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Posts Tagged ‘marriage equality’

Supreme Court Lets Stand 7th Circuit Decision on Lesbian Spouses and Birth Certificates

Posted on: December 14th, 2020 by Art Leonard No Comments

The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to review a ruling by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Henderson v. Box, 947 F.3d 482 (2020), that the state of Indiana must extend to married lesbian couples the same parentage presumption it applies to married different sex couples: that a birth mother’s spouse is presumed to be a parent of her child, that  the child be deemed born “in wedlock,” and that both mothers be named as parents on the birth certificat.  On December 14, the Supreme Court denied the State of Indiana’s petition to review that ruling without explanation or any dissent.  Box v. Henderson, 2020 WL 7327836 (Dec. 14, 2020).

On one hand, this action might be seen as routinely expected, because the Supreme Court decided a similar case from Arkansas exactly this way in 2017.  In Pavan v. Smith, 137 S. Ct. 2075, the Court voted 6-3 to reverse a decision by the Arkansas Supreme Court.  That opinion was issued per curiam, although a close reading would identify the hand of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, Jr., author of the Court’s 2015 marriage equality ruling, Obergefell v. Hodges, 135 S. Ct. 2584, in which the Court not only said that same-sex couples have a constitutional right under the 14th Amendment to marry, but also that such marriages must be treated by the states as equal in every respect to the marriages of different sex couples.  In Obergefell, Justice Kennedy specifically mentioned listing on birth certificates as one of the incidents of legal marriage from which same-sex couples had previously been excluded.

Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote a dissenting opinion in Pavan, joined by Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, arguing that the Obergefell ruling did not necessarily compel the conclusion stated by the Court and that the Court should have scheduled briefing and a full hearing on the question rather than issue a summary per curiam ruling.

Since Pavan was decided, Justice Kennedy has retired and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died, being replaced respectively by Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, both religious conservatives.  When Indiana filed its petition for review in the Henderson case last spring, Justice Ginsburg was still on the Court and the Pavan v. Smith majority was intact.  The same-sex couples who had filed the lawsuit, represented by the National Center for Lesbian Rights, did not even file an opposition, assuming the Court would dismiss the petition.  But with Justice Ginsburg’s death and replacement, the calculus had changed, as the Pavan 6-member majority had been reduced to a 4-member minority of the Court.  The Supreme Court then requested the plaintiffs to file a reply to Indiana’s petition for review, and the possibility appeared that the Supreme Court might take up the issue anew.

At the heart of Indiana’s case was the contention that the presumption that a husband is the father is reality-based in biology, and there is no such basis for a reality-based presumption for the wife of a woman who gives birth, although the 7th Circuit had observed that one of the lesbian couples in the case comprised two biological mothers, as the second mother had donated the egg that was gestated by the birth mother.

Be that as it may, Indiana, in common with other states, has never treated the father’s parental status as conclusive, since it could be rebutted by evidence that a different man was the biological father, and ultimately a birth certificate records legal parentage, not biological parentage, as in the new birth certificates that are issued upon a child’s adoption.  The trial court, and ultimately the 7th Circuit, related that Indiana relied on self-reporting by the mother in determining a man’s name to record on a birth certificate, and the form the birth mother is given asks for the name of the father, not explicitly the name of the biological father, making it likely that many men are named as fathers on birth certificates despite the lack of a biological tie to the child.

Ultimately, wrote the 7th Circuit, “The district court’s order requiring Indiana to recognize the children of these plaintiffs as legitimate children, born in wedlock, and to identify both wives in each union as parents, is affirmed.”

By refusing to review this ruling, without any explanation or dissent by the conservative justices, the Supreme Court seems to have put the seal on this issue.  This is particularly reassuring in light of gratuituous comments by Justice Alito (joined by Justice Thomas) in a statement he issued when the Court refused to review former Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis’s petition to review an award of damages against her for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples after the Obergefell decision was announced.  Davis v. Ermold, 2020 U.S. LEXIS 3709, 2020 WL 588157 (October 5). In Alito’s statement, and remarks he later delivered to a conservative public forum, Alito sharply criticized the Obergefell decision and suggested that the Court needed to “fix” the problems that ruling created for those with religious objections to same-sex marriage.  This focused renewed attention on the Henderson case and the possibility that the Court would take it and rule in a way that would detract from the equal legal status of same-sex marriages.  The decision not to take this case may represent an important bullet dodged for now.

Federal Court Bars Enforcement of Louisville Public Accommodations Ordinance Against A Wedding Photographer Who Opposes Marriage Equality

Posted on: August 16th, 2020 by Art Leonard No Comments

Justin Walker, recently confirmed by the Senate to be a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, completed some unfinished business on his docket as a U.S. District Judge in Louisville, Kentucky, by issuing an order on August 14 barring the Louisville Metro Human Relations Commission from enforcing the sexual orientation provision of the city’s public accommodation ordinance against a wedding photographer who does not want to photograph same-sex weddings and wants to be able to announce and explain her opposition on her website.  Chelsey Nelson Photography LLC v. Louisville/Jefferson County Metro Gov’t, 2020 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 146246 (W.D. Ky, Aug. 14, 2020).

