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Landmark Federal Appeals Ruling Holds Sexual Orientation Discrimination Violates Title VII

Posted on: April 5th, 2017 by Art Leonard No Comments

The full bench of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, based in Chicago, substantially advanced the cause of gay rights on April 4, releasing an unprecedented decision in Kimberly Hively v. Ivy Tech Community College, 2017 WL 1230393, holding that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which applies generally to all employers with fifteen or more employees as well as many federal, state and local government operations, prohibits discriminating against a person because of their sexual orientation.  The text of the statute does not mention sexual orientation, so the interpretive question for the court was whether discriminating against somebody because they are lesbian, gay or bisexual can be considered a form of sex discrimination.

What was particularly amazing about the affirmative decision, the first to rule this way by a federal appeals court, was that the 7th Circuit is composed overwhelmingly of Republican appointees, many of whom were appointed as long ago as the Reagan Administration.  Although the lead opinion for the Circuit was written by Chief Judge Diane Pamela Wood, who was appointed by Bill Clinton, the 8-member majority of the 11-judge bench included more Republicans than Democrats.  Many of the judges in the majority could be generally characterized as judicial conservatives.

Wood’s opinion was joined by Frank Easterbrook (Reagan appointee), Ilana Rovner (George H. W. Bush appointee), Ann Claire Williams (Clinton appointee), and David F. Hamilton (the only Obama appointee on the Circuit). Richard Posner (Reagan appointee) wrote a concurring opinion.  Joel Martin Flaum (Reagan appointee) wrote a concurring opinion which was joined by Kenneth Francis Ripple (Reagan appointee).  The dissent by Diane S. Sykes (George W. Bush appointee) was joined by Michael Stephen Kanne (Reagan appointee) and William Joseph Bauer (Ford appointee).  Ripple and Bauer are senior judges who were sitting on the en banc hearing because they were part of the three-judge panel (with Judge Rovner) that ruled on the case last year.  The Circuit has 11 authorized positions, but there are two vacancies among the active judges, part of the Republican Senate’s legacy of refusing to confirm most of President Obama’s judicial appointees during his second term.

The Circuit’s decision to grant en banc review clearly signaled a desire to reconsider the issue, which Judge Rovner had called for doing in her panel opinion. Rovner then made a persuasive case that changes in the law since the 7th Circuit had previously ruled negatively on the question called out for reconsideration.  Those who attended the oral argument on November 30 or listened to the recording on the court’s website generally agreed that the circuit was likely to overrule its old precedents, the only mystery being who would write the opinion, what theories they would use, and who would dissent.

The lawsuit was filed by Kimberly Hively, a lesbian who was working as an adjunct professor at the college, which is located in South Bend, Indiana. Despite years of successful teaching, her attempts to secure a full-time tenure-track position were continually frustrated and finally her contract was not renewed under circumstances that led her to believe it was because of her sexual orientation.  Since Indiana’s state law does not forbid sexual orientation discrimination, and South Bend’s ordinance (which does forbid sexual orientation discrimination) would not apply to the state college, she filed suit in federal court under Title VII.  She represented herself at that stage.  The trial judge, Rudy Lozano, granted the college’s motion to dismiss the case on the ground that 7th Circuit precedents exclude sexual orientation discrimination claims under Title VII.

Hively obtained representation from Lambda Legal on appeal. The three-judge panel rejected her appeal, while two of the judges urged that the precedents be reconsidered.

Judge Wood found that several key Supreme Court decisions have broadened the meaning of “because of sex” in Title VII, to the extent that she could write that “in the years since 1964, Title VII has been understood to cover far more than the simple decision of an employer not to hire a woman for Job A, or a man for Job B.” The broadening includes launching a complex law of sexual harassment, including same-sex sexual harassment, and discrimination against a person who fails to conform to “a certain set of gender stereotypes.”

As have many of the other judges who have written on this issue, Wood quoted from Justice Antonin Scalia’s opinion for the unanimous court in Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, Inc., 523 U.S. 75 (1998), the same-sex harassment case, in which, after noting that “male-on-male sexual harassment in the workplace was assuredly not the principal evil Congress was concerned with when it enacted Title VII,” this did not mean that the statute could not be interpreted to apply to such a situation. “But statutory prohibitions often go beyond the principal evil to cover reasonably comparable evils,” Scalia wrote, “and it is ultimately the provisions of our laws rather than the principal concerns of our legislators by which we are governed.”

Woods found convincing Hively’s contention, argued to the court by Lambda Legal’s Greg Nevins, that two alternative theories would support her claim. The first follows a “comparative method in which we attempt to isolate the significance of the plaintiff’s sex to the employer’s decision: has she described a situation in which, holding all other things constant and changing only her sex, she would have been treated the same way?”  The second rests on an intimate association claim, relying on the Supreme Court’s 1967 ruling striking down state laws barring interracial marriages, Loving v. Virginia.  The Supreme Court held that a ban on interracial marriage was a form of race discrimination, because the state was taking race in account in deciding whom somebody could marry.  Similarly here, an employer is taking sex into account when discriminating against somebody because they associate intimately with members of the same sex.  After briefly describing these two theories, Wood wrote, “Although the analysis differs somewhat, both avenues end up in the same place: sex discrimination.”

Woods noted at least two rulings by other circuits under Title VII that had adapted Loving’s interracial marriage analysis to an employment setting, finding race discrimination where an employer discriminated against persons who were in interracial relationships, Parr v. Woodmen of the World Life Insurance Co., 791 F.2 888 (11th Cir. 1986), and Holcomb v. Iona College, 521 F.3d 130 (2nd Cir. 2008).  These citations were a bit ironic, since the 11th and 2nd Circuits have in recent weeks rejected sexual orientation discrimination claims under Title VII, in which the plaintiffs advanced the same analogy to support their Title VII claims.  These recent opinions were by three-judge panels that held themselves to be bound by prior circuit rulings.  Lambda Legal has already filed a petition for en banc review in the 11th Circuit case, and counsel for plaintiff in the 2nd Circuit case is thinking about doing the same.

Ultimately, Wood acknowledged, “It would require considerable calisthenics to remove the ‘sex’ from ‘sexual orientation.’ The effort to do so has led to confusing and contradictory results, as our panel opinion illustrated so well.  The EEOC concluded, in its Baldwin decision, that such an effort cannot be reconciled with the straightforward language of Title VII.  Many district courts have come to the same conclusion.  Many other courts have found that gender identity claims are cognizable under Title VII.”

Woods recited the now well-worn argument about how it is a basic inconsistency in the law that a person can enter into a same-sex marriage on Saturday and then be fired without legal recourse for having done so when they show up at the workplace on Monday. That is still the state of the law in a majority of the states.

Wood acknowledged that this decision does not end the case. Because Hively’s original complaint was dismissed by the district court without a trial, she has not yet been put to the test of proving that her sexual orientation was a motivating factor in the college’s decision not to hire her or renew her adjunct contract.  And, what passed unspoken, the college might decide to petition the Supreme Court to review this ruling, although the immediate reaction of a college spokesperson was that the school – which has its own sexual orientation non-discrimination policy – denies that it discriminated against Hively, and is ready to take its chances at trial.

Judge Posner submitted a rather odd concurring opinion, perhaps reflecting the oddity of some of his comments during oral argument, including the stunning question posed to the college’s lawyer: “Why are there lesbians?” Posner, appointed by Reagan as an economic conservative and social libertarian, has evolved into a forceful advocate for LGBT rights, having satisfied himself that genetics and biology play a large part in determining sexual identity and that it is basically unfair to discriminate against LGBT people without justification.  He wrote the Circuit’s decision striking down bans on same-sex marriage in Indiana and Wisconsin in 2014.

In this opinion, he takes on the contention that it is improper for the court to purport to “interpret” the language adopted by Congress in 1964 to cover sexual orientation discrimination. After reviewing various models of statutory interpretation, he insisted that “interpretation can mean giving a fresh meaning to a statement (which can be a statement found in a constitutional or statutory text) – a meaning that infuses the statement with vitality and significance today.”  He used as his prime example judicial interpretation of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, adopted “long before there was a sophisticated understanding of the economics of monopoly and competition.”  As a result of changing times and new knowledge, he observed, “for more than thirty years the Act has been interpreted in conformity to the modern, not the nineteenth-century, understanding of the relevant economics.” Basically, the courts have “updated” the Act in order to keep it relevant to the present.

He argued that the same approach should be brought to interpreting Title VII, adopted more than half a century ago. This old law “invites an interpretation that will update it to the present, a present that differs markedly from the era in which the Act was enacted.”  And, after reviewing the revolution in understanding of human sexuality and public opinion about it, he concluded it was time to update Title VII to cover sexual orientation claims, even though “it is well-nigh certain that homosexuality, male or female, did not figure in the minds of the legislators who enacted Title VII.”  Although some of the history he then recites might arouse some quibbles, he was able to summon some pointed examples of Justice Scalia employing this method in his interpretation of the Constitution regarding, for example, flag-burning and an individual right to bear arms.

