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Kennedy Retirement from Supreme Court May Doom LGBT Rights Agenda

Posted on: June 27th, 2018 by Art Leonard No Comments

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s announcement on June 27 that he would retire from active service on the U.S. Supreme Court as of July 31, 2018, opening up a vacancy for President Donald J. Trump to fill with the assistance of the bare majority of Republican United States Senators, portends a serious setback for LGBT rights in the years ahead. Kennedy cast a crucial vote and wrote powerfully emotional opinions to establish the dignity of LGBT people under the Constitution’s 5th and 14th Amendments.  Justice Kennedy will be remembered as the author of four major Supreme Court opinions that worked a revolution in United States constitutional law concerning the rights of sexual minorities.

Before his opinion for the Court in Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620, was announced on May 20, 1996, the Court had never ruled in favor of gay litigants in an Equal Protection Case.   In Romer, the Court invalidated a Colorado constitutional amendment, adopted in a voter initiative that banned the state from protecting gay people from discrimination.  Kennedy condemned the measure as an attempt to render gay people as “strangers to the law,” and found it to be an obvious violation of equal protection, leading Justice Scalia to complain in dissent that the Court’s opinion was inconsistent with its ruling a decade earlier that sodomy laws were constitutional.

Before his opinion for the Court in Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558, was announced on June 26, 2003, the Court had never used the Due Process Clause to strike down an anti-gay law. In Lawrence, Kennedy wrote for five members of the Court that the Texas Homosexual Conduct Law, by making private consensual adult gay sex a crime, had unconstitutionally abridged the liberty of gay people.  (Justice O’Connor concurred in an opinion focused solely on the equal protection clause.)  This time, Justice Scalia’s dissent denounced the Court’s opinion as opening the path to same-sex marriage.

His opinions in United States v. Windsor, 570 U.S. 744 (2013) and Obergefell v. Hodges, 135 S. Ct. 2584 (2015), established a right to marriage equality for LGBT people in the United States, the most populous nation so far to allow same-sex couples to marry. In Windsor, Kennedy wrote for five members of the Court that the Defense of Marriage Act, a statute requiring the federal government to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages that were valid under state law, violated both the Due Process and Equal Protection requirements of the 5th Amendment, emphasizing the affront to the dignity of gay married couples.  In dissent, of course, Justice Scalia accused the Court of providing a framework for lower courts to strike down state bans on same-sex marriage.  Scalia’s dissent was prophetic, as just two years later the Court ruled in Obergefell that the 14th Amendment’s guarantees of Due Process and Equal Protection required the states to allow same-sex couples to marry and to recognize such marriages for all legal purposes.  In the intervening years, lower courts had cited and quoted from Kennedy’s Windsor opinion (and Scalia’s dissent) in finding bans on same-sex marriage unconstitutional.  Kennedy’s vote with the majority in the per curiam ruling in Pavan v. Smith, 137 S. Ct. 2075 (2017), reinforced Obergefell’s holding that couples in same-sex marriages enjoyed the “full constellation” of rights associated with marriage, as did his vote in V.L. v. E.L., 136 S. Ct. 1017 (2016), affirming that states were obligated to extend full faith and credit to second-parent adoptions granted by the courts of other states.

Justice Kennedy also joined the majority in a concurring opinion in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, 561 U.S. 661 (2010), rejecting a 1st Amendment challenge to a public university law school’s refusal to extend official recognition to a student group that overtly discriminated against gay students.

When LGBT litigants lost Kennedy’s vote, however, they lost the Court. In his most recent LGBT-related decision, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, 2018 WL 2465172, 2018 U.S. LEXIS 3386 (June 4, 2018), while reiterating his concern for the dignity of gay people to be able to participate without discrimination in the public marketplace, Kennedy could not bring himself to reject the religious free exercise claims of a Christian baker, and so engineered an “off ramp” by embracing a dubious argument that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission was so overtly hostile to the baker’s religious beliefs that he had been deprived of a “neutral forum” to decide his case.  Thus, Kennedy was able to assemble a 7-2 vote to overturn the Colorado Court of Appeals ruling in that case, without directly ruling on whether the baker’s religious objections would override the non-discrimination requirements of Colorado law, leading to oversimplified media headlines suggesting that the baker had a 1st Amendment right to refuse to make the cake.

Kennedy also joined the majority (without writing) in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, 530 U.S. 640 (2000), a 5-4 ruling holding that the Boy Scouts had a 1st Amendment right to deny membership to an out gay Assistant Scoutmaster, based on BSA’s rights of free speech and expressive association. He was part of the unanimous Courts that rejected a constitutional challenge to the Solomon Amendment, a law denying federal money to schools that barred military recruiters (mainly because of the Defense Department’s anti-gay personnel policies), in Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights, Inc., 547 U.S. 47 (2006), and that, reversing the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, held that a gay Irish-American group could be barred from marching in Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Hurley v. Irish American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Group of Boston, 515 U.S. 557 (1995).  However, in those cases all of the more liberal members of the Court joined in the unanimous opinions, so Kennedy’s vote did not make a difference to the outcome.

While Justice Kennedy’s majority opinions in the major LGBT rights cases were triumphs for LGBT rights, they were not viewed as unalloyed triumphs in the halls of legal academe. Commentators who agreed with the results were frequently harshly critical of Kennedy’s opinions in terms of their articulation of legal reasoning and doctrinal development.  The Romer decision left many scratching their heads, trying to figure out whether the Court had applied some sort of “heightened scrutiny” to the Colorado constitutional amendment, puzzled about the precedential meaning of the ruling for later LGBT-related equal protection challenges.  There was similar criticism of the opinions in Lawrence, Windsor, and Obergefell.  Kennedy failed to use the doctrinal terminology familiar to constitutional law scholars and students, such as “suspect classification,” “heightened scrutiny,” “compelling state interest” and the like, leaving doubt about the potential application of these rulings.  Indeed, three justices dissenting in Pavan v Smith in an opinion by Justice Gorsuch claimed that the Court’s Obergefell ruling had left undecided the question in Pavan – whether Arkansas had to list lesbian co-parents on birth certificates – and the Texas Supreme Court expressed similar doubts about the extent of Windsor and Obergefell in refusing to put an end to a dispute about whether the city of Houston had to extend employee benefits eligibility to the same-sex spouses of city employees.  While some courts, such as the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, saw Kennedy’s opinions as extending protected class status to gay people for equal protection purposes, others insisted that those rulings had produced no such precedent.

Justice Kennedy’s retirement effective July 31, 2018, seemed to signal a likely retreat from LGBT rights leadership by the Supreme Court. Assuming that President Trump will nominate and the Republican majority in the Senate will confirm a justice with the ideological and doctrinal profiles of Neil Gorsuch or Samuel Alito, the crucial fifth vote to make a pro-LGBT majority would most likely be missing, although Supreme Court appointments are a tricky business.  In the past, some presidents have been astounded at the subsequent voting records of their appointees.  President Dwight Eisenhower called his appointment of William J. Brennan one of the worst mistakes of his presidency, as Brennan went on to be a leader of the Court’s left wing.  Had he lived long enough to see it, President John F. Kennedy might have been similarly disappointed by the rightward drift of Byron R. White, his nominee who wrote the blatantly homophobic decision in Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986), that upheld Georgia’s felony sodomy law, calling a claim to constitutional protection by gay people “at best facetious.”  President Richard Nixon was undoubtedly disappointed with the leftward drift of Harry Blackmun, author of Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), the Court’s key abortion rights decision, and vigorous dissenter in Bowers v. Hardwick.  President Ronald Reagan appointed Anthony Kennedy assuming he would provide a vote to strike down abortion rights, but Kennedy was part of a moderate Republican coalition (joining with Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and David Souter) that joined with the remaining Democratic appointees to reaffirm those rights in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992).  President George H. W. Bush’s appointment of Souter ended up being a massive disappointment to conservatives, as Souter frequently voted with the Democratic appointees and the leftward veering John Paul Stevens, who had been appointed by President Gerald Ford and ended up being much more liberal than expected.  Souter was so disillusioned by the Court’s 5-4 decision in Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000), handing the presidency to George W. Bush after Albert Gore decisively won the national popular vote and may well have been entitled to the Florida electoral votes needed to put him over the top, that he retired from the Court prematurely.

In other words, the past records of Supreme Court nominees are not inevitably accurately predictive prologues to how they will vote on the Court over the long term. Supreme Court justices frequently serve for several decades (Kennedy’s service stretched over 30 years), and the looming constitutional issues at the time of their appointment are inevitably replaced by new, unanticipated issues over the course of their service.  Also, the Supreme Court is like no other court in the United States, in which the constraints of precedent faced by lower court judges are significantly loosened, since the Supreme Court can reverse its prior holdings, and in which theories and trends in constitutional and statutory interpretation evolve over time.  The examples of Brennan, Souter and Kennedy have caused the confirmation process to change drastically, and the possibility of an appointee turning out a total surprise appears diminished, but it is not entirely gone.  One can hope that a Trump appointee will not be totally predictable in the Alito/Gorsuch orbit, although that may be unduly optimistic when it comes to LGBT issues.  In his first full term on the Court, Justice Gorsuch has not cast 100 predictable votes. . .

Federal Court Blocks Implementation Mississippi HB 1523

Posted on: July 1st, 2016 by Art Leonard No Comments

 Just minutes before Mississippi’s anti-LGBT H.B. 1523 was scheduled to go into effect on July 1, U.S. District Judge Carlton W. Reeves filed a 60-page opinion explaining why he was granting a preliminary injunction to the plaintiffs in two cases challenging the measure, which he consolidated for this purpose under the name of Barber v. Bryant.

 

                According to Judge Reeves, H.B. 1523 violates both the 1st Amendment’s Establishment of Religion Clause and the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.  His lengthy, scholarly opinion expands upon some of the points he made just days earlier when he granted a preliminary injunction in a separate lawsuit, blocking implementation of one provision of H.B. 1523 that allowed local officials responsible for issuing marriage licenses to “recuse” themselves from issuing licenses to same-sex couples based on their “sincere” religious beliefs.

 

                Unlike the earlier ruling, the June 30 opinion treats H.B. 1523 as broadly unconstitutional on its face.  Although Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant, the lead defendant in all three lawsuits, announced that the state would immediately appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, Reeves’ scholarly opinion seemed likely to withstand judicial review.  Attorney General Jim Hood, Mississippi’s only Democratic statewide elected official and also a named defendant, suggested that he might not be joining in such an appeal, voicing agreement with Reeves’ decision and suggesting that the legislature had “duped” the public by passing an unnecessary bill.  He pointed out that the 1st Amendment already protected clergy from any adverse consequences of refusing to perform same-sex marriages, and that the state’s previously-enacted Religious Freedom Restoration Act already provides substantial protection for the free exercise rights of Mississippians.

 

                At the heart of H.B. 1523 is its Section 2, which spells out three “sincerely held religious beliefs or moral convictions” that are entitled, as found by Judge Reeves, to “special legal protection.”  These are “(a) Marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman; (b) Sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage; and (c) Male (man) or female (woman) refer to an individual’s immutable biological sex as objectively determined by anatomy and genetics at birth.”  According to the statute, any person or entity that holds one or more of these beliefs is entitled to be free from any sanction by the government for acting upon them by, for example, denying restroom access to a transgender person or refusing to provide goods or services to a same-sex couple for their wedding.

 

                Of course, the state may not override federal rights and protections, and the plaintiffs argue in these cases that by privileging people whose religious beliefs contradict the federal constitutional and statutory rights of LGBT people, the state of Mississippi has violated its obligation under the 1st Amendment to preserve strict neutrality concerning religion and its obligation under the 14th amendment to afford “equal protection of the law” to LGBT people.

 

                Reeves, who ruled in 2014 that Mississippi’s ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional, agreed with the plaintiffs as to all of their arguments.   For purposes of granting a preliminary injunction, he did not have to reach an ultimate decision on the merits of the plaintiffs’ claims.  It would suffice to show that they are “likely” to prevail on the merits.  But anybody reading Reeves’ strongly-worded opinion would have little doubt about his view of the merits.

