SCOTUS Blog reports from the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling that the Defense of Marriage Act, which bans federal recognition of same-sex marriage, “is unconstitutional as a deprivation of the equal liberty of persons that is protected by the Fifth Amendment… DOMA singles out a class of persons deemed by a State entitled ot recognition and protection to enhance their own liberty… The opinion and its holding are confined to those lawful marriages.”
The upshot: Same-sex couples who are legally wed in their respective states (such as Washington State and New York) are equally entitled to roughly 1,000 federal benefits as straight marriage couples, including tax breaks and Social Security coverage.
Authored by Justice Kennedy—on behalf of himself and with Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan—the majority opinion finds, “The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity. By seeking to displace this protection and treating those persons as living in marriages less respected than others.”
Hell yes.
The dissent telegraphs that—as many people predicted, based on oral arguments—that the court will punt on Proposition 8, California’s law banning same-sex marriage. In Chief Roberts’s minority opinion, he notes that “we lack jurisdiction to consider it in the particular context of Hollingsworth v. Perry.” The court still hasn’t released an opinion on that case, which will come later, but it seems the court won’t make a definitive ruling, thereby passing on the larger issue of whether same-sex marriage bans are inherently unconstitutional.
(Much more to come)
DOMA “”is unconstitutional as a deprivation of the equal liberty of persons that is protected by the Fifth Amendment… DOMA singles out a class of persons deemed by a State entitled to recognition and protection to enhance their own liberty… The opinion and its holding are confined to those lawful marriages.”
Parsed: Marriage is a condition of “enhanced liberty” that a state may or may not decide to give to whoever they want. Whenever they decide to “enhance” someone’s liberty, the feds can’t roll it back.
That’s what the DOMA decision stands for. That “enhanced liberty” language fairly screams “THIS IS WHAT IT TOOK TO GET KENNEDY ON BOARD,” so you can see what a future decision squarely on the question of “can a State privilege some citizens with marriage and deny it to others for basically any reason?” is going to be “yep, States can do that – it’s totally their call, and there is no fundamental constitutional right for ANY kind of marriage.”
You got the latter part right, marriage isn’t a fundamental right. But even rights that are not fundamental cannot be denied by the government because of animus or as Kennedy put it to “disparage and injure” some at the expense of others.
So, no, the state cannot deny some citizens the right to marry for *any* reason. Depending who those people are, the government would have to meet various thresholds to deny them a right to marry.