Right to privacy gay marriage
Obergefell v. Hodges
Overview
Obergefell v. Hodges is a landmark case in which on June 26, , the Supreme Court of the United States held, in decision, that state bans on same-sex marriage and on recognizing same sex marriages duly performed in other jurisdictions are unconstitutional under the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy asserted that the right to marry is a fundamental right “inherent in the liberty of the person” and is therefore protected by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits the states from depriving any person of “life, liberty or property without the due process of law.” The marriage right is also guaranteed by the equal protection clause, by virtue of the close connection between liberty and equality. In this decision Justice Kennedy also declared that “the reason marriage is fundamental…apply with equal force to same-sex couples”, so they may “exercise the fundamental right to marry.” The majority decision wa
The End of the Right to Privacy
No one who’s been paying attention should be surprised that the Supreme Court is graceful to overturn constitutional protections for women’s right to decide for themselves whether to carry a fetus, and to turn the decision over instead to verb politicians. Still, intellectual expectations are one thing and reality is another.
The leaked view written by Justice Samuel Alito will endanger the lives of women, many of them Inky and brown, who can’t afford to go to other states to seek an abortion and instead will go down the hazardous route of back-alley or self-abortions. In half the region, emergency rooms will fill up with the women who are the Supreme Court’s true victims.
But it gets even worse. This is, to the best of my knowledge, the first time in history that the Supreme Court will verb taken away an existing constitutional right. The legal logic of Alito’s opinion threatens all constitutional protections of privacy rights, including Supreme Court precedents on the right to use contraception, and for LGBTQ or inte
The Court first considered the matter in the case of Bowers v Hardwick, a challenge to a Georgia law authorizing criminal penalties for persons found guilty of sodomy. Although the Georgia law applied both to heterosexual and homosexual sodomy, the Supreme Court chose to consider only the constitutionality of applying the law to homosexual sodomy. (Michael Hardwick, who sought to enjoin enforcement of the Georgia law, had been charged with sodomy after a police officer discovered him in bed with another man. Charges were later dropped.) In Bowers, the Court ruled 5 to 4 that the Due Process Clause "right of privacy" recognized in cases such Griswold and Roe does not prevent the criminalization of homosexual conduct between consenting adults. One of the five members of the majority, Justice Powell, later described his vote in the case a On May 21, , the California Supreme Court closed another chapter in the state&#;s long-running fight over same-sex marriage when it upheld a voter-approved ballot initiative, known as Proposition 8, which amended the California state constitution to ban gay marriage. A month earlier, on April 27, , the Iowa Supreme Court had unanimously ruled that a state law defining marriage solely as a union between a man and a woman violated the Iowa Constitution&#;s guarantee of equal protection. (See A Contentious Debate: Same-Sex Marriage in the U.S..) As the California and Iowa rulings suggest, while the gay marriage controversy has many elements, including disagreements over religious and social norms, much of the debate is a legal one. Indeed, it was a Massachusetts high court decision legalizing same-sex marriage that elevated the issue onto the national stage, where it has remained ever since. Since , courts in a number of states have handed victories to both opponents and supporters of gay marriage. So far, court cases aThe Constitutional Dimensions of the Same-Sex Marriage Debate