On June 26, 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples had the right to marry.
With the passage of the Respect for Marriage Act, which protects same-sex and interracial marriages, The Associated Press is republishing its 2015 story by reporter Mark Sherman on the Supreme Court’s same-sex ruling.Same-sex couples won the right to marry nationwide Friday as a divided Supreme Court handed a crowning victory to the gay rights movement, setting off a jubilant cascade of long-delayed weddings in states where they had been forbidden.
Four of the court’s justices weren’t cheering. The dissenters accused their colleagues of usurping power that belongs to the states and to voters, and short-circuiting a national debate about same-sex marriage. Kennedy said nothing in the court’s ruling would force religions to condone, much less perform, weddings to which they object. And he said the couples seeking the right to marry should not have to wait for the political branches of government to act.
“No union is more profound than marriage,” Kennedy wrote, joined by the court’s four more liberal justices. Obama placed a congratulatory phone call to Obergefell, which he took amid a throng of reporters outside the courthouse. The cases before the court involved laws from Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee that define marriage as the union of a man and a woman. Those states have not allowed same-sex couples to marry within their borders, and they also have refused to recognize valid marriages from elsewhere.
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