At this writing, we are awaiting an imminent decision from the U.S. Supreme Court on a set of cases involving a claim that the Constitution requires states to permit civil marriages between persons of the same sex.
However, several Supreme Courts (state courts, that is) have already rejected similar arguments to those offered in Obergefell v. Hodges. Today, I begin a series offering excerpts from those decisions.
The earliest was in the Supreme Court of Minnesota, which handed down its decision in Baker v. Nelson on October 15, 1971. The appeal of this case was dismissed “for want of a substantial federal question” by the U.S. Supreme Court -- establishing a binding precedent which over two dozen federal judges have chosen to ignore in the last two years.
While the U.S. Supreme Court issued no written opinion in Baker, the Minnesota Supreme Court did. Here are some key excerpts (with legal citations abbreviated):
The institution of marriage as a union man and woman, uniquely involving the procreation and rearing of children within a family, is as old as the book of Genesis. Skinner v. Oklahoma ex rel. Williamson, [U.S. Supreme Court] (1942), which invalidated Oklahoma’s Habitual Criminal Sterilization Act on equal protection grounds, stated in part: “Marriage and procreation are fundamental to the very existence and survival of the race.” This historic institution manifestly is more deeply founded than the asserted contemporary concept of marriage and societal interests for which petitioners contend. The due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment is not a charter for restructuring it by judicial legislation.
. . .
The equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, like the due process clause, is not offended by the state’s classification of persons authorized to marry. There is no irrational or invidious discrimination. Petitioners note that the state does not impose upon heterosexual married couples a condition that they have a proved capacity or declared willingness to procreate, posing a rhetorical demand that this court must read such condition into the statute if same-sex marriages are to be prohibited. Even assuming that such a condition would be neither unrealistic nor offensive under the Griswold rationale, the classification is no more than theoretically imperfect. We are reminded, however, that “abstract symmetry” is not demanded by the Fourteenth Amendment.
Loving v. Virginia, [U.S. Supreme Court] (1967), upon which petitioners additionally rely, does not militate against this conclusion. Virginia’s antimiscegenation statute, prohibiting interracial marriages, was invalidated solely on the grounds of its patent racial discrimination. . . .
Loving does indicate that not all state restrictions upon the right to marry are beyond reach of the Fourteenth Amendment. But in commonsense and in a constitutional sense, there is a clear distinction between a marital restriction based merely upon race and one based upon the fundamental difference in sex.
For a more detailed description of Baker, and the full text of the decision, see this blog post from last year.
