Word: gays
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...might not take 19 years for the Supreme Court to rule this time. Unlike Massachusetts, California has no residency requirement for marriage licenses. So beginning sometime next month, gay couples from all over America will be headed to California to be wed. Most of them will return to states that won't recognize those marriages. When they begin to sue in federal court, they'll likely claim the denials violate the privileges and immunities clause of the U.S. Constitution and its promise of full faith and credit...
That will likely happen even if the voters in the fall restrict gay marriage to opposite-sex couples. Such challenges, however, are anything but a sure thing. If the federal courts rule that the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act is constitutional, gays in states where marriages are banned will likely be out of luck, Sam Marcosson, a constitutional law professor at the University of Louisville Louis D. Brandeis School of Law, told TIME...
Marcosson, however, points out a paradoxical possibility. He says the strongest cases will probably not involve gay marriage at all, at least not directly. They'll be the child-support cases that arrive out of its corollary, same-sex divorce. "The court would have to recognize the original marriage as valid to enforce the divorce and child support decree - and thus give it full faith and credit," he says...
...will the federal courts view these cases? That will likely depend on where they are, and who is doing the deciding. But such split decisions are a classic recipe for intervention by the Supreme Court. The justices' conservative bent might spell trouble for gay plaintiffs, but the court's most recent decisions on gay rights have been mixed, and the presidential election could have an impact who will be beneath the robes by the times the cases are heard...
...come what may in Washington, last week's decision in California made history by putting the history of gay Americans' struggle for civil rights in the same sphere as earlier American struggles by women, African-Americans, Jews and others who have faced discrimination. That remains the case - and the law in California - no matter what Golden State voters decide in the fall...