Supreme Court Justices Rule In Favor Of Equality, “Decency”

Staff Report

Celebrations are taking place around the country in response to the historic Supreme Court decision made June 26, striking down the Defense of Marriage Act and marking it unconstitutional to deny marriage to same-sex couples. What’s being mostly discussed is the language used by Supreme Court justices which strongly supports the arguments made in support of same-sex marriage, like equal rights, just treatment of American citizens, and a myriad of other common sense arguments that have been shut down by conservative critics. To highlight the momentous occassion, The Free Weekly wanted to share some a few of the most decisive statements made by the Supreme Court justices.

• “Although Congress has great authority to design laws to fit its own conception of sound national policy, it cannot deny the liberty protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment.”
• “The particular case at hand concerns the estate tax, but DOMA is more than a simple determination of what should or should not be allowed as an estate tax refund. Among the over 1,000 statutes and numerous federal regulations that DOMA controls are laws pertaining to Social Security, housing, taxes, criminal sanctions, copyright, and veterans’ benefits.”
• “DOMA divests married same-sex couples of the duties and responsibilities that are an essential part of married life and that they in most cases would be honored to accept were DOMA not in force.”
• “What has been explained to this point should more than suffice to establish that the principal purpose and the necessary effect of this law are to demean those persons who are in a lawful same-sex marriage. This requires the Court to hold, as it now does, that DOMA is unconstitutional as a deprivation of the liberty of the person protected by the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.”

Of course there are always those skeptics of equal rights as they manifest themselves in our human society. To highlight the archaic opinions now no longer relavant to U.S. law, we’ve highlighted a few of Scalia’s dissent remarks:

• “Few public controversies touch an institution so central to the lives of so many, and few inspire such attendant passion by good people on both sides. Few public controversies will ever demonstrate so vividly the beauty of what our Framers gave us, a gift the Court pawns today to buy its stolen moment in the spotlight: a system of government that permits us to rule ourselves.”
• “By formally declaring anyone opposed to same-sex marriage an enemy of human decency, the majority arms well every challenger to a state law restricting marriage to its traditional definition. … The result will be a judicial distortion of our society’s debate over marriage — a debate that can seem in need of our clumsy ‘help’ only to a member of this institution.”