Federal Appeals Court Upholds Same-Sex Marriage Bans In 4 States
In a 2-1 decision in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, Judges Jeffrey Sutton and Deborah Cook maintained that gay couples have no fundamental right to marry and ruled that bans in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee are constitutional.
Sutton wrote in his decision that while gay people have suffered prejudice in America, "we also cannot deny that the institution of marriage arose independently of this record of discrimination.”
Judge Martha Craig Daughtrey, who dissented, said back in October that she didn't think the bans would hold up under future scrutiny.
Today's decision was a blanket verdict covering six cases in those four states, and effectively reverses rulings legalizing same-sex marriage in Michigan and Kentucky—as well as decisions in Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee that mandated recognition of such marriages legally performed elsewhere.
It also marks the first time since the Supreme Court struck down Prop 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act last June that any federal appellate court has upheld a voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage. The Sixth Circuit is one of the most conservative in America—which, ironically, makes it one of the most likely venues for a marriage-equality case to land before the Supreme Court.
Reaction to the verdict from LGBT advocates was hardly positive.
“The legacies of Judges Deborah Cook and Jeffrey Sutton will forever be cemented on the wrong side of history," said HRC president Chad Griffin. "Today the Sixth Circuit stood in the way of a path constructed by two dozen federal court rulings over the last year — a path that inevitably leads to nationwide marriage equality. Gay and lesbian couples in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee are just as deserving of marriage equality as the rest of America."
Griffin also called on the Supreme Court to "[to] decide once and for all whether the Constitution allows for such blatant discrimination."
