Affirming right to same-sex marriage advances equal rights for all

That the United States Supreme Court has affirmed the constitutional right of same-sex people to marry will not adversely affect marriages between men and women. It will not demand that priests and ministers whose faith does not recognize gay marriage perform such marriages or endorse them. The ruling does not inhibit or restrict the rights of other groups. But it does recognize the rights of those who desire to marry someone of the same sex and grants them the legal rights that apply to traditional marriage.

Although the gay marriage issue has been politicized, and emotionalized by those of liberal and conservative ideological viewpoints, the court ruling is in fact mostly about civil rights.

This ruling doesn’t represent some kind of erosion of American society. If anything, it represents a flourishing of this society, through an expansion of recognized civil liberties. And that expansion has implications in terms of recognizing the rights of same-sex married people to have the legal benefits of all others in marriages, whether that means inheritance rights or the right to make medical decisions or pay taxes.

Kennedy’s words

Justice Anthony Kennedy was eloquent in his majority opinion. He said, “No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were.

“It would misunderstand these men and women (the people challenging the anti-gay marriage state laws before the court) to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.”

That is about as emphatic as an opinion gets. It supports what has become a movement with momentum over the last decade, which has seen 36 states and the District of Columbia sanction gay marriage. Now, such marriages will be recognized everywhere, even, yes, in North Carolina, where Republican lawmakers successfully led a charge for a 2012 constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages.

Now they have approved a law are allowing magistrates and registers of deeds to decline to perform legal gay marriages or issue marriage licenses. The Supreme Court ruling does not affect the magistrates and registers of deeds opt-out law, but it is likely to face a legal challenge.

Respecting dissent

In the wake of this ruling and the understandable celebrations that will follow, there remain many people with long-held sincere beliefs, based in their interpretations of the Bible and perhaps the teachings of their parents, that same-sex marriage is not something they can support. Those who disagree with them should not be harsh in their judgment any more than they would want people to judge them solely based on their own views on this single issue.

And the right of those of faith to believe and worship as they wish is a right explicit in the Constitution. Those who practice their religion without holding to a belief in same-sex marriage have nothing to fear from this ruling.

For the ruling does not force anyone to believe in anything. It simply grants a group of people the right to enjoy the privileges and freedoms that all others enjoy and to which all are entitled. That echoes the movement of more than a half-century ago to ensure freedoms for people of color, freedoms that had been granted in some places and denied, sometimes in subtle and clandestine ways, in other places – despite the fact that those freedoms had been won on battlefields a hundred years before.

This decision will rile some groups and excite others. But there also should come a calm now in this debate. This issue that has ignited fierce political firestorms in some places, including North Carolina, has now been settled, once and for all.

This story was originally published June 27, 2015 at 4:00 PM with the headline "Affirming right to same-sex marriage advances equal rights for all."