Same Sex Marriage Bans and Obergefell v. Hodges

     On June 26th, 2015, the United States Supreme Court ruled that regardless of state, same-sex couples had the same legal right to marry as different-sex couples.  This landmark case proved to be a mark of progress in the social rights of same-sex couples.  Before this case, however, there were some states that allowed homosexual marriages, while others explicitly banned it.
     The first state to ban same-sex marriage was Hawaii.  In the 1993 decision in Baehr v. Lewin, a same-sex couple sued because they were denied a marriage license, citing illegal discrimination outlawed by the states Equal Protection Clause.  After this ruling was announced, many opponents of same-sex marriage feared that it would soon become legal.  Voters in Hawaii allowed a constitutional amendment that allowed same-sex marriage to be outlawed, thus nullifying the Equal Rights Amendment.  As a result, Hawaii became the first state to ban same-sex marriage in 1994.
       The majority of same-sex marriage bans occurred with the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) of 1996.  This was passed in response to Baehr v. Lewin.  Among other things, DOMA prevented same-sex couples from receiving federal protections and benefits given to heterosexual couples.  DOMA stated that "No state, territory or possession of the United States ... shall be required to give effect to any public act, record, or judicial proceeding of any other State, territory, possession or tribe respecting a relationship between persons of the same sex that is treated as a marriage under the laws of such other State, territory, possession, or tribe, or a right or claim arising from such a relationship."  It did not directly ban gay marriage anywhere, but it did allow states to ban it much more easily.
     No state legalized gay marriage explicitly until Massachusetts in 2003.  Shortly after, President George W. Bush called for a Constitutional amendment to explicitly ban all gay marriage nationwide, saying that DOMA was under attack without it.  Bush feared that activist courts could easily legalize gay marriage, especially after a seeming legalization in San Francisco.  While many amendments were proposed, no vote ever took place.
     In the years that followed, more and more states legalized gay marriage.  By the end of 2014, 37 states legalized homosexual marriage while the other 13 states maintained active bans.  However, 8 of these 13 states were in the process of overturning these bans at the time of the Obergefell v. Hodges decision.
     In 2015, attorneys for Michigan couple April DeBoer and Jayne Rowse petitioned the Supreme Court, asking it to hear their case.  They wanted to turn over the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals' decision upholding the Michigan ban on same-sex marriage.   In a case that represented DeBoer and Rowse along with other couples, the Supreme Court ruled that bans on same-sex marriage were unconstitutional, citing the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause.  This case, known as Obergefell v. Hodges, will go down in United States history as one of the greatest victories for the gay liberation movement.




https://www.glad.org/cases/deboer-v-snyder/
https://gaymarriage.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=004857
https://family.findlaw.com/marriage/the-defense-of-marriage-act-and-the-call-for-a-constitutional.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_Faith_and_Credit_Clause
https://family.findlaw.com/marriage/1993-the-hawaii-case-of-baehr-v-lewin.html