 

                In an introductory portion of the opinion, he spells out his conclusions succinctly: “The Establishment Clause is violated because persons who hold contrary religious beliefs are unprotected – the State has put its thumb on the scale to favor some religious beliefs over others.  Showing such favor tells ‘nonadherents that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community, and adherents that they are insiders, favored members of the political community,’” quoting from a Supreme Court decision from 2000, Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe, 530 U.S. 290.  “And the Equal Protection Clause is violated by H.B. 1523’s authorization of arbitrary discrimination against lesbian, gay, transgender, and unmarried persons.”

 

                Much of the opinion was devoted to rejecting the state’s arguments that the plaintiffs did not have standing to bring the lawsuits, that the defendants were not liable to suit on these claims, and that injunctive relief was unnecessary because nobody had been injured by the law.  Reeves cut through these arguments with ease.  A major Supreme Court precedent backing up his decision on these points is Romer v. Evans, the 1996 case in which LGBT rights groups won a preliminary injunction against Colorado government officials to prevent Amendment 2 from going into effect.  Amendment 2 was a ballot initiative passed by Colorado voters in 1992 that prevented the state from providing any protection against discrimination for gay people.  The state courts found that the LGBT rights groups could challenge its constitutionality, and it never did go into effect, because the Supreme Court ultimately found that it violated the Equal Protection Clause.

 

                Judge Reeves ended his introductory section with a quote from the Romer v. Evans opinion:  “It is not within our constitutional tradition to enact laws of this sort.”

 

                In his earlier opinion, dealing with the clerk “recusal” provision, Reeves had alluded to Mississippi’s resistance to the Supreme Court’s racial integration rulings from the 1950s and 1960s, and he did so at greater length in this opinion, focusing on how H.B. 1523 was specifically intended by the legislature as a response to the Supreme Court’s ruling last year in Obergefell v. Hodges, holding that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry.  Mississippi legislators made clear during the consideration of this bill that its intention was to allow government officials and private businesses to discriminate against LGBT people without suffering any adverse consequences, just as the state had earlier sought to empower white citizens of Mississippi to preserve their segregated way of life despite the Supreme Court’s rejection of race discrimination under the 14th Amendment.

 

                Reeves quoted comments by Governor Bryant criticizing Obergefell as having “usurped” the state’s “right to self-governance” and mandating the state to comply with “federal marriage standards – standards that are out of step with the wishes of many in the United States and that are certainly out of step with the majority of Mississippians.”  In a footnote, Reeves observed, “The Governor’s remarks sounded familiar.  In the mid-1950s, Governor J.P. Coleman said that Brown v. Board of Education ‘represents an unwarranted invasion of the rights and powers of the states.’”  Furthermore, “In 1962, before a joint session of the Mississippi Legislature – and to a ‘hero’s reception’ – Governor Ross Barnett was lauded for invoking states’ rights during the battle to integrate the University of Mississippi.”  Reeves also noted how the racial segregationists in the earlier period had invoked religious beliefs as a basis for failing to comply with the Supreme Court’s decisions.

 

                Turning to the merits of the case, Reeves addressed the state’s argument that the purpose of the statute was to “address the denigration and disfavor religious persons felt in the wake of Obergefell,” and the legislative sponsors presented it as such, as reflected in the bill’s title: “Protecting Freedom of Conscience from Government Discrimination Act.”  Reeves pointed out what was really going on.  “The title, text, and history of H.B. 1523 indicate that the bill was the State’s attempt to put LGBT citizens back in their place after Obergefell,” he wrote.  “The majority of Mississippians were granted special rights to not serve LGBT citizens, and were immunized from the consequences of their actions.  LGBT Mississippians, in turn, were ‘put in a solitary class with respect to transactions and relations in both the private and governmental spheres’ to symbolize their second-class status.” (The quotation is from Romer v. Evans.)  “As in Romer, Windsor, and Obergefell,” Reeves continued, “this ‘status-based enactment’ deprived LGBT citizens of equal treatment and equal dignity under the law.”