“Nothing has changed more in the decades since the enactment of the statute than attitudes toward sex,” wrote Posner, going on to recite the litigation history of the struggle for marriage equality that culminated in 2015 with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges.

Although it might sound odd at times as a judicial opinion, Posner’s concurrence is eminently readable and packed full of interesting information, including his list of “homosexual men and women (and also bisexuals, defined as having both homosexual and heterosexual orientations)” who have made “many outstanding intellectual and cultural contributions to society (think for example of Tchaikovsky, Oscar Wilde, Jane Addams, Andre Gide, Thomas Mann, Marlene Dietrich, Bayard Rustin, Alan Turing, Alec Guinness, Leonard Bernstein, Van Cliburn, and James Baldwin – a very partial list).”

This brought to the writer’s mind a famous paragraph in Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun’s opinion rejecting a challenge to the traditional anti-trust exemption for professional baseball, in which Blackmun included his own list of the greatest professional baseball players in history (compiled through a survey of the Supreme Court’s members and their young legal clerks).

Instead of pursuing Judge Wood’s line of reasoning, Posner was ready to declare that sexual orientation discrimination is a form of sex discrimination without such detailed analysis. “The most tenable and straightforward ground for deciding in favor of Hively is that while in 1964 sex discrimination meant discrimination against men or women as such and not against subsets of men or women such as effeminate men or mannish women, the concept of sex discrimination has since broadened in light of the recognition, which barely existed in 1964, that there are significant numbers of both men and women who have a sexual orientation that sets them apart from the heterosexual members of their genetic sex (male or female), and that while they constitute a minority their sexual orientation is not evil and does not threaten society.  Title VII in terms forbids only sex discrimination, but we now understand discrimination against homosexual men and women to be a form of sex discrimination; and to paraphrase [Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.], ‘We must consider what this country has become in deciding what that [statute] has reserved.’”

In his concurring opinion Judge Flaum took a narrower approach, noting that Title VII was amended in 1991 to provide that “an unlawful employment practice is established when the complaining party demonstrates that … sex … was a motivating factor for any employment practice, even though other factors also motivated the practice.” In other words, discrimination does not have to be “solely” because of sex to violate Title VII.  It is enough if the individual’s sex was part of the reason for the discrimination.  In light of this, Flaum (and Ripple, who joined his opinion) would look to the analogy with discrimination against employees in interracial relationships.  In addition, he noted, “One cannot consider a person’s homosexuality without also accounting for their sex: doing so would render ‘same’ and ‘own’ meaningless” in dictionary definitions that define homosexuality in terms of  whether somebody is attracted to persons of “the same” or “their own” sex.  Clearly, “sex” is involved when people are discriminated against because they are gay.

Judge Sykes’s dissent channeled scores of cases going back to the early years of Title VII and argued against the method of statutory interpretation used by the various opinions making up the majority. “The question before the en banc court is one of statutory interpretation,” she wrote.  “The majority deploys a judge-empowering, common-law decision method that leaves a great deal of room for judicial discretion.  So does Judge Posner in his concurrence.  Neither is faithful to the statutory text, read fairly, as a reasonable person would have understood it when it was adopted.  The result is a statutory amendment courtesy of unelected judges.  Judge Posner admits this; he embraces and argues for this conception of judicial power.  The majority does not, preferring instead to smuggle in the statutory amendment under cover of an aggressive reading of loosely related Supreme Court precedents.  Either way, the result is the same: the circumvention of the legislative process by which the people govern themselves.”

Although Sykes conceded that sexual orientation discrimination is wrong, she was not ready to concede that one could find it illegal by interpretation of a 1964 statute prohibiting sex discrimination at a time when the legislature could not possibly have been intending to ban discrimination against LGBT people. As Posner pointed out, that issue wasn’t on the radar in 1964.  Thus, to Sykes, Bauer and Kanne, it was not legitimate for a court to read this into the statute under the guise of “interpretation.”

Speculating about the ultimate fate of this decision could go endlessly on. There are fierce debates within the judiciary about acceptable methods of interpreting statutes, and various theories about how to deal with aging statutes that are out of sync with modern understandings.

Posner’s argument for judicial updating allows for the possibility that if Congress disagrees with what a court has done, it can step in and amend the statute, as Congress has frequently amended Title VII to overrule Supreme Court interpretations with which it disagreed. (For example, Congress overruled the Supreme Court’s decision that discrimination against pregnant women was not sex discrimination in violation of Title VII.)  Posner’s approach will be familiar to those who have read the influential 1982 book by then-Professor (now 2nd Circuit Judge) Guido Calabresi, “A Common Law for the Age of Statutes,” suggesting that courts deal with the problem of ancient statutes and legislative inertia by “updating” statutes through interpretation to deal with contemporary problems, leaving it to the legislature to overrule the courts if they disagree.  This method is more generally accepted in other common law countries (British Commonwealth nations), such as Australia, South Africa, India and Canada, than in the United States, but it clearly appeals to Posner as eminently practical.

So far the Republican majorities in Congress have not been motivated to address this issue through amendments to Title VII, or to advance the Equality Act, introduced during Obama’s second term, which would amend all federal sex discrimination laws to address sexual orientation and gender identity explicitly. Perhaps they will be provoked to act, however, if the question gets up to the Supreme Court and the 7th Circuit’s view prevails.

With the possibility of appeals now arising from three different circuits with different views of the issue, Supreme Court consideration of this question is highly likely. Public opinion polls generally show overwhelming support for prohibiting sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination in the workplace, which might serve as a brake on conservative legislators who would otherwise respond adversely to a Supreme Court ruling approving the 7th Circuit’s holding.

Houston Benefits Dispute May Bring Marriage Equality Issue Back to the Supreme Court

Posted on: January 25th, 2017 by Art Leonard No Comments

Conservatives eager to bring the marriage equality issue back to the U.S. Supreme Court after President Donald J. Trump has had an opportunity to appoint some conservative justices may have found a vehicle to get the issue there in an employee benefits dispute from Houston. On January 20, the Texas Supreme Court announced that it had “withdrawn” its September 2, 2016, order rejecting a petition to review a ruling by the state’s intermediate court of appeals that had implied that the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 marriage equality ruling, Obergefell v. Hodges, 135 S. Ct. 2584, might require Houston to provide the same spousal health benefits to same-sex as different-sex spouses of City workers.  Instead, announced the Court, it had reinstated the petition for review and scheduled oral argument for March 1, 2017.  Parker v. Pidgeon, 477 S.W.3d 353 (Tex. 14th Dist. Ct. App., 2015), review denied, sub nom. Pidgeon v. Turner, 2016 WL 4938006 (Texas Supreme Ct., September 2, 2016), No. 16-0688, Order withdrawn, motion for rehearing granted, petition reinstated (Jan. 20, 2017).

The plaintiffs in the Houston benefits case, Houston taxpayers Jack Pidgeon and Larry Hicks, had filed a motion for rehearing with active support from Governor Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton, both ardent marriage equality opponents eager to chip away at the marriage equality ruling or even to get it reversed. The Texas Supreme Court’s order denying review had been issued over a fervent dissenting opinion by Justice John Devine, who argued for a limited reading of Obergefell, and the Republican leaders’ amicus brief in support of review channeled Devine’s arguments.

Trump’s nomination of a conservative to fill the seat left vacant when Justice Antonin Scalia died last February would not change the Supreme Court line-up on marriage equality. Obergefell was decided by a 5-4 vote, with Scalia dissenting.  However, it is possible – even likely, if rumors of a possible retirement by Justice Anthony Kennedy at the end of the Court’s 2017-18 Term are accurate – that Trump will get an opportunity to replace the author of the Obergefell decision with a more conservative justice in time for the Court’s 2018-19 Term.  Regardless how the Texas Supreme Court rules on this appeal, its interpretation of the scope of Obergefell could set up a question of federal constitutional law that could be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, and once the issue gets to the Court, it is possible that the Obergefell dissenters, strengthened in number by new conservative appointees, could take the opportunity to narrow or even overrule the marriage equality decision.

The Houston dispute dates back to 2001, when Houston voters reacted to a City Council move to adopt same-sex partner benefits by approving a City Charter amendment that rejected city employee health benefits for “persons other than employees, their legal spouses and dependent children.” In 2001 same-sex couples could not legally marry anywhere in the world, so this effectively denied benefits to any and all same-sex partners of City employees.  Texas was also one of many states that put firm bans on same-sex marriage into its constitution and family law statute.

