U.S. District Judge Daniel D. Crabtree, who had ruled on November 4, 2014, that the Kansas constitutional amendment and statutes banning same-sex marriage were unconstitutional, has issued a final ruling in that case, Marie v. Mosier, 2016 WL 3951744 (D. Kan., July 22, 2016), effectively finding that Kansas officials cannot be trusted to comply voluntarily with the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, 135 S. Ct. 2584 (2015), without the prod of an injunction that would subject them to contempt proceedings if they fail to comply fully. In light of the initial refusal by the state to issue appropriate birth certificates for children of lesbian couples, and continuing ambiguity about how state officials will handle such situations, the court rejected the state’s argument that the lawsuit should be dismissed as “moot” or that its prior rulings should be vacated as unnecessarily in light of Obergefell.
When Judge Crabtree issued his preliminary injunction in 2014, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over Kansas, had already issued rulings prohibiting Oklahoma and Utah from enforcing their laws against same-sex marriage, and the U.S. Supreme Court had refused to review those rulings on October 6, 2014, so they had gone into effect. Shortly afterward, however, the 6th Circuit had ruled against marriage equality, and in January 2015 the Supreme Court announced it would review that decision. On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell that same-sex couples were entitled to the same marriage rights under state law as different-sex couples. After Obergefell, the Kansas defendants moved to dismiss Marie v. Mosier as “moot,” but the plaintiffs moved instead to have the court issue a declaration that the Kansas ban on marriage equality was unconstitutional and to issue an injunction requiring the state to comply with Obergefell. This responded to an argument that was being made by some marriage equality resisters that the Supreme Court’s decision applied only to states in the 6th Circuit, and to the announced opposition to the Supreme Court’s decision by Kansas Governor Sam Brownback and other Kansas officials. The plaintiffs feared that Kansas would not give full effect to the “equality” requirement of the Supreme Court’s decision, despite assurances by the state’s attorney that it would do so.
At that time, Judge Crabtree decided to give the state the benefit of the doubt. On August 10, 2015, he issued a declaratory judgment, but withheld injunctive relief to give the state time to comply voluntarily. Voluntary compliance did follow in many respects, such as issuing marriage licenses, but the plaintiffs responded to the state’s contention that it had complied voluntarily by bringing to the court’s attention two instances in which state officials had refused to issue birth certificates listing both mothers of children born to married lesbian couples. Indeed, in one of those cases the mothers had gone into state court to get an order to issue an appropriate birth certificate, and the state initially resisted the state court order. Subsequently both of those cases were resolved by the state issuing appropriate birth certificates, but contradictory statements issued from officials of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, one suggesting that in future same-sex couples would be treated the same as different-sex couples when children were conceived through donor insemination, but the other stating that same-sex couples would have to alert the department in advance so that a case-by-case determination could be made about whether a birth certificate listing both women would be issued.
Judge Crabtree concluded that the case was not “moot” and an injunction was necessary. In this case, there was clear evidence that state officials were complying reluctantly with Obergefell, sometimes only under the prodding of court orders, so the court could not conclude that there was no longer an issue of whether same-sex couples in Kansas could expect to receive equal treatment from all instrumentalities of the state government in all circumstances.
“Exercising its remedial discretion,” wrote Crabtree, “the court has decided to grant a permanent injunction forbidding defendants (and their successors) from enforcing or applying any aspect of Kansas law that treats same-sex married couples differently than opposite-sex married couples. As the court noted last August, a significant value exists in giving public officials a reasonable opportunity to comply voluntarily with a mandate by the Supreme Court. The record here shows that defendants have said they will comply with Obergefell and, in many instances, they have acted to implement the changes that compliance requires. But even after Obergefell and even after this court’s declaratory judgment, the record also demonstrated one defendant’s department deliberately refused to treat two same-sex married couples in the same fashion it routinely treats opposite-sex couples. This disparate treatment did not result from oversight, inadvertence, or decisions made at lower levels of the department. To the contrary, the conduct involved officials who the court would expect to know about Obergefell, this court’s preliminary injunction [from 2014], and the defendants’ assurances that they intended to comply with Obergefell. This conduct required one same-sex couple to file an action in state court to get something that an opposite-sex couple would have received as a matter of course.”
In reaching this conclusion, Judge Crabtree listed the decisions by judges in numerous other states who issued permanent injunctions against those states after the Obergefell decision upon finding that the cases were not “moot” because of actual or potential failures of those states fully to comply with Obergefell’s equality mandate. These included decisions from Alabama, Florida, Nebraska, Arkansas, South Dakota, Idaho, and Louisiana. The only court to reach a contrary conclusion was in South Carolina, where the state government had quickly fallen into line after the Supreme Court refused to review the 4th Circuit’s decision in the Virginia marriage equality case. Given the birth certificate contretemps in Kansas, the case was clearly distinguishable.
Crabtree sympathized with the plaintiffs’ concern about “whether defendants will comply voluntarily with Obergefell without the judicial oversight that an injunction permits.” His response to this concern was to provide that the court will maintain supervisory oversight for three years, which means that at the first sign that a government official in Kansas is denying equal treatment to a same-sex couple, direct application can be made to Judge Crabtree for relief without the need to run into state court and start a new lawsuit. “The court finds that permanent injunctive relief could prevent future same-sex married persons from having to do what the Smiths had to do,” he wrote: “initiate a separate lawsuit and incur expenses to secure the equal treatment that Obergefell promises.”
In rejecting the defendants’ argument that Obergefell was a narrow ruling that did not address the issue of birth certificates for children born to same-sex couples, Crabtree pointed out that Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion for the Supreme Court specifically mentioned this issue! “The Supreme Court found that the rights, benefits, and responsibilities of marital status include ‘taxation; inheritance and property rights; spousal privilege; hospital access; medical decision making authority; adoption rights; the rights and benefits of survivors; birth and death certificates; health insurance; and child custody, support, and visitation rules.’” By quoting from the Obergefell opinion, Crabtree made clear that Kansas may not impose any different treatment on same-sex couples regarding any of these issues without running afoul of Obergefell.
He also rejected the bizarre argument made by Kansas that one lesbian married couple that encountered birth certificate issues was not entitled to recognition of their marriage under Obergefell because they were married in Canada and the Full Faith and Credit Clause refers on to other states. Judge Crabtree pointed out that Kansas’s own marriage recognition statute provides that “all marriages which would be valid by the law of the country in which the same are contracted, shall be valid in all courts and places in this state.” If Kansas automatically recognizes different-sex marriages contracted in other countries, Obergefell’s equality requirement would mandate application of this rule to same-sex marriages.
“In sum,” wrote Crabtree, “defendants’ argument that Obergefell’s holding was narrow is unpersuasive,” and he quoted Justice Kennedy’s comment that a “slower, case-by-case determination of the required availability of specific public benefits to same-sex couples would deny gays and lesbians many rights and responsibilities intertwined with marriage.” “Perhaps defendants will provide the voluntary compliance with Obergefell that they promise,” Crabtree wrote. “But the court cannot assign plaintiffs’ constitutional rights to such uncertainty. In short, defendants’ assurances of future compliance do not provide the reliability that those rights deserve.”
The last issue before the court was an award of attorneys’ fees to the plaintiffs. He ordered them to submit their fee bill promptly, and if Kansas disputes the amount (which they will likely do, since the state’s budget has been decimated by Governor Brownback’s unrealistic tax-cutting measures, which have led, among other things, to a crisis in school funding that caused a confrontation with the state’s Supreme Court), Judge Crabtree will address the issue promptly.