Posted on 12/21/2013 6:26:00 AM PST by SoFloFreeper
A federal judge struck down Utah’s same-sex marriage ban Friday in a decision that marks a drastic shift toward gay marriage in a conservative state where the Mormon church has long been against it.
The decision set off an immediate frenzy as the clerk in the state’s most populous county began issuing marriage licenses to dozens of gay couples while state officials took steps to appeal the ruling and halt the process.
Cheers erupted as the mayor of Salt Lake City led one of the state’s first gay wedding ceremonies in an office building about three miles from the headquarters of the Mormon church.
Deputy Salt Lake County Clerk Dahnelle Burton-Lee said the district attorney authorized her office to begin issuing licenses to same-sex couples but she couldn’t immediately say how many had been issued.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
Marriage consists only of the legal union between a man and a woman. No other domestic union, however denominated, may be recognized as a marriage or given the same or substantially equivalent legal effect.
The Judge struck down a amendment to a state constitution. Will this stand?
In 1965 in Griswold the Supreme Court first created a doctrine from the First, Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments that sexual identity, expression and self-determination were Constitutionally protected, holding in that case that Connecticut couldn’t limit unmarried women’s access to birth control. While one of its first progeny (Loving in 1967, striking down anti-miscegenation laws) made race a co-issue, it was quite clear that the doctrine did not depend any full equation of race with sexuality, or turn in any particular way on identity or immutable characteristics, versus conduct, at all. Roe in 1973 famously extended the doctrine to abortion — pure conduct.
In 1986, the Supreme Court rejected the doctrine as applicable to homosexuality in Bowers v Hardwick, but 1996’s Romer v Evans began to move the other way, and 2003’s Lawrence completed the reversal of course, finding a Constitutional entitlement to homosexual conduct and identity. The 2013 marriage cases unified the Loving and Lawrence streams of thinking.
So it will be exactly 50 years after Grisold when in June 2015 the Supreme Court will either uphold yesterday’s Utah decision or one just like it, or require all states to recognize a gay marriage legal where it was solemnized (two avenues which have the precise same result).
Not in my world does it stand.
Tenth Amendment.
federal judge. lifetime appointment unless removed by the federal legislature (congress).
They can now learn the happiness of divorce.
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