After the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act in June 2013, Houston Mayor Annise Parker, an openly-lesbian longtime LGBT rights advocate, announced the extension of health benefits to same-sex spouses of City employees. Although same-sex couples could not then marry in Texas, they could go to any of a number of other states to get married, including California and New York and, most conveniently as a matter of geography, Iowa.  Parker and her City Attorney concluded that under the Supreme Court’s reasoning in the DOMA case, United States v. Windsor, 133 S. Ct. 2675, Houston’s city government was obligated to recognize lawfully contracted same-sex marriages of city employees and provide them the same benefits that were accorded to other city employees.  Federal constitutional requirements would override the City Charter ban as well as state law.

Taxpayers Pidgeon and Hicks filed suit in state court, contending that Parker’s action violated the Texas Constitution and statutes, as well as the city charter amendment. They persuaded the trial judge to issue a temporary injunction against the benefits extension while the case was pending.  The City appealed that ruling to the 14th District Court of Appeals, which sat on the appeal as new marriage equality litigation, sparked by the Windsor ruling, went forward in dozens of states including Texas.  A Texas federal district judge ruled in 2014 in the De Leon case that the state’s ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional.  The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals heard the state’s appeal of that ruling in January 2015.  After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled for marriage equality in June 2015, the 5th Circuit issued its decision upholding the Texas district court, 791 F.3d 619, which in turn ordered Texas to allow and recognize same-sex marriages.  This prompted the 14th District Court of Appeals to issue its decision on July 28, 2015.

The Court of Appeals ruling in Parker v. Pidgeon, 477 S.W.3d 353, said, “Because of the substantial change in the law regarding same-sex marriage since the temporary injunction was signed, we reverse the trial court’s temporary injunction and remand for proceedings consistent with Obergefell and De Leon.”  The court did not rule on the merits, merely sending the case back to the trial court to issue a decision “consistent with” the federal marriage equality rulings.  What those rulings may require in terms of city employee benefits is a matter of some dispute.

Pidgeon and Hicks petitioned the Texas Supreme Court to review this court of appeals decision, but the court denied that petition on September 2, 2016, with Justice Devine dissenting. Devine argued that the court should have taken up the case because, in his view, the majority of the court “assumed that because the United States Supreme Court declared couples of the same sex have a fundamental right to marry, the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment requires cities to offer the same benefits to same-sex spouses of employees as to opposite-sex spouses.  I disagree.” He continued: “Marriage is a fundamental right.  Spousal benefits are not.  Thus, the two issues are distinct, with sharply contrasting standards for review.  Because the court of appeals’ decision blurs these distinctions and threatens constitutional standards long etched in our nation’s jurisprudence, I would grant review.”

Justice Devine was mistaken as to the court of appeals decision. That court did not hold in its July 28 ruling that same-sex spouses of Houston employees are entitled to health benefits from the city.  Rather, it ruled that because of “substantial change in the law” since the temporary injunction was issued, the injunction should be reversed and the case sent back to the trial court for “proceedings consistent with Obergefell and De Leon.”  If the trial court, on reconsideration, concluded that Obergefell and De Leon did not require the City to extend benefits to same-sex spouses of its employees, as Justice Devine argued in his dissent, the trial court could still rule in favor of Pidgeon and Hicks.  All the court of appeals directed the trial judge to do was to rethink the case in light of the new federal rulings.

Devine’s argument rests on a very narrow reading of Obergefell.  He interprets the Supreme Court’s decision to be sharply focused on the right of same-sex couples to marry, resting on the Court’s conclusion that the right to marry is a “fundamental right.”  Thus, a state would have to have a “compelling interest” to deny the right, a test that the Supreme Court found was not met.  However, pointed out Devine, the Supreme Court never explicitly said that the federal constitution requires state and local governments to treat all marriages the same, regardless whether they are same-sex or different-sex marriages.  And, he argued, public employees do not have a fundamental constitutional right to receive health insurance benefits from their employer.  Thus, he contended, the state could decide who gets benefits based on its own policy considerations, which the courts should uphold if they satisfy the relatively undemanding “rationality” test that is used when a fundamental right is not at stake.  As to that, he argued that the state’s interest in procreation by married different-sex couples could justify extending benefits to them but not to same-sex couples.

A contrary argument would note that Justice Kennedy’s opinion in Obergefell specifically listed health insurance as one of the many benefits associated with marriage that contributed towards the conclusion that the right to marry was a fundamental right because of its importance to the welfare of a couple and their children.  Similarly, Justice Kennedy did not consider the “procreation” argument persuasive to justify denying the right to marry to same-sex couples.  On the other hand, the Supreme Court did not say anywhere in its opinion that states are constitutionally required to treat same-sex and different-sex couples exactly the same in every respect, ignoring any factual distinctions between them.  Justice Devine’s argument seems strained, but not totally implausible, especially in the hands of a conservatively-inclined court.

Timing is everything in terms of getting an issue before the Supreme Court, especially if the aim of Texas conservatives and their anti-LGBT allies around the country is to get the issue there after Trump has had two appointments.  Once the Texas Supreme Court hears oral argument on March 1, it could take as long as it likes to issue a ruling on the appeal, and it could be strategic about holding up a ruling until it looks likely that any Supreme Court appeal would be considered after the 2017-18 Term of the Court has concluded in June 2018.  After the Texas Supreme Court rules, the losing party could take up to 90 days to file a petition in the Supreme Court.  If the petition arrives at the Supreme Court after the end of its term, that Court won’t decide whether to grant review until the beginning of its new term in the fall of 2018, and if the petition is granted, argument would not take place for several months, giving the parties time to brief the merits of the case.  If the Texas Supreme Court decides to affirm the court of appeals, it is highly likely that Pidgeon and Hicks, abetted by Abbott and Paxton, will seek Supreme Court review.  If the Texas Supreme Court reverses, the City of Houston will have to decide whether to seek Supreme Court review, or whether to adopt a wait-and-see attitude while the trial court proceeds to a final ruling on the merits of the case.  And the trial court could well decide, upon sober reflection, that Obergefell compels a ruling against Pidgeon and Hicks, which would put them back in the driver’s seat as to the decision to appeal to the Supreme Court.

If a second Trump appointee was confirmed while all of this was playing out, the case would be heard by a bench with a majority of conservative justices appointed by Republican presidents, one by George H.W. Bush (Clarence Thomas), two by George W. Bush (Chief Justice John Roberts and Samuel Alito), and two by Donald Trump. Trump’s appointees would be joining three Republican colleagues who filed or signed dissents in the Windsor and Obergefell cases.  Regardless of how the Petitioner frames the questions posed to the Court, the justices are free to rewrite the question or questions on which they grant review.  If a majority of the newly-constituted Court is eager to revisit Obergefell, they could grant review on the question whether Obergefell was correctly decided.  Based on past history, they could reach that issue if a majority wants to do so without signaling its salience in the Order granting review.

Much of this is conjecture, of course. Justice Devine was a lone voice dissenting from the September 2 order to deny review in this case.  But that order was issued at a time when national pollsters were near unanimous in predicting that Hillary Clinton would be elected and, consequently, would be filling the Scalia vacancy and any others that occurred over the next four years. The political calculus changed dramatically on November 8 when Trump was elected. Even though he has stated that he accepts marriage equality as a “settled issue,” his announced intention to appoint Justices in the image of Scalia and to seek reversal of Roe v. Wade, the Court’s seminal abortion decision from 1973, suggests that he will appoint justices who have a propensity to agree with the Obergefell dissenters that the marriage equality ruling was illegitimate.  (Chief Justice Roberts wrote in his dissent that it had “nothing to do with the Constitution.”)  Although the Court has frequently resisted efforts to get it to reverse highly consequential constitutional decisions, it has occasionally done so, most notably in the LGBT context in its 2003 ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, striking down a state sodomy law and overruling its 1986 decision in Bowers v. Hardwick.

After the election, many LGBT rights organizations issued statements to reassure people that marriage equality would not immediately disappear after Trump took office. That remains true.  A constitutional ruling by the Supreme Court can only be changed by the adoption of a constitutional amendment, which Democrats can easily block in Congress, or overruling by the Supreme Court, which requires that a new case come up to the Court at a time when a majority of the Court is receptive to the overruling argument, which seems to be at least two years off from now.  But these statements, including those by this writer, conceded that in the long run it was possible that Trump’s Supreme Court appointments and new appeals headed to the Supreme Court might come together to endanger marriage equality.  This new development in the Houston benefits case shows one way that could happen.

Anti-Gay Justice Scalia Exits the Stage

Posted on: February 16th, 2016 by Art Leonard No Comments

With the death of Antonin Scalia the Supreme Court has lost its most outspoken anti-gay member.  Ever since taking his seat on the high bench in 1986, Justice Scalia voted consistently against gay rights claims, sometimes in the majority and sometimes in dissent, regardless of the factual context in which they arose.

Scalia was appointed to the Court by President Ronald Reagan shortly after the Court had decided Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), the notorious case in which it rejected by a 5-4 vote a constitutional challenge to Georgia’s law making gay sex a crime.  There is no doubt how he would have voted in that case, since he subsequently argued (in dissent) that it had been correctly decided and should be reaffirmed and followed.