In 1999, Louisville became the first municipality in Kentucky to ban anti-gay discrimination.  Among other things, the ordinance prohibits businesses from denying goods or services because of the sexual orientation of a patron, or to communicate to the public that it will refuse such services or treat people as unwelcome because of their sexual orientation.  The Commission concedes in this case that a photographer’s refusal to photograph same-sex weddings would violate the ordinance, and has not “disavowed” any intention to prosecute such an action.

Chelsey Nelson is a photographer whose business includes weddings.  Although she has not been asked to photograph any same-sex weddings, she claims that her religious beliefs would compel her to refuse such business, and she would like to avoid such confrontations by being able to advertise on her website that she will not provide such service.  Represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, the anti-gay litigation group, she filed a lawsuit seeking a court order that she is not required to comply with the ordinance and can publish her views without fear of liability.  She claims that the existence of the ordinance has chilled her ability to exercise her constitutional freedom of speech and free exercise of religion rights under the First Amendment by deterring her from using her website to communicate this message.

Judge Walker is a family friend and protégé of Senator Mitch McConnell, who recommended his appointment to President Trump and has shepherded his nomination through two rounds of Senate confirmation votes.  Walker is a leader of the conservative Federalist Society branch in Louisville, where he worked as a lawyer and law professor before taking the bench.  Thus, his decision to deny the city’s motion to dismiss the case in large part, as well as his decision to grant in part Nelson’s motion for preliminary relief pending an ultimate trial of the merits (presumably before a different district judge as Walker leaves for Washington), is not surprising.

What may be surprising, however, is some of the gay-friendly language that permeates his decision.  Assuming the sincerity of what he has written, the youthful Walker (born 1982) is part of a generation of young conservatives who have generally accepted gay rights.  He begins his decision praising the activists who campaigned for many years to get the Louisville ordinance passed, and comments that our society is “better” for prohibiting anti-gay discrimination.

Finding that the plaintiff has a good chance of prevailing on the merits of her claim is a prerequisite for ordering preliminary injunctive relief against enforcement of a law that, on its face, is not unconstitutional.  Walker premises his conclusion that Nelson meets this test by reference to the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Group of Boston, in which the Court held that the organizers of the Boston St. Patrick’s Day parade were not required to allow a gay Irish-American group to march under their own banner if the parade organizers did not want to include a gay rights message in their parade.  The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court had ruled by 4-3 that Massachusetts’ public accommodations law, which prohibited sexual orientation discrimination, required the parade organizers to let the gay group march.

In reversing, the Supreme Court found that the parade was an expressive activity protected by the First Amendment’s freedom of speech provision.  The Court held that forcing the organizers to include the gay group would be unconstitutional compelled speech, imposing the gay group’s message on the parade organizer’s expressive activity.

In this case, Judge Walker embraced the analogy to requiring a photographer to take pictures she did not want to take as compelled speech, and that the provision making it unlawful for her to publicize her refusal to photograph same-sex weddings was a content-based restriction on her speech.  Because her speech was motivated by her religious beliefs, the constitutional problem was compounded, in Judge Walker’s view.  And he noted that the Supreme Court has found that government-compelled speech and punishment of religious expression impose irreparable injury, another test for preliminary relief.

Court decisions on this issue are divided.  In 2013, New Mexico’s Supreme Court found that a wedding photographer violated the state’s public accommodation law by refusing to photograph a same-sex commitment ceremony, and the Supreme Court of the United States denied a petition to review that case.

But more recently the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of a videographer who did not want to film same-sex weddings, and the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that a custom stationer did not have to create invitations for a same-sex wedding, both relying on First Amendment free speech rights.  What the more recent cases have in common is that they are part of a broader litigation strategy by Alliance Defending Freedom and other conservative litigation groups, which having lost the battle against marriage equality, seek to establish broad constitutional exemptions for religious opponents of marriage equality from having to comply with anti-discrimination laws.  These are “affirmative litigation” cases brought to challenge the application of the law.  They do not involve actual denials of service to particular individuals, unlike the famous Masterpiece Cakeshop case, or similar cases in other jurisdictions where same-sex couples have filed discrimination claims after being denied goods or services.

The municipal defendants in this case could seek to appeal the grant of injunctive relief to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals (in Cincinnati), or could decided to await a final ruling on the merits before instituting an appeal.  At this point, local media coverage of the case has undoubtedly solved Chelsey Nelson’s problem of communicating her stance to the public, so it seems unlikely that any same-sex couples planning their weddings in Louisville are going to approach her for service.  The injunction specifically protects her from being investigated by the Louisville Commission, but does not prevent the Commission from enforcing the ordinance against any other business that is actually violating the anti-discrimination ban, so there is no pressing urgency for an appeal.

Catholic Foster Care Agency Seeks Supreme Court Review of Exclusion from Philadelphia Program

Posted on: July 24th, 2019 by Art Leonard No Comments

Catholic Social Services (CSS), a religious foster care agency operated by the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overrule a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, which on April 22 rejected CSS’s claim that it enjoys a constitutional religious freedom right to continue functioning as a foster care agency by contract with the City of Philadelphia while maintaining a policy that it will not provide its services to married same-sex couples seeking to be foster parents.  The decision below is Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, 922 F.3d 140 (3rd Cir. 2019).

CSS and several of its clients sued the City when the agency was told that if it would not drop its policy, it would be disqualified from certifying potential foster parents whom it deemed qualified to the Family Court for foster care placements and its contract with the City would not be renewed.  CSS insists that the City’s Fair Practices Ordinance, which prohibits discrimination because of sexual orