, reactions, and other important marriage news.

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Image by Meghan Hess via Flickr and a CC license

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‘Careening’ Toward ‘Risk of Political Violence’: Experts Sound Alarm After Trump Floats Executing His Former General

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Political experts are sounding alarms after Donald Trump‘s weekend of attacks on the military and the media, with some cautioning America is “not just careening toward a significant risk of political violence around the 2024 presidential election. It’s also mostly oblivious to where it’s headed.”

Friday evening the ex-president said General Mark Milley, the outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whom he appointed to that role, “in times gone by” would have been executed for treason.

Trump wrote, “if the Fake News reporting is correct,” General Milley “was actually dealing with China to give them a heads up on the thinking of the President of the United States. This is an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH! A war between China and the United States could have been the result of this treasonous act.”

READ MORE: Gaetz Praises GOP Congressman Who Echoes His Call for Change ‘Through Force’

Foreign policy, national security, and political affairs analyst David Rothkopf Sunday night warned, “Trump this weekend indicated military leaders who opposed his policies should be put to death and media that presented views he did not like are traitors and will be prosecuted. He is a monster, an aspiring dictator, the greatest threat America faces.”

Sunday evening Trump had also attacked NBC News and MSNBC, along with their parent company, Comcast, all by name. He wrote in part: “I say up front, openly, and proudly, that when I WIN the Presidency of the United States, they and others of the LameStream Media will be thoroughly scrutinized for their knowingly dishonest and corrupt coverage of people, things, and events.”

“Why should NBC, or any other of the corrupt & dishonest media companies, be entitled to use the very valuable Airwaves of the USA, FREE? They are a true threat to Democracy and are, in fact, THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE! The Fake News Media should pay a big price for what they have done to our once great Country!” Trump said on his social media platform.

Professor of global politics and political scientist Brian Klass at The Atlantic wrote on Monday that General Milley’s phone call to China “was, in fact, explicitly authorized by Trump-administration officials.”

READ MORE: ‘Corruption of the Highest Order’: Experts ‘Sickened’ at ‘Definitely Bought’ Clarence Thomas and His ‘Pay to Play’ Lifestyle

“And yet,” Klass noted, “none of the nation’s front pages blared ‘Trump Suggests That Top General Deserves Execution’ or ‘Former President Accuses General of Treason.’ Instead, the post barely made the news. Most Americans who don’t follow Trump on social media probably don’t even know it happened.”

Klass is also warning that America has become “numb” to these attacks.

“Trump’s rhetoric is dangerous, not just because it is the exact sort that incites violence against public officials but also because it shows just how numb the country has grown toward threats more typical of broken, authoritarian regimes. The United States is not just careening toward a significant risk of political violence around the 2024 presidential election. It’s also mostly oblivious to where it’s headed.”

Juliette Kayyem, a lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a CNN national security analyst Monday morning observed: “To view each of Trump’s calls to violence in isolation — ‘he attacked Milley,’ or ‘he attacked NBC,’ or ‘he attacked the jury, the prosecutor, the judge ‘ — is to miss his overall plan to ‘introduce() violence as a natural extension of our democratic disagreement.'”

Kayyem, a former Asst. Secretary at the Dept. of Homeland Security and a terrorism expert, pointed to her own piece at The Atlantic from July.

“The language” Trump and his allies “are using is filled with words of war, elevating concerns among terrorism experts and security planners that Trump’s supporters pose the same threat of violence that they did before the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol,” Kayyem wrote.

READ MORE: ‘Vulgar and Lewd’: Trump Judge Cites Extremist Group to Allow Drag Show Ban

Klass again sounded the alarm on complacency:

“Bombarded by a constant stream of deranged authoritarian extremism from a man who might soon return to the presidency, we’ve lost all sense of scale and perspective. But neither the American press nor the public can afford to be lulled. The man who, as president, incited a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol in order to overturn an election is again openly fomenting political violence while explicitly endorsing authoritarian strategies should he return to power. That is the story of the 2024 election. Everything else is just window dressing.”

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‘It Won’t Fare Well’: Legal Expert Trashes Trump’s Hopes for ‘Hail Mary’ Appeal This Week

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The fate of the $250 million Manhattan fraud trial brought against Donald Trump and his Trump Organization by New York Attorney General Letitia James could be determined in two separate court rulings this week with one legal insider claiming Trump shouldn’t get his hopes up.

What is at stake is an expected Tuesday ruling from Judge Arthur F. Engoron on what charges he will accept against the former president for massively overstating the value of his properties, and a “Hail Mary” bid to the appeals court to delay the trial or dismiss it altogether with a deciosn expected on Thursday.

According to a report from the New York Times, Engoron is set to make his ruling after a contentious hearing last Friday where he repeatedly chastised the former president’s legal team and abruptly cut them off.

POLL: Should Trump be allowed to run for office?

That led former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner to suggest on Sunday that the future of the fraud case does not look good for Trump’s legal team.

Kirschner told MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart, “He [Engoron] called those arguments ‘borderline frivolous.’ He was considering sanctions against Donald Trump’s attorney,” and later added, “I don’t think that hearing went all that well for Trump.”

As for the appeals court, the Times is reporting, “Mr. Trump’s lawsuit — and in turn the fate of Ms. James’s case against him — hinges on a passage in the June appeals court ruling that has become a legal Rorschach test of sorts, in which each side sees what they want. Mr. Trump’s lawyers are convinced that the June ruling effectively tossed out the claims against him, while Ms. James’s team has argued that it had little effect on the accusation at the heart of her case — that Mr. Trump overstated his net worth by billions of dollars in his annual financial statements.”

After noting that, should the appeals court side with Trump, it would likely delay or “defang the case before the trial even begins,” the Times is reporting that some legal experts aren’t expecting Trump’s legal team to come out on top.

According to David B. Saxe, who previously served nearly on the same appeals court, “I think it won’t fare well.”

You can read more here.

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Pete Buttigieg Nails Trump for His Ugly Comments About Wounded Vets

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During his Sunday morning appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg called out Donald Trump over reports he told military leaders he didn’t want wounded vets to be seen by the public while he was president.

In a recent Atlantic profile of General Mark Milley, the retiring military office recounted the former president telling him “no one wants to see” wounded soldiers, with Milley adding he found Trump’s attitude to those serving their country “superficial, callous, and, at the deepest human level, repugnant.”

Buttigieg, who served in Afghanistan during his 8 years while in the Naval Reserve, was asked by CNN host Dana Bash about the former president’s apparent distaste for service members.

“I want to ask you about a new Atlantic profile that says that then President Trump complained to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley after an Army veteran who lost a leg in combat sang at an event at the Pentagon,” Bash prompted her guest. “Trump reportedly told Milley, ‘Why do you bring people like that here, no one wants to see that, the wounded.'”

“After that article came out, Trump attacked Milley on social media, kind of a rambling post, but suggested that milley deserved the death penalty. You’re a veteran– what’s your response?” she asked.

“It’s just the latest in a pattern of outrageous attacks on the people who keep the country safe,” the Biden administration official replied.

POLL: Should Trump be allowed to run for office?

After pointing to fellow vets who suffered horrific injuries, he added, “These are the kind of people that deserve respect and a hell of a lot more than that from every American, and definitely from every American president.”

“And the idea that an American president, the person to whom service members look at as a commander in chief, and the person who sets the tone for this entire country could think that way or act that way or talk that way about anyone in uniform, and certainly about those who put their bodies on the line and sacrificed in ways that most Americans will never understand, and I guess wounded veterans make president Trump feel uncomfortable.”

Watch below or at the link.

 

 

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