The first LGBT rights case to come up after his appointment, during Scalia’s first term on the Court in 1987, was San Francisco Arts & Athletics v. U.S. Olympic Committee.  The Olympic Committee sued for an injunction to stop SFAA from holding its international athletic competition under the name “Gay Olympics.”  The Supreme Court ruled that the USOC had a right under a federal statute to veto the use of “Olympics” in connection with athletic competitions run by other organizations, and that the statute did not violate the 1st Amendment free speech rights of others who wanted to run their own “Olympic” games.  Scalia joined the majority opinion by Justice Lewis Powell.  The Court refused to entertain the argument that USOC’s discriminatory exercise of its veto – allowing many other organizations to use “Olympic” in their name unchallenged – raised a constitutional issue, as the Court found that USOC was not a governmental organization, and thus not bound by the Equal Protection requirement.  Justices William J. Brennan and Thurgood Marshall dissented in full, and two other justices  — Sandra Day O’Connor and Harry Blackmun — also opined that the case should be sent back to a lower court for further consideration of an equal protection challenge.

The Court ruled in 1988 that a gay man who had been discharged by the Central Intelligence Agency had a right to seek judicial review of his claim that he was a victim of unconstitutional discrimination.  Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote the decision for the Court.  Scalia, who normally voted in line with the Chief Justice, penned a lengthy dissent, arguing that Congress had insulated such CIA personnel decisions from judicial review and was constitutionally entitled to do so.

Scalia subsequently joined a dissent by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy in 1989 in Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, a case in which a majority of the Court accepted the argument that an employer who takes adverse action against an employee because she fails to conform to gender stereotypes may be violating the sex discrimination ban in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Justice Brennan’s opinion for a plurality of the Court influenced lower courts to adopt a broader approach to Title VII’s ban on sex discrimination, leading ultimately to provide protection to transgender plaintiffs and even some gay plaintiffs who can make a plausible claim that they encounter workplace discrimination due to gender stereotype non-conformity.  Although Justice Kennedy’s dissent, joined by Scalia, focused mainly on other issues in the case, it voiced skepticism about the “sex stereotyping” theory.

In 1996 Scalia “vigorously” dissented (to use his descriptive word) from the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling in Romer v. Evans, holding that Colorado Amendment 2 violated the equal protection rights of gay people.  Amendment 2 prohibited the state or its political subdivisions from adopting legislation that would protect gay people from discrimination.  The case provided Scalia with his first vehicle to accuse the Court of signing on to a gay rights agenda, because it was the first potentially wide-ranging pro-gay-rights decision to emanate from the Court.

“The constitutional amendment before us here is not the manifestation of a “‘bare . . . desire to harm'” homosexuals,” he wrote, refuting Justice Kennedy’s reasoning for the majority, “but is rather a modest attempt by seemingly tolerant Coloradans to preserve traditional sexual mores against the efforts of a politically powerful minority to revise those mores through use of the laws.” The description of “seemingly tolerant Coloradans” who had voted overwhelmingly to enact Amendment 2 in the wake of a horrifyingly homophobic media campaign drew shocked guffaws from LGBT commentators.

He continued: “This Court has no business imposing upon all Americans the resolution favored by the elite class from which the Members of this institution are selected, pronouncing that ‘animosity’ toward homosexuality is evil.”  Scalia aligned the majority of the Court with the organized bar and the law school community, which had condemned anti-gay discrimination and moved to deny access to law school placement offices to discriminatory recruiters.  After summarizing Justice Kennedy’s rationale for the decision in sarcastic terms, Scalia insisted that by such reasoning “constitutional jurisprudence has achieved terminal silliness.”  He argued that the Court’s ruling was inconsistent with Bowers v. Hardwick and accused the Court of overruling that case without saying so.  If it was constitutional to make gay sex a crime, he asked, how could it be a violation of equal protection for a state to refuse to protect homosexuals from discrimination?

Pushing the point further, he wrote: “Of course it is our moral heritage that one should not hate any human being or class of human beings. But I had thought that one could consider certain conduct reprehensible — murder, for example, or polygamy, or cruelty to animals — and could exhibit even ‘animus’ toward such conduct. Surely that is the only sort of ‘animus’ at issue here: moral disapproval of homosexual conduct, the same sort of moral disapproval that produced the centuries-old criminal laws that we held constitutional in Bowers.”

He went on at length in a similar vein, ultimately accusing the Court of ruling based on politics rather than law, and arguing for the right of individuals who did not want to associate with homosexuals in their workplaces to refuse to employ them.

This dissent set the pattern for Scalia’s increasingly vociferous dissents as he found himself on the losing side in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), United States v. Windsor (2013), and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), the cases in which the Court struck down sodomy laws, the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act, and state laws against same-sex marriage.  These dissents were littered with colorful phrases one would not expect to find in the normally staid volumes of Supreme Court opinions, accusing Justice Kennedy of “argle-bargle” and asserting that he would be so ashamed to sign on the logic of the Obergefell decision that he would put his head in a paper bag.

Scalia’s dissents in these cases proved to be prophetic, probably to his dismay. He accused the Court of overruling Bowers v. Hardwick sub silentio in Romer, and the Court subsequently did so explicitly and emphatically in Lawrence.  He accused the Court of opening up the path to same-sex marriage in Lawrence, and exactly ten years later the Court, citing Lawrence, struck down the federal ban on recognition of same-sex marriages in Windsor.  In his Windsor dissent, Scalia accused the Court of providing a road-map for lower courts to strike down state bans on same-sex marriage, predicting that the issue would be back before the Court in two years.  Precisely two years later, the Court struck down such bans in Obergefell, over a hysterical Scalia dissent.  Not surprisingly, many lower court judges cited and quoted from Scalia’s dissents to support their rulings striking down same-sex marriage bans.

Throughout these dissents, Scalia bemoaned the Court’s weakening of the ability of legislative majorities to codify their moral judgments in law, detesting the moral relativism exhibited by Kennedy’s opinions exalting private morality above public morality as a matter of individual liberty protected by the Constitution.

When the marriage equality cases arrived at the Court’s door, Scalia fought a rear-guard action to try to keep lower court marriage equality rulings “stayed” until the Supreme Court could decide the cases, perhaps holding out hope that Justice Kennedy was not ready to extend the Windsor decision further, joining dissents by Justice Clarence Thomas, who sought to preserve the anti-marriage status quo as long as possible, even after the Supreme Court had denied review to several pro-marriage equality court of appeals rulings and agreed to review the one adverse ruling out of the 6th Circuit.

Scalia did enjoy some victories along the way after Romer v. Evans, however.  In Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Group of Boston, he joined a unanimous Court in striking down the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s ruling that the organizers of the Boston St. Patrick’s Day Parade were required under a state civil rights law to allow an LGBT group to participate in the event.  In Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, he joined a 5-4 majority in striking down the New Jersey Supreme Court’s ruling that the Boy Scouts did not enjoy a 1st Amendment right to exclude openly gay men from leadership positions in violation of the state’s civil rights law.  In Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic & Institutional Rights, Inc., he joined Chief Justice Roberts’ opinion for the unanimous Court in rejecting a constitutional challenge to the Solomon Amendment, a provision denying federal funding to law schools that were refusing to allow military recruiters on campus due to the Defense Department’s anti-gay policies, reversing a contrary decision by the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals.

Scalia joined dissents in several other cases where the Court affirmatively addressed issues of concern to the LGBT community.  In Bragdon v. Abbott, he joined a dissent by Chief Justice William Rehnquist from the Court’s conclusion that a woman with HIV-infection could asserted a discrimination claim under the Americans with Disabilities Act against a dentist who refused to provide treatment to her in his office.  In Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, a 5-4 ruling, he joined a dissent against Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s majority opinion, which held that the University of California Law School could refuse to extend official recognition to a student group that explicitly excluded “homosexuals” from its membership on religious grounds.  He was, of course, a frequent dissenter in cases upholding women’s right to terminate their pregnancies as part of their liberty under the Due Process Clause, in a key decision – Planned Parenthood v. Casey – writing in dissent that the Court’s support for abortion rights was inconsistent with its upholding of laws against “homosexual sodomy” in Bowers v. Hardwick.

Sometimes, however, Scalia wrote opinions that might prove useful to gay litigants, although their interests were not directly involved in the case before the Court. In Employment Division v. Smith, he wrote for the Court that individuals could not claim a broad right under the 1st Amendment’s protection for free exercise of religion to refuse to comply with general state laws because of their religious objections.  Although that decision spurred the passage of federal and state statutes providing some protection for religious dissenters, the degree to which such statutes would shield employers, landlords or businesses serving the public from discrimination charges remains hotly contested, and so far many courts have ruled against recalcitrant businesses that had refused to provide goods or services for same-sex weddings.  Scalia’s opinion in Smith was cited in some of these cases to reject the constitutional free exercise claims raised by the discriminators.

