Photo: Eric Holder. Credit: The Aspen Institute/flickr.
The Obama administration urged the U.S. Supreme Court to rule in favor of marriage equality nationwide in a brief filed with the court Friday.
“The marriage bans challenged in these cases impermissibly exclude lesbian and gay couples from the rights, responsibilities, and status of civil marriage,” the “friend of the court” brief filed by the Justice Department states. “These facially discriminatory laws impose concrete harms on same-sex couples and send the inescapable message that same-sex couples and their children are second-class families, unworthy of the recognition and benefits that opposite-sex couples take for granted. The bans cannot be reconciled with the fundamental constitutional guarantee of ‘equal protection of the laws.’”
The brief is one of dozens filed with the high court calling for a ruling in favor of marriage equality later this year. Also on Friday, more than 300 conservatives and 211 Democratic members of Congress urged the court to strike down state bans on same-sex marriage in separate briefs filed with the court.
According to the brief, state bans on same-sex marriage “impose a more direct stigma that is all the more painful because its source is the home State and not the federal government; they exclude lesbian and gay couples from the institution of civil marriage; and they deprive the children of those couples of equal recognition of their family structure. There is no adequate justification for such a discriminatory and injurious exercise of state power.”
In January, the nation’s highest court agreed to consolidate four cases challenging same-sex marriage bans in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee after the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld marriage bans in those four states. On Thursday, the Supreme Court announced oral arguments on the issue of marriage equality would be heard April 28, with a ruling expected by the end of June.
In her first televised interview since her 2020 confirmation, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett appeared on CBS Sunday Morning to promote her new book, offering only vague commentary to host Norah O’Donnell in defense of the Court’s legitimacy when asked whether justices might overturn Obergefell v. Hodges.
Barrett was pressed on recent remarks from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who told the Raging Moderates podcast that the Court will likely “do to gay marriage what they did to abortion” and “send it back to the states.”
A new Pew Research Center survey finds that 59% of LGBTQ U.S. adults under age 50 who have never been married say they want to marry someday -- nearly the same as the 63% of non-LGBTQ adults who do. About 12% of each group say they never want to marry, while more than one-quarter are unsure of their future marriage plans.
By age, younger Americans who have never been married are more eager to wed than older peers, who are less certain and more doubtful about ever marrying.
Among those aged 18 to 29 who have never married, 67% of LGBTQ adults and 73% of non-LGBTQ adults say they want to marry someday. By contrast, just 48% of LGBTQ adults and 49% of non-LGBTQ adults aged 30 to 49 say the same, with nearly one-third in each group unsure.
Jason Collins, the first openly gay NBA player, is reportedly undergoing treatment for a brain tumor. Collins made headlines more than a decade ago when he came out publicly in a first-person essay for Sports Illustrated.
The 41-year-old former center earned All-American honors at Stanford before being drafted by the Houston Rockets in 2001. Over his 13-year career, he played for several NBA teams, including the New Jersey Nets, Minnesota Timberwolves, Atlanta Hawks, Boston Celtics, and Brooklyn Nets.
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