Same-Sex Issue Pushes Justices Into Overdrive |
Same-Sex Issue Pushes Justices Into Overdrive
The New York Times
2012-12-09
Adam Liptak, Supreme Court Correspondent
In the civil rights era, the Supreme Court waited decades to weigh in on interracial marriage. On Friday, by contrast, the court did not hesitate to jump into the middle of one of the most important social controversies of the day, agreeing to hear two cases on same-sex marriage.
By taking both, the court gave itself the chance to issue a sweeping ruling that would cast aside bans on same-sex marriage nationwide. But the speed with which the court moved also raised the possibility of a split decision, one that would provide federal benefits to same-sex couples married in states that allow such unions but would permit other states to forbid gay and lesbian couples from marrying…
…In private correspondence in 1957, Justice Felix Frankfurter said the court was doing all it could to avoid hearing cases that would require giving the nation an answer about whether bans on interracial marriage — anti-miscegenation laws, in the parlance of the day — were constitutional.
“We twice shunted it away,” Justice Frankfurter wrote to Judge Learned Hand, “and I pray we will be able to do it again without being too brazenly evasive.”
Judge Hand responded that “I don’t see how you lads can duck it.”
But Justice Frankfurter was unpersuaded.
“I shall work, within the limits of judicial decency,” he wrote, “to put off decision on miscegenation as long as I can.”
The Supreme Court did not strike down laws banning interracial marriage until 1967, in Loving v. Virginia, when 16 states still had them on the books. That was almost two decades after the California Supreme Court in 1948 struck down a law making illegal “all marriages of white persons with Negroes” in Perez v. Sharp.
It has been just four years since the California Supreme Court, citing Perez, struck down two state laws limiting marriage to a man and a woman…
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Tags: Adam Liptak, Loving v. Virginia, New York Times, The New York Times