In another case, Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services, Scalia wrote for a unanimous Court that same-sex workplace harassment might violate Title VII of the Civil Rights Act if the victim was singled out for harassment because of his sex. This case has also proved useful to some gay male litigants combatting workplace harassment by male co-workers, and Scalia’s comment that a statute could be interpreted to address “comparable evils” to those envisioned by the legislature has proved useful to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as it has moved to apply Title VII to discrimination claims brought by gay and transgender people.  One doubts that this was Scalia’s intent in penning the phrase, however.

In the Supreme Court’s only ruling to date on transgender rights, Farmer v. Brennan, Scalia joined an opinion for the Court by Justice David Souter holding that prison officials could be sued under the 8th Amendment for failing to take steps to protect transgender inmates from known risks of harm while incarcerated.

Justice Scalia’s main impact on the Court’s jurisprudence in general was to lend a degree of respectability to certain theories of constitutional and statutory interpretation that had been rejected or minimized in the past, but he was never able to persuade a stable majority of the Court to fully embrace his notion that the Constitution is “dead” – in the sense that its meaning was fixed at the time its provisions were adopted and cannot change in light of new circumstances – or that statutes should be construed by reference to their language without any regard to what legislators said they intended to accomplish by enacting them – so-called “legislative history,” for which he had open disdain. However, when he was assigned to write for the majority, he managed to work these ideas into his opinions to some extent, giving lower courts a basis to invoke them from time to time.

Justice Scalia departed from Supreme Court tradition by engaging in a substantial amount of public speaking.  In the past most justices avoided speaking publicly about substantive legal issues, lest they cross an ethical line and signal their views about cases pending before the Court.  Such concerns did not seem to bother Scalia, who said publicly on several occasions what he subsequently said officially in court opinions concerning claims by gay people for constitutional protection, which he invariably found to lack merit.  Homosexuality is not mentioned in the Constitution, which struck Scalia as the end of the matter, and he repeatedly argued that “the people” were entitled to vote against the interest of LGBT people as a matter of “democracy.”

After almost thirty years of service, he will be missed from the Court by many, but not all for the same reasons.

Supreme Court Strikes Section 3 of DOMA, Dismisses Proposition 8 Appeal

Posted on: June 28th, 2013 by Art Leonard 1 Comment

[Second draft of history.  My prior posting on this week’s ruling in the DOMA and Prop 8 cases was written shortly after the opinion was release, and was intended as a basis for my journalistic comment to be published in Gay City News that day.  Herewith my more extensive draft, reflecting further thought and containing many more quotes from the Court’s opinion, written two days later.  And amended after a few hours to reflect some startling new developments today.]

On June 26, the last decision day of its October 2012 Term, the United States Supreme Court issued a pair of 5-4 rulings, holding unconstitutional Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and thus requiring the federal government to treat lawfully-contracted same-sex marriages as equal to different-sex marriages for purposes of federal law, and rejecting an appeal by initiative proponents of a federal trial court decision invalidating California Proposition 8 of 2008, setting the stage for the resumption of same-sex marriages in that state.  United States v. Windsor, 2013 WL 3196928; Hollingsworth v. Perry, 2013 WL 3196927. 

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, Jr., writing for the Court in Windsor, found that Section 3 of DOMA, which required the federal government to deny legal recognition to same-sex marriages validly contracted by the law of the jurisdiction where they took place, violates the 5th Amendment’s guarantee of due process and equal protection.  Chief Justice John R. Roberts, Jr., writing for the Court in Hollingsworth, found that the initiative proponents lacked standing to appeal the trial court’s decision, leaving both the Supreme Court and the 9th Circuit without jurisdiction to rule on the merits of the case.  The Court vacated the 9th Circuit’s decision (which had affirmed the trial court’s broad due process and equality ruling on a narrower equal protection theory), and ordered that the appeal be dismissed, which would logically result in terminating the 9th Circuit’s stay of the trial court’s Order, which had enjoined state officials from enforcing the constitutional amendment enacted by Prop 8. At the request of California Attorney General Kamala Harris, the 9th Circuit panel dissolved the stay on Friday, and the plaintiff couples promptly got married; in San Francisco, Attorney General Harris officiated for the wedding of Kris Perry and Sandy Stier at City Hall; in Los Angeles, outgoing Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa officiated at the wedding of Paul Katami and Jeffrey Zarrillo. 

The line-up of justices in Windsor was predictable, with Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, all appointees of Democratic presidents and sometimes referred to as the Court’s “liberal wing,” signing Kennedy’s opinion.  There were three dissenting opinions.  Chief Justice Roberts, writing for himself; Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for himself and Justice Clarence Thomas, with partial joinder by the Chief; and Justice Samuel Alito, writing for himself with partial joinder by Justice Thomas.  Roberts, Scalia and Thomas agreed on the proposition that the case was not properly before the Court, because the Petitioner, the United States, did not disagree with the substance of the 2nd Circuit’s opinion holding Section 3 unconstitutional.  Thus, in their view, the case did not present the Court with a real “controversy” to resolve between the government and Plaintiff-Respondent Edith Schlain (“Edie”) Windsor, as the government was not asking the Court to do other than affirm the decision below.  Evidently none of these three justices considered that the presence in the case of the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group of the U.S. House of Representatives (BLAG), which was allowed to intervene to defend Section 3, would cure this jurisdictional fault.  Justice Alito, by contrast, opined that BLAG’s participation as an interested party cured the jurisdictional defect, arguing that BLAG as representative of the House of Representatives (pursuant to a resolution adopted by the House in January 2013, a month after the Court granted the petition for certiorari in this case), had a real interest in the resolution of the case, since the lower court’s opinion had invalidated legislation enacted by the House, thus in effect constricting its authority to pass legislation.  Although Roberts, Scalia and Thomas believed the case was not properly before the Court, this did not stop them from pronouncing on the merits, all agreeing that Section 3 was constitutional.  Justice Alito also opined that Section 3 was constitutional, but on somewhat different grounds.  The Chief Justice signed on to the portion of Scalia’s dissent addressing jurisdiction, and Thomas, who signed on to Scalia’s entire dissent, also signed on to the portion of Alito’s dissent addressing the merits. 

The line-up of justices in Hollingsworth was less predictable, and initially puzzling to many.  The Chief Justice’s opinion was joined by Justices Scalia, Ginsburg, Breyer and Kagan, while Justice Kennedy’s dissent was joined by Justices Thomas, Alito and Sotomayor.  Roberts’ opinion for the Court insisted that in order to have Article III standing, an appellant must show that the lower court’s ruling imposes a personal and tangible harm on him, rejecting the alternative argument that the initiative proponents were suing in a representative capacity on behalf of the state of California.  There were no concurring opinions.  Justice Kennedy argued in dissent that the California Supreme Court’s decision, entitled to binding effect as an authoritative construction of California law, provided a basis for finding that the initiative proponents had standing to sue on behalf of the state as crucial to the “integrity” of the state’s initiative process.  Neither Roberts nor Kennedy said anything in their opinions about the merits of the case.  Indeed, the only member of the Court to give even an oblique discussion to the Prop 8 merits was Justice Alito, in his dissent in Windsor, in which he devoted a lengthy textual footnote to ridiculing the fact finding process of the district court in Hollingsworth.

The DOMA Decision

Justice Kennedy’s decision first took on the jurisdictional issue, acknowledging the unusual posture of the case, in which the Petitioner (the United States represented by the Solicitor General) was asking the Court to affirm the decision below.  This led the court to appoint as amicus curiae Prof. Vicki Jackson of Harvard Law School to argue against jurisdiction, since none of the “parties” would make such an argument.  Ultimately, Kennedy concluded that the United States had standing to appeal the 2nd Circuit’s decision because of the government’s commitment to continue enforcing Section 3 unless and until there was a definitive ruling by the federal courts as to its constitutionality. 

The case began when the Internal Revenue Service, relying on Section 3, refused to allow Edith Windsor to use the marital exemption to avoid paying taxes on her inheritance from her wife, Thea Spyer, who died in 2009 in New York City after New York State courts had begun to recognize same-sex marriages contracted elsewhere.  (Windsor and Spyer married in Canada after having been a couple for over forty years.  New York subsequently adopted marriage equality legislatively in 2011.)  Because of the Obama Administration’s determination that it should continue enforcing Section 3, despite the conclusion by Attorney General Eric Holder and President Barack Obama that the provision was unconstitutional, the government would not comply with the lower courts’ orders to refund Windsor’s $363,000 tax payment on her inheritance.  Thus, something tangible with respect to the parties turns on the Court’s decision in this case; either Windsor gets her refund or she doesn’t.  This was enough, in Kennedy’s view, to satisfy Article III’s standing requirement for the government. For Scalia, it was a “contrivance” intended to manufacture an opportunity for the Court to rule on the constitutionality of Section 3.

Further, Kennedy found, the government had a very legitimate and direct interest in getting a definitive national precedent on Section 3, in light of the 1st Circuit’s previous ruling finding it unconstitutional.  Beyond meeting the requirements of Article III, the case would also have to meet the Court’s jurisprudence on when it might be “prudential” for the Court to abstain from deciding a case.  In the absence of a ruling on Section 3, he pointed out, “The district courts in 94 districts throughout the Nation would be without precedential guidance not only in tax refund suits but also in cases involving the whole of DOMA’s sweep involving over 1,000 federal statutes and a myriad of federal regulations. . .  Rights and privileges of hundreds of thousands of persons would be adversely affected, pending a case in which all prudential concerns about justiciability are absent.  That numerical prediction may not be certain, but it is certain that the cost in judicial resources and expense of litigation for all persons adversely affected would be immense.”  It was clear that Justice Kennedy was persuaded by the practical problem faced by married same-sex couples and the government, were a ruling on the constitutionality of Section 3 to be further delayed.  “In these unusual and urgent circumstances,” he wrote, “the very term ‘prudential’ counsels that it is a proper exercise of the Court’s responsibility to take jurisdiction.”

Scalia decisively rejected these holdings, claiming that one could scour the U.S. Reports and never find a case in which the Court had asserted jurisdiction at the behest of a Petitioner who was asking the Court merely to affirm the holding of the court of appeals.  He observed that “the plaintiff and the Government agree entirely on what should happen in this lawsuit.  They agree that the court below got it right; and they agreed in the court below that the court below that one got it right as well.  What, then are we doing here?”  He characterized as “jaw-dropping” Kennedy’s assertion that the role of the Court was to say “what the law is” in the sense that the famous quotation of Chief Justice John Marshall used by Kennedy was presented in the majority opinion.  Scalia asserted that the Supreme Court operates to decide actual cases, incidentally deciding questions of law as required to determine the rights of the parties in a particular case, and that the Court does not have a general jurisdiction to decide “what the law is” in the absence of an actual controversy between the parties.  He chided Kennedy (an internationalist with a penchant for citing foreign precedents, to Scalia’s continued dismay) for mistaking the function of American courts for those of some other countries, citing as an example a treatise on the German constitutional court.

Kennedy’s approach to the merits of the case strikingly resembled his approach to the two earlier major gay rights opinions he wrote: Romer v. Evans (1996) and Lawrence v. Texas (2003).  In both of those cases, Kennedy eschewed the terminology that legal commentators, some justices, and many lower court judges have adopted to describe the process of judicial review, such as “strict scrutiny,” “heightened scrutiny,” “rational basis” and “suspect classification.”  He was true to form here, writing a decision that never employs this terminology and thus leaves it open to commentators and later courts to try to determine its doctrinal significance. 

Kennedy began his discussion of the merits with an extensive exposition of the traditional role of the states in deciding who could marry, and the traditional deference to state decisions on marriage by the federal government, as part of the allocation of roles in our federal system.  For several pages of his opinion, it appeared that he was ruling that Section 3 violates the allocation of authority between federal and state governments by overriding the determination of particular states that same-sex couples should be entitled to the same “status” and “dignity” as different-sex couples have in their marriages.  “DOMA rejects the long-established precept that the incidents, benefits, and obligations of marriage are uniform for all married couples within each State, though they may vary, subject to constitutional guarantees, from one State to the next.  Despite these considerations,” he continues, “it is unnecessary to decide whether this federal intrusion on state power is a violation of the Constitution because it disrupts the federal balance.”  But, Kennedy says, quoting his opinion in Romer, “discriminations of an unusual character especially suggest careful consideration to determine whether they are obnoxious to the constitutional provision.”  In other words, Kennedy will not rest his decision on federalism, but will refer to Congress’s unusual “intrusion” into a traditional state function to justify a more demanding level of judicial review than might otherwise be applied in this case as part of his 5th Amendment analysis.

“The States’ interest in defining and regulating the marital relation, subject to constitutional guarantees, stems from the understanding that marriage is more than a routine classification for purposes of certain statutory benefits,” he explained.  “Private, consensual sexual intimacy between two adult persons of the same sex may not be punished by the State, and it can form ‘but one element in a personal bond that is more enduring,’” quoting his own opinion in Lawrence.  “By its recognition of the validity of same-sex marriages performed in other jurisdictions and then by authorizing same-sex unions and same-sex marriages, New York sought to give further protection and dignity to that bond.”  But, he points out, “DOMA seeks to injure the very class New York seeks to protect.  By doing so it violates basic due process and equal protection principles applicable to the Federal Government.”  Thus, Kennedy cited as the constitutional basis for the ruling both aspects of the Due Process Clause of the 5th Amendment, the substantive due process and the equal protection guarantees that prior Supreme Court decisions have found to inhere in that provision.  “DOMA’s unusual deviation from the usual tradition of recognizing and accepting state definitions of marriage here operates to deprive same-sex couples of the benefits and responsibilities that come with the federal recognition of their marriages.  This is strong evidence of a law having the purpose and effect of disapproval of that class.  The avowed purpose and practical effect of the law here in question are to impose a disadvantage, a separate status, and so a stigma upon all who enter into same-sex marriages made lawful by the unquestioned authority of the States.”

Thus, for Kennedy, this case was very closely analogous to Romer, where he found that Colorado voters enacted Amendment 2 to make gay people unequal to everybody else, without any plausible legitimate justification.  In this case, after reviewing the blatantly homophobic legislative history of DOMA’s enactment in 1996, he found a similar fatal flaw.  “DOMA writes inequality into the entire United States Code,” he exclaims.  “DOMA’s principal effect is to identify a subset of state-sanctioned marriages and make them unequal.  The principal purpose is to impose inequality, not for other reasons like government efficiency.  Responsibilities, as well as rights, enhance the dignity and integrity of the person.  And DOMA contrives to deprive some couples married under the laws of their State, but not other couples, of both rights and responsibilities.  By creating two contradictory marriage regimes within the same State, DOMA forces same-sex couples to live as married for the purpose of state law but unmarried for the purpose of federal law, thus diminishing the stability and predictability of basic personal relations the State has found it proper to acknowledge and protect.  By this dynamic DOMA undermines both the public and private significance of state-sanctioned same-sex marriages; for it tells those couples, and all the world, that their otherwise valid marriages are unworthy of federal recognition. This places same-sex couples in an unstable position of being in a second-tier marriage.  The differentiation demeans the couple, whose moral and sexual choices the Constitution protects (citing Lawrence) and whose relationship the State has sought to dignify.”  He also found that it “humiliates tens of thousands of children now being raised by same-sex couples.” 

So the analogy with Romer is very close; Colorado enacted Amendment 2 to make gay people unequal to others without any policy justification, and Congress enacted Section 3 to make gay peoples’ marriages unequal to those of others without any policy justification.  Interestingly, Kennedy omitted to discuss the specific policy justifications that BLAG advanced in its brief and oral argument, a failure that earned the scorn of Justice Scalia in his impassioned dissent. Having found that “the principal purpose and the necessary effect of this law are to demean those persons who are in a lawful same-sex marriage,” Kennedy concluded, “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 5th Amendment of the Constitution.”  He went on to explain that this is a deprivation both of liberty and of equal protection of the laws, as that concept has been found by the Court to be an essential part of the Due Process guarantee.  Early in the opinion, Kennedy made clear that all his references to “DOMA” refer only to Section 3, as the Court was not asked to rule on Section 2, the provision that purports to free states from any constitutional obligation to recognize same-sex marriages contracted in other states.

Kennedy ended with a final statement that the opinion “and its holding are confined to those lawful marriages,” i.e., “same-sex marriages made lawful by the State.”  Without expressly discussing whether the federal government is obligated to recognize same-sex marriage of individuals who reside in states that do not recognize such marriages, Kennedy’s closing paragraph creates some ambiguity on a very important point, since this decision, by its silence, leaves to the Executive Branch the task of figuring out how to implement federal laws and regulations without clear guidance.  Kennedy’s opinion might be read to restrict the federal obligation to recognizing marriages that are recognized by the state in which a couple resides, but it might alternatively be read to require the federal government to recognize lawfully contracted marriages regardless of where the couple happen to be when the issue arises.  The more expansive reading makes more sense, and seems consistent with the overall rhetorical stance of Kennedy’s opinion, but the history of subsequent reception of %Romer% and Lawrence shows Kennedy’s brand of inscrutable opinion-writing can give rise to contradictory views as to the precise holding of the Court.

