In an attempt to prove that Virginia is indeed for lovers, two couples have recently gone to federal court to get their marriages recognized in their home state. One of the couples has been together for more than 20 years and the other got married in California and have a teenage daughter together, yet the Commonwealth of Virginia will not recognize their marriages because the couples are—you guessed it—same-sex.
These couples don’t see why their sexual orientation should keep them from enjoying the equal right to marry a partner of their choice, so they filed suit in federal district court to challenge the Virginia’s anti-gay-marriage state constitutional amendment. They argued that the provision violates both equal protection and the fundamental right to marriage, as protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. This February, the district court agreed with them, and now they’re defending that ruling before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
Following on the heels of last term’s Supreme Court ruling in United States v. Windsor—which struck down the part of the Defense of Marriage Act that denied federal benefits to lawfully married same-sex couples—this case adds Virginia to the list of states (which now includes Utah, Oklahoma, Texas, Kentucky, Michigan, and Ohio, and seems to grow with each passing week) that have the constitutionality of their marriage laws before a federal appeals court.
Reprising our collaboration in Perry v. Hollingsworth—the California Prop 8 case in which the Supreme Court avoided ruling on the merits—and the Tenth Circuit gay marriage cases Kitchen v. Herbert and Bishop v. Smith, Cato and the Constitutional Accountability Center have filed a brief supporting the plaintiffs’ fight for equality under the law in the Old Dominion. We argue that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause protects against the arbitrary and invidious singling-out that the Virginia gay marriage ban effects, that the clause’s original meaning confirms that its protections are to be interpreted broadly, and that the clause provides every person the equal right to marry a person of his or her choice.
We believe that the Virginia constitutional amendment conflicts with the equal rights of those same-sex couples whose unions are treated differently than those of opposite-sex couples. To the extent that states recognize marriage, every person has the right to choose whom to marry and to have that decision respected equally by the state in which they live.
Especially in the wake of Windsor, it is becoming clearer that laws that force same-sex unions into second-class status have no place in a free society. After the Fourth Circuit hears argument in Bostic v. Rainey later this spring, it should affirm the district court’s decision.
