By Lyle Denniston
SCOTUSblog
This is the third of four articles explaining the constitutional controversy, now awaiting the Supreme Court’s attention, over same-sex marriage. The Court is scheduled to consider ten petitions on that issue at its private Conference tomorrow. This articles discusses the legal arguments against same-sex marriage. The final article tomorrow will discuss the options the Court has in considering the cases. The first article in this series can be found here, and the second article is here.
Analysis
Marriage is an institution so valued in virtually every society, modern or ancient, that it always has been easy to rally public support against challenges to it. The ferv0r of that defense has been obvious, across the country, in recent years, especially since 1993, when the Hawaii Supreme Court signaled that same-sex couples in that state might soon gain a right to marry, under the state constitution. No state had previously even hinted at that, and the reaction of defenders of marriage was swift and widespread. As a result, the change did not happen in Hawaii, and would not, in any state, until Massachusetts’ highest state court opened marriage to same-sex couples, nine years ago this month.
The Hawaiian hint, of course, ran counter to a traditional understanding about marriage. A state court in New York would remark later: ”It was an accepted truth for almost everyone who ever lived, in any society in which marriage existed, that there could be marriages only between participants of different sex.” Changing that understanding has been seen, in many quarters of society, as a threat to marriage itself, and, with it, a threat to society’s capacity to renew itself generation after generation. Same-sex marriage, some would and did argue, was nothing less than a suicide pact for humanity.