Shortly after the opinion was announced, President Obama embraced the more expansive obligation of recognizing lawful marriages regardless of the couples’ residence, but emphasized that he was talking “as a president, not a lawyer,” and that it would be up to the Attorney General, working in concert with other department heads (and perhaps ultimately the federal courts), to sort this out.  Some department heads were quick on the draw.  Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel quickly indicated that the Defense Department would recognize lawful same-sex marriages for purposes of military benefits regardless of residence, and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano chimed in similarly as to immigration issues administered by her department, including recognition of married bi-national couples for purposes of residency and citizenship applications.  The Office of Personnel Management for the federal government quickly fell into line, sending a notice to federal agencies on Friday that same-sex spouses of federal employees are now eligible for benefits coverage, retroactive to June 26, and establishing special open enrollment periods to get them signed up for benefits.  But it was less clear how this issue would be resolve for purposes of federal taxes, Social Security, and other programs that have traditionally relied on the place of residence in determining whether a couple is married.  The Internal Revenue Service issued a statement, saying that it would issue formal guidance as soon as possible, but without tipping its hand, setting off lots of speculation without hard data. 

Chief Justice Roberts’ dissenting opinion, after briefly stating agreement with Scalia’s view on jurisdiction, was devoted to attempting to cabin the impact of the decision by striving to characterize it as a “federalism” decision that would be of no relevance to the question whether same-sex couples have a right to marry under the 14th Amendment.  “The Court does not have before it,” he wrote, “and the logic of its opinion does not decide, the distinct question whether the States, in the exercise of their ‘historic and essential authority to define the marital relation,’ may continue to utilize the traditional definition of marriage.”  And it is accurate to say that Kennedy made clear that the Court was not addressing that question.  Nonetheless, virtually ignoring Kennedy’s 5th Amendment analysis and ultimate statement that Section 3 violates the 5th Amendment while expressly eschewing a decision based on federalism, Roberts asserted: “The dominant theme of the majority opinion is that the Federal Government’s intrusion into an area ‘central to state domestic relations law applicable to its residents and citizens’ is sufficiently ‘unusual’ to set off alarm bells.  I think that the majority goes off course, as I have said, but it is undeniable that its judgment is based on federalism.”  If that were the case, of course, the decision might be seen as having little relevance to the question whether states can deny gay people the right to marry.

But Justice Scalia emphatically disagreed, which explains why the Chief did not join that portion of his dissent devoted to the merits.  Characterizing Kennedy’s holding on the merits as “rootless and shifting” in terms of its “justifications,” he said, “For example, the opinion starts with seven full pages about the traditional power of States to define domestic relations – initially fooling many readers, I am sure, into thinking that this is a federalism opinion.”  One of those fooled, evidently, was the Chief Justice, unless, as seems more likely, his puzzlement was more strategic than real.  But, said Scalia, although Kennedy’s opinion continues to refer to federalism from time to time as part of its 5th Amendment analysis, the frequent references to equality and liberty make this a 5th Amendment case. 

However, Scalia complains, “if this is meant to be an equal-protection opinion, it is a confusing one.  The opinion does not resolve and indeed does not even mention what had been the central question in this litigation: whether, under the Equal Protection Clause, laws restricting marriage to a man and a woman are reviewed for more than mere rationality.”  Scalia said that he would “review this classification only for its rationality,” and the Court purports to do that, since it cites Moreno as authority, expressly a rational basis case.  “As nearly as I can tell, the Court agrees with that; its opinion does not apply strict scrutiny, and its central propositions are taken from rational-basis cases like Moreno. But the Court certainly does not apply anything that resembles that deferential framework.”  He then noted how Kennedy slipped back and forth between equality language and liberty language, but “never utters the dread words ‘substantive due process,’ perhaps sensing the disrepute into which that doctrine has fallen.”  (Disrepute in the Scalia household, perhaps, but not among those who disagree with the so-called originalist jurisprudence of Scalia and his acolytes on the Court.)  He also argued that this could not really be a due process case, because of the lack of a history of respect for same-sex marriage, a test that the Court has used in the past for determining whether particular conduct is entitled to protection under the Due Process Clause.  But Scalia was fighting a rear-guard action here, as Kennedy had eschewed the “history and tradition” test when writing for a majority of the Court in Lawrence, saying that longstanding historical regard for a right was not a necessary requirement for Due Process protection.  This is really part of the “living constitution” debate, in which Scalia recently took the position during a public talk that the Constitution is “dead, dead, dead” – not to say that the Constitution is meaningless, but rather to say that, in his view, the essence of a written Constitution is that its meaning is fixed upon its adoption and does not evolve over time.  This view has never won a firm majority on the Court, but Scalia writes as if it is well-established, as it is in his own mind.  Kennedy clearly disagrees, as do the four Democratic appointees and even, from time to time, Chief Justice Roberts.   Only Thomas and, perhaps, Alito, seem to adhere to Scalia’s views on this.

After ridiculing Kennedy’s opinion for never providing a fully-developed analysis of any of the doctrinal bases cited for the Court’s holding, Scalia wrote, “Some might conclude that this loaf could have used a while longer in the oven.  But that would be wrong; it is already overcooked.  The most expert care in preparation cannot redeem a bad recipe.  The sum of all the Court’s nonspecific hand-waving is that this law is invalid (maybe on equal-protection grounds, maybe on substantive-due-process grounds, and perhaps with some amorphous federalism component playing a role) because it is motivated by a ‘bare . . . desire to harm’ couples in same-sex marriages.”  Scalia then went on to hotly dispute – as he did in his Romer and Lawrence dissents – that antigay animosity was behind the challenged law, rejecting the idea that anti-gay legislation is necessarily the result of bigotry.  He suggested that Kennedy failed to engage the arguments put forth by BLAG to defend Section 3 “because it is harder to maintain the illusion of the Act’s supporters as unhinged members of a wild-eyed lynch mob when one first describes their views as they see them,” and accused the Court of labeling the proponents of DOMA as “enemies of the human race.” 

Also, as is his wont, Scalia predicted that the ultimate result of the opinion would be to decide the issues not presented to the Court, but beyond making predictions, and in a manner perhaps without precedent in the annals of the Supreme Court, Scalia inserted in his dissent several extended quotes from Kennedy’s opinion, edited to make the case that state laws denying same-sex couples the right to marry are unconstitutional.  Scalia provided a veritable roadmap for lower courts to use in striking down state anti-marriage amendments!  “By formally declaring anyone opposed to same-sex marriage an enemy of human decency,” he insisted, “the majority arms well every challenger to a state law restricting marriage to its traditional definition.”  Scalia concluded that the Court had improperly ventured into the political sphere, which is where he insisted that the issue of same-sex marriage should be resolved.

Alito’s dissent on the merits is more tempered than Scalia’s, adverting to the theories advocated by Prof. Robert George of Princeton University, a prominent foe of same-sex marriage who has argued that the traditional definition of marriage focused on its procreative potential and the complementarity of the two sexes, is an essential component of western civilization, with which we tamper at our peril.  After appointing out the different views as to the essential character of marriage, contrasting the traditional view of its procreative purpose and the modern view embraced by popular culture, Alito insisted that the Constitution takes no position between these two views and mandates neither.  Thus, the determination which view should be embraced by society is up to the polity speaking through the democratic process.  He argued that the Court should not intervene in this process.  “In our system of government,” he wrote, “ultimate sovereignty rests with the people, and the people have the right to control their own destiny.  Any change on a question so fundamental should be made by the people through their elected officials.”  And, “By asking the Court to strike down DOMA as not satisfying some form of heightened scrutiny, Windsor and the United States are really seeking to have the Court resolve a debate between two competing views of marriage. . .  The Constitution does not codify either of these views of marriage (although I suspect it would have been hard at the time of the adoption of the Constitution or the Fifth Amendment to find Americans who did not take the traditional view for granted).  The silence of the Constitution on this question should be enough to end the matter as far as the judiciary is concerned. . .  I would not presume to enshrine either vision of marriage in our constitutional jurisprudence.”

As noted above, Alito devoted a lengthy textual footnote, rather out of the blue, to deprecating the conduct of the Prop 8 trial, presenting this as an illustration of why, in his view, it is inappropriate for the courts to take on the same-sex marriage question.  “At times, the trial reached the heights of parody,” he wrote, “as when the trial judge questioned his ability to take into account the views of great thinkers of the past because they were unavailable to testify in person in his courtroom.”  He deprecated the contention in academic amicus briefs filed in Hollingsworth “that we are bound to accept the trial judge’s findings – including those on major philosophical questions and predictions about the future – unless they are ‘clearly erroneous.’  Only an arrogant legal culture that has lost all appreciation of its own limitations could take such a suggestion seriously,” he harrumphed.  Take that, you arrogant professors of constitutional law and civil procedure!  One suspects that Alito, who joined the dissent in Hollingsworth, was disappointed that he could not embody these comments in a majority or concurring opinion, and was eager to make these observations somewhere, so here they are in the other case.

The Proposition 8 Decision

The majority and dissenting opinions in Hollingsworth are shorter and need less discussion, since there was no comment in either concerning the merits of the 14th Amendment claim that Proposition 8, which inserted into the California Constitution an amendment providing that only different-sex marriages would be “valid or recognized in California,” violated the equal protection rights of same-sex couples. 