 

                Because state law in Mississippi does not expressly forbid discrimination because of sexual orientation or gender identity, the state tried to claim that in fact the bill did not have the effect of imposing any new harm.  However, recently the city of Jackson passed an ordinance forbidding such discrimination, and the University of Southern Mississippi also has a non-discrimination policy in place.  “H.B. 1523 would have a chilling effect on Jacksonians and members  of the USM community who seek the protection of their anti-discrimination policies,” wrote Reeves.  “If H.B. 1523 goes into effect, neither the City of Jackson nor USM could discipline or take adverse action against anyone who violated their policies on the basis of a ‘Section 2’ belief.”

 

                The court held that because of the Establishment Clause part of the case, H.B. 1523 was subject to strict scrutiny judicial review, and also pointed out that under Romer v. Evans, anti-LGBT discrimination by the state is unconstitutional unless there is some rational  justification for it.  He rejected the state’s argument that it had a compelling interest to confer special rights upon religious objectors.  “Under the guise of providing additional protection for religious exercise,” he wrote, H.B. 1523 “creates a vehicle for state-sanctioned discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.  It is not rationally related to a legitimate end.”  Indeed, he asserted, “The deprivation of equal protection of the laws is H.B. 1523’s very essence.”

 

                Reeves easily found that the standard for ordering preliminary relief had been met.  Not only was it likely that H.B. 1523 would be found unconstitutional in an ultimate ruling in the case, but it was clear that it imposed irreparable harm on LGBT citizens, that a balancing of harms favored the plaintiffs over the defendants, and that the public interest would be served by enjoining operation of H.B. 1523 while the lawsuits continue.  “The State argues that the public interest is served by enforcing its democratically adopted laws,” he wrote.  “The government certainly has a powerful interest in enforcing its laws.  That interest, though, yields when a particular law violates the Constitution.  In such situations the public interest is not disserved by an injunction preventing its implementation.”

 

                Reeves concluded, “Religious freedom was one of the building blocks of this great nation, and after the nation was torn apart, the guarantee of equal protection under law was used to stitch it back together.  But H.B. 1523 does not honor that tradition of religious freedom, nor does it respect the equal dignity of all of Mississippi’s citizens.  It must be enjoined.”

 

Judith Kaye, a champion of lesbian & gay rights, dies at 77

Posted on: January 11th, 2016 by Art Leonard No Comments

Retired Chief Judge Judith Kaye of the New York Court of Appeals died on January 7, 2016, at age 77.  Most accounts of her passing mentioned her dissenting opinion in the case of Hernandez v. Robles, 7 N.Y.3d 338 (2006), the case in which the state’s highest court voted against the claim that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry, as one of her most notable opinions, but this was merely the capstone of a long career on the court during which Judge Kaye spoke out eloquently many times in cases important for the rights of gay people and people affected by the AIDS epidemic.

Governor Mario Cuomo appointed Kaye to the court early in his first term in 1983, and then elevated her to the position of Chief Judge in 1993.  She retired due to a state constitutional age limit at the end of 2008.  As of her retirement, she was the longest-serving judge in the Court of Appeals’ history, as well as the longest serving Chief Judge and the first woman to sit on the court and to sit as its chief.  Her appointment was a bit controversial, since she had no prior judicial experience when she was appointed, having worked as a corporate and litigation lawyer in private practice for most of her career, but she quickly assumed a leading role on the court, especially as a defender of civil rights and minority rights.

She joined the majority of the court in 1989 in a historic ruling, Braschi v. Stahl Associates Company, 74 N.Y.2d 201, which for the first time in American law recognized cohabiting same-sex couples as members of each other’s family for purposes of the state’s Rent Control Law, thus protecting the right of a surviving same-sex partner to take over the lease although the apartment had been rented in the name of the deceased partner.  Following up on this important ruling, Judge Kaye wrote the opinion for the court in 1993, Rent Stabilization Association of New York v. Higgins, 83 N.Y.2d 156, which upheld the New York Division of Housing and Community Renewal’s regulations that extended the Braschi ruling to the far larger rent stabilization system.  DHCR had specifically noted the impact of the AIDS epidemic on the housing security of gay men as a justification for the regulation. Judge Kaye rejected the plaintiff’s argument that extending protection to non-traditional families through an administrative regulation was an impermissible legislative act by the agency, and she also rejected the argument that extending this protection had unconstitutionally deprived the owners of property rights.

In 1991, Judge Kaye penned an important dissenting opinion in the case of Alison D. v. Virginia M., 77 N.Y.2d 651, when the court ruled that a lesbian co-parent of a child was a “legal stranger” who could not seek court-ordered visitation rights after separating from the child’s birth mother.  The court rested its ruling on the formal language of New York’s antiquated Domestic Relations Law, which even today adheres to a vision of families that fails to reflect reality.  Kaye criticized the court for exalting legal formality above a central purpose of family law: protecting the best interests of children.  “The majority’s retreat from the courts’ proper role — its tightening of rules that should in visitation petitions, above all, retain the capacity to take the children’s interests into account — compels this dissent,” she wrote.  The judge argued that a provision of the law requiring the court to take the best interest of children into account should take priority, and that the formal legal definition of a parent should not stand in the way in situations where a person had been an actual parent to a child in a relationship that had been fostered and encouraged by the child’s legal parent.

On the same date as the Alison D. ruling, Judge Kaye joined the majority in an important ruling upholding a determination by the state’s Public Health Council not to list HIV infection as a condition requiring mandatory testing and contact tracing.  The Council was concerned that such a listing would prevent infected persons from cooperating with public health officials and impose a barrier to addressing the HIV epidemic.  The New York State Society of Surgeons had challenged this decision, but the court held that the Council’s ruling had a rational basis and would not be second-guessed by the court.  N.Y. State Society of Surgeons v. Axelrod, 77 N.Y.2d 677 (1991).

Judge Kaye wrote for the court in 1995 in a sharply-divided 4-3 ruling, Matter of Jacob, 86 N.Y.2d 651, creatively interpreting the state’s antiquated adoption statute so as to allow for second-parent adoptions.  This was a crucially important follow-up to the Alison D. ruling.  Since the Court of Appeals considered same-sex coparents to be “legal strangers,” the only way they could protect the relationship with their children would be if they could adopt them, with the permission of their partner.  Literally interpreted, the adoption statute would require that the child’s birth parent relinquish her parental rights upon adoption by a person to whom she was not married.  But Judge Kaye found that this would violate the statute’s overall purpose: the child’s best interest.  “This policy would certainly be advanced in situations like those presented here by allowing the two adults who actually function as a child’s parents to become the child’s legal parents,” she wrote.

After listing all the practical reasons why allowing a second-parent adoption would make sense, Judge Kaye cut to the heart of the matter.  “Even more important,” she wrote, “is the emotional security of knowing that in the event of the biological parent’s death or disability, the other parent will have presumptive custody, and the children’s relationship with their parents, siblings and other relatives will continue should the coparents separate.  Indeed, viewed from the children’s perspective, permitting the adoptions allows the children to achieve a measure of permanency with both parent figures and voids the sort of disruptive visitation battle we faced in Matter of Alison D. v. Virginia M.”

A year later, Judge Kaye provided the crucial vote in a 4-3 decision holding that a dentist’s office is a place of public accommodation, so a dentist would be in violation of the Human Rights Law for refusing treatment in his office to patients the dentist knew or suspected to have HIV infection.  Cahill v. Rosa, 89 N.Y.2d 14 (1996).

In 2001, Judge Kaye joined with the majority in Levin v. Yeshiva University, 96 N.Y.2d 484, ruling that the trial court had wrongly dismissed a sexual orientation discrimination complaint under the New York City Human Rights Law brought against Yeshiva’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine for refusing to allow two lesbian medical students to live with their same-sex partners in housing provided near the campus for married students.  The case arose before the state legislature had added sexual orientation to the state’s Human Rights Law, and a majority of the court rejected the plaintiffs’ argument that the College had violated the state law’s ban on marital status discrimination, but the court accepted the argument that because the state did not let same-sex couples marry, it was discriminatory on grounds of sexual orientation covered by the city law to refuse an important benefit to same-sex couples.  Judge Kaye would have gone farther than the court, however.  In a partial dissent, she argued that the marital status complaint should not be dismissed either, finding that the court’s earlier recognition in Braschi that same-sex partners could constitute a family should be taken into account.  “At the very least,” she wrote, “it is a question of fact whether plaintiffs’ life partners qualify as members of their ‘immediate families.’  If they do, the State and City Human Rights Laws prohibit [the medical school] from denying them partner housing merely because they are unmarried.  Since discovery and fact finding on this issue are necessary, the lower courts improvidently granted [the school’s] motion to dismiss.”  She pointed out that prior cases interpreted the “marital status” provision in the state law to ban discrimination against somebody because they are “single, married, divorced, separated or the like.”  In this case, she said, the plaintiffs were alleging that they suffered discrimination because they were not married, an obvious violation of the ban on marital status discrimination.

Finally, of course, there is Judge Kaye’s dissent in Hernandez, in which she argued on behalf of herself and Judge Carmen Ciparick that same-sex couples did have a right to marry.  “This State has a proud tradition of affording equal rights to all New Yorkers,” she wrote.  “Sadly, the Court today retreats from that proud tradition.”  After noting the long list of federal and state cases holding that “marriage is a fundamental constitutional right,” she wrote that “fundamental rights, once recognized, cannot be denied to particular groups on the ground that these groups have historically been denied those rights.  Indeed, in recasting plaintiffs’ invocation of their fundamental right to marry as a request for recognition of a ‘new’ right to same-sex marriage, the Court misapprehends the nature of the liberty interest at stake.”  She pointed to the U.S. Supreme Court’s then-recent decision in Lawrence v. Texas, striking down a state sodomy law and overruling Bowers v. Hardwick, the 1986 decision upholding Georgia’s sodomy law.  In Lawrence, the Court criticized the Bowers decision as failing to apprehend the nature of the liberty interest at stake.  “The same failure is evident here,” wrote Judge Kaye. “An asserted liberty interest is not to be characterized so narrowly as to make inevitable the conclusion that the claimed right could not be fundamental because historically it has been denied to those who now seek to exercise it.”

“Simply put,” she asserted, “fundamental rights are fundamental rights.  They are not defined in terms of who is entitled to exercise them.”  Continuing, she wrote, “The long duration of a constitutional wrong cannot justify its perpetuation, no matter how strongly tradition or public sentiment might support it.”

Judge Kaye contended that “homosexuals meet the constitutional definition of a suspect class” for purposes of equal protection rights, which would mean that “any classification discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation must be narrowly tailored to meet a compelling state interest.”  She also pointed out that the same-sex marriage ban discriminated on the basis of sex, which would require the court to apply “heightened scrutiny,” under which the policy would be struck down unless it was “substantially related to the achievement of important governmental objectives.”  She concluded that the ban could not survive either test, much less the “rational basis test” that would otherwise apply. She rejected the court’s conclusion that the issue should be left up to the legislature, stating that “this Court cannot avoid its obligation to remedy constitutional violations in the hope that the Legislature might some day render the question presented academic.”  She concluded, “I am confident that future generations will look back on today’s decision as an unfortunate misstep.”

Judge Kaye’s confidence was vindicated over the past several years as scores of courts, many of them citing her dissenting opinion, declared state bans on same-sex marriage unconstitutional, culminating in the Supreme Court’s Obergefell ruling on June 26, 2015.  After New York’s legislature enacted marriage equality in 2011, Judge Kaye happily performed same-sex marriage ceremonies.  Perhaps not so coincidentally, the lead attorney in U.S. v. Windsor, the case that struck down the federal ban on recognizing same-sex marriages in 2013, was Roberta Kaplan, a former law clerk for Judge Kaye whose book about the case describes the important role Judge Kaye played for her as a mentor.  The judge reportedly had several openly-gay clerks, some of whom have themselves become judges.