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Court ruling a new watershed

We support traditional marriages between a man and woman.

It’s not without its problems, of course, but it’s an institution that certainly has stood the test of time and we like it.

We also think old-fashioned marriages will be just fine in the wake of last week’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling requiring the federal government to treat same-sex marriages the same as it treats those between a man and woman.

Because, as a practical matter, one has nothing to do with the other. The court’s ruling – one of two it issued on the subject of same-sex marriage – was widely hailed as a breakthrough for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender movement.

Actually, it moves the whole country forward by embracing a class of people who for years were – and in too many cases still are – ostracized and pushed to the margins of society by the narrow-minded and ignorant.

In overturning a section of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, a court majority ruled that DOMA violated the constitution because, in states like New Hampshire which permit same-sex marriages, the law afforded federal protections only to those in heterosexual marriages, effectively creating a subset of second-class unions. And that was precisely DOMA’s intent – to demean and humiliate gay and lesbian couples in same-sex marriages – said Justice Anthony Kennedy, who authored the decision.

Writing for the 5-4 majority in a New York case involving two women who were married under that state’s laws, Kennedy found that, “The State’s decision to give this class of persons the right to marry conferred upon them a dignity and status of immense import. But the Federal Government uses the state-defined class for the opposite purpose – to impose restrictions and disabilities.”

DOMA had the effect of denying federal privileges like tax breaks, survivor benefits and a host of more than a thousand other federal protections afforded traditional partners but heretofore denied to those in legal, state-sanctioned same-sex marriages.

The court ruled that, in those states that recognize same-sex marriages, the constitution requires the federal government to treat all marriages the same.

In another opinion issued the same day, the court also declined to overturn a lower court ruling that found California’s ban on same-sex marriages to be unconstitutional, paving the way for homosexual marriages to resume in that state.

The rulings represent a watershed in the gay-rights movement in much the same way that Brown v Board of Education was a seminal decision for the civil rights movement – by conferring the court’s stamp of legitimacy on a class of people who have suffered indignities for far too long.

The court could have gone further, of course, and issued a straightforward ruling making same-sex marriages legal in all states.

That would undoubtedly have been cleaner, but the court deserves credit for judicial restraint. It declined to trample on states’ rights while, at the same time, recognizing the social realities of the times in which we live.

In limiting its ruling to only those states that currently permit same-sex marriages, the court also left room for those other states to work out their own political solutions.

None of which has any bearing whatsoever on the institution of marriage between a man and woman.

Except it does.

Because, as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote from a jail cell in Birmingham, Ala., “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

www.nashuatelegraph.com

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