As noted above, Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the Court, accepted the contention that because the initiative proponents could not satisfy the traditional Article III standing test of having a tangible, personal interest in the outcome of the case (i.e., they were not asking the Court for a remedy specific to them, as Proposition 8 does not directly affect any of their own rights; presuming none of the proponents has any interest in marring a person of the same sex), they could not appeal the trial court’s decision.  If this means that sometimes state officials may rid themselves of noxious initiative products through the expedient of failing to defend them in the courts and then refusing to appeal the resulting decisions striking them down, then so be it.  That’s the way the system works, according to Roberts, because federal courts are only authorized to decide real cases between real parties.  “We have never before upheld the standing of a private party to defend the constitutionality of a state statute when state officials have chosen not to,” concluded Roberts. “We decline to do so for the first time here.” 

At the same time, Roberts made clear, the trial court did have jurisdiction, despite the failure of the named defendants to provide a substantive defense, and thus there is no jurisdictional fault identified by the Supreme Court with District Judge Vaughn Walker’s ruling in the case.  Justice Kennedy, in dissent, argued that the alternative standing theory was adequate to make this appeal proper, resting on the California Supreme Court’s admitted role as the authoritative exponent of California law.  That didn’t impress Chief Justice Roberts.  Since federal standing is a question of federal law, the California Supreme Court’s ruling was not binding on the federal courts.  “The judgment of the Ninth Circuit is vacated,” he wrote, “and the case is remanded with instructions to dismiss the appeal for lack of jurisdiction.”  That should mean, in the normal course of events, that the 9th Circuit will lift its stay of Judge Walker’s Order, shifting the focus of attention to the implementation of that Order.

There was some comment about the “odd” line-up of the justices in this 5-4 ruling.  The Chief Justice was joined by Justice Scalia and three members of the “liberal wing” of the Court, Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kagan.  Justice Kennedy’s dissent was joined by Justices Thomas and Alito and the remaining member of the “liberal” wing, Justice Sotomayor.  Thus, three justices who voted to strike down Section 3 of DOMA, and presumably would find Prop 8 to be unconstitutional, agreed with the Chief Justice that there was no jurisdiction to rule on the merits.  As to the dissenters, Justice Alito had found jurisdiction in Windsor and was clearly itching to uphold Proposition 8.  Justice Sotomayor, to judge by her general jurisprudential stance and her questions and comments at oral argument, would probably have voted to affirm the lower courts and strike down Prop 8 were she able to reach the issue.  Justice Thomas would most likely have agreed with Alito as to the merits.  Justice Kennedy’s views are more difficult to pin down, but one suspects that he would not be arguing so fiercely in favor of jurisdiction in this case if he did not have a strong view how it should be decided.  Perhaps reading the tea-leaves of his Windsor opinion and taking Scalia’s dissent at face value, Kennedy was also poised to strike down Prop 8.  So, the question occurs, if both Sotomayor and Kennedy were poised to strike down Prop 8, why did the other three “liberals” side with Roberts to dismiss the case? 

For months, commentators have been struggling with Justice Ginsburg’s views on Roe v. Wade and what they might portend for her position in the same-sex marriage cases.  Ginsburg has frequently stated that Roe was a premature and unduly expansive ruling, in light of the evolving political views on abortion rights at the time it was decided.  She has suggested that had the Court written a narrower decision, leaving the future scope of abortion rights to the legislative process, abortion might not have become the hot-button political issue that it quickly became, with all the divisive effects flowing from that development.  One speculates that Breyer and Kagan joined the Chief Justice in dismissing the appeal, having concluded that a decision on the merits might not strike down Prop 8 because Ginsburg might not supply the necessary fifth vote.  It may even be that Ginsburg joined out of the pragmatic view that a dismissal would result in allowing the district court’s opinion to go into effect and same-sex marriage to resume in California.  Thus, Prop 8 would be vanquished by default without the Supreme Court having to go on record as to whether same-sex couples have a right to marry under the 14th Amendment.  This might seem to be the most prudent way for the Court to deal with an issue as to which there remains much public controversy.  The art of avoiding merits decisions while obtaining desired results is a subtle weapon in the judge’s arsenal, perhaps cannily deployed here by Justice Ginsburg.  In this light, Justice Scalia’s concurrence with the Chief might seem odd, given his ardent opposition to same-sex marriage, but on the other hand his concurrence seems consistent with his impassioned dissent on jurisdiction in Windsor, in which the Chief concurred.

So, the bottom line on the Hollingsworth non-decision is that the Court, in effect, decided to let the district court opinion be the final, unreviewable word on the narrow question of whether Prop 8 was unconstitutional, without creating any precedent binding on other federal courts, since only appellate rulings create binding precedents.

But where did that leave the case after the stay was lifted and Judge Walker’s Orderwent into effect?  As to that, there was not complete agreement among the “parties” – if that term is loosely deployed to take in the original plaintiffs, the named defendants, and the intervenors whose standing to appeal had been definitively rejected by the Supreme Court.  The plaintiffs argued all along that if the appeal was dismissed, Judge Walker’s Order required the state of California to make marriage licenses available to same-sex couples and to recognize those marriages as fully equal to the marriages of different-sex couples throughout the state, not limited to the two counties (Alameda and Los Angeles) whose clerks were named defendants, and certainly not limited to the two plaintiff couples who brought the case.  In its 2009 decision finding that Prop 8 had been duly enacted, the California Supreme Court made clear that same-sex couples who married prior to the passage of Prop 8 remained married, and that their marriages were entitled to equal treatment under California law.  Indeed, that Court also ruled that pursuant to its prior decision on the merits in the marriage cases, domestic partnerships in California would be entitled to the same status as marriages under state law in order to satisfy the court’s equal protection and due process holdings.  It became clear after the Supreme Court’s decision was announced that Governor Jerry Brown (who was an original named defendant as attorney general) and Attorney General Kamala Harris agreed with that view.   Comments by the justices during the oral argument hinted that dismissal on grounds of jurisdiction was a likely outcome, and Governor Brown, anticipating the ruling, asked the attorney general for an analysis of “the scope of the district court’s injunction.”  She prepared a letter, which is dated June 3, advising the governor that “the injunction would apply statewide to all 58 counties, and effectively reinstate the ruling of the California Supreme Court in In re Marriage Cases (2008), 43 Cal.4th 757,857.” Harris concluded that the Department of Public Health could instruct all county officials to resume issuing marriage licenses and recording the subsequent marriages upon the lifting of the stay.  The governor accepted this advice, and hours after the Supreme Court’s opinion was announced, the Department sent instructions to all County Clerks and County Recorders accordingly.  As soon as the stay was lifted, the plaintiffs were alerted, rushed to get their marriage licenses, and were promptly married.  Some clerks offices planned to stay open late Friday to process license applications from same-sex couples.

The initiative proponents had a different view, not unexpectedly, and Andrew Pugno, their California counsel, argued that a trial court ruling is not binding beyond the immediate parties.  He contended that the only couples entitled to the benefit of Walker’s Order were the plaintiffs. This was not brought as a class action, he contended, and all the clerks in the state were not joined as co-defendants.  He also argued that it was established in California law that only appellate rulings have statewide effect.  Whether that would be true concerning a federal district court ruling as opposed to a California trial court ruling seems questionable, in light of the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution.  If Prop 8 is unconstitutional as a basis for denying marriage licenses to the plaintiffs, surely it is unconstitutional if used to deny marriage licenses to any other similarly-situated same-sex couple anywhere in California, and principles of res judicata should prevent the need to re-litigate the matter in each county.  Pugno threatened to take some sort of legal action to block implementation of the Order beyond the immediate parties, and criticized the lifting of the stay by the 9th Circuit panel and subsequent performance of marriages as lawless and inappropriately rushed.

As to timing, the Supreme Court’s procedures give disappointed parties up to 25 days to file motions for rehearing, after which the Court sends its mandate out to the lower court, in this case ordering dismissal of the appeal.  It seemed unlikely that the Court would grant rehearing in either case, as that would require the disappointed party to persuade a member of the majority to change his or her views.  The 9th Circuit Clerk filed an entry acknowledging receipt of the Court’s decision promptly after it was announced, a welcome artifact of our modern age of near-instantaneous electronic accessibility of high court rulings, and responded promptly to Attorney General Harris’s request to the lift the stay.  Perhaps facts on the ground will successfully outflank any attempt by the proponents to interfere with the speedy implementation of the Order.

Also on Friday, the 28th, came what is probably the first judicial reliance on U.S. v. Windsor, as a federal district judge in Michigan cited the case in ruling on pending pretrial motions in an action challenging the Attorney General’s position that an anti-marriage amendment prevents the implementation of a recently enacted domestic partnership law.  More details on that when I’ve had an opportunity to read the opinion.