Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg thinks Americans are ready to accept a ruling legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide in an notably direct interview with Bloomberg.
“I think it’s doubtful that it wouldn’t be accepted,” Ginsburg said Wednesday of a nationwide marriage equality ruling, pointing to the shift in public opinion toward gay people.
“The change in people’s attitudes on that issue has been enormous,” the 81-year-old Ginsburg continued. “In recent years, people have said, ‘This is the way I am.’ And others looked around, and we discovered it’s our next-door neighbor — we’re very fond of them. Or it’s our child’s best friend, or even our child. I think that as more and more people came out and said that ‘this is who I am,’ the rest of us recognized that they are one of us.”
Ginsburg’s remarks appear to reinforce the views of many court observers that the Supreme Court is ready to rule in favor of marriage equality, a view most recently expressed by President Barack Obama.
“My sense is that the Supreme Court is about to make a shift, one that I welcome, which is to recognize that — having hit a critical mass of states that have recognized same-sex marriage — it doesn’t make sense for us to now have this patchwork system and that it’s time to recognize that, under the equal protection clause of the United States, same-sex couples should have the same rights as anybody else,” Obama said earlier this week during an interview with BuzzFeed News.
“I think that as more and more people came out and said that ‘this is who I am,’ the rest of us recognized that they are one of us.”
But while Ginsburg believes most Americans would accept a sweeping ruling legalizing same-sex marriage, this week has left little doubt others would be less welcoming. Led by Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, judges in more than half of Alabama’s 67 counties have defied a federal court order and refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. On Monday, the Supreme Court declined to extend the stay of a U.S. district court’s ruling overturning the state’s same-sex marriage ban. Moore threatened probate judges who did issue marriage license that they would be “acting in violation of their oaths to uphold the Alabama Constitution if they issued marriage licenses prohibited under Alabama law.”
Moore, who has admitted state courts would be bound by a nationwide marriage equality ruling from the Supreme Court, has been compared to George Wallace, the Alabama governor who defied a federal order to desegregate Alabama schools in the 1960s.
“It’s a shame and a disgrace what is happening in Alabama today, my native state,” Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement, said Tuesday on The Diane Rehm Show. “It’s almost like Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door. You cannot have equality and justice for some and not for all under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. It’s not right, it’s not fair and it’s not just.”
Lewis said he believes the Supreme Court will do “what is right” and Alabama will “become part of the 21st century.”
The Supreme Court is expected to hear arguments on the constitutionality of state bans on same-sex marriage in April, with a ruling handed down in June. In a written dissent, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the denial of a stay in the Alabama case “may well be seen as a signal of the Court’s intended resolution of that question” of same-sex marriage.
“There was a familiarity with people that didn’t exist in the beginning when the race problem was on the front burner because we lived in segregated communities and it was truly a ‘we, they’ kind of thing,” Ginsburg said Wednesday. “It’s not so, I think, of the gay rights movement. It would not take a lot of adjustment. And of course we shouldn’t speak much more about this subject because one way or another it will be decided before we leave town in June.”
On Monday, November 10, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected former Kentucky county clerk and same-sex marriage opponent Kim Davis' appeal of a lower court's decision against her -- including a petition demanding that the court revisit and overturn its landmark ruling legalizing same-sex marriage.
The nation's highest court denied a writ of certiorari, which would have signaled its intention to review Davis' case -- and the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodgesdecision, which struck down state-level bans on same-sex marriage. It would have taken four justices to agree to hear Davis' challenge.
David Urban, a Republican strategist and CNN commentator who served as a senior advisor to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, has written an op-ed accusing Democrats of fear-mongering for suggesting that the U.S. Supreme Court might overturn its 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision legalizing same-sex marriage.
In his USA Today op-ed, Urban accuses "hyperpartisan liberals" of trying to "sow fear and discontent" by suggesting that the Supreme Court could reverse its own precedent and strike down the 2015 ruling -- a move that would immediately reinstate same-sex marriage bans still on the books in 32 states.
U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace once cast herself as an LGBTQ-friendly Republican. She has since become one of Congress’s loudest opponents of transgender rights -- and is now echoing a familiar refrain used by opponents of same-sex marriage on social media.
"Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve," wrote Mace on X, repeating a long-used slogan that mocks same-sex relationships as “abnormal” and frames homosexuality as contrary to the Bible. The South Carolina congresswoman is currently running for governor.
A community note soon appeared under Mace’s post, pointing out that she voted twice for the Respect for Marriage Act -- once during its initial passage, and again when the House approved the Senate’s version. The 2022 law requires both federal and state governments to recognize same-sex marriages performed in states where they’re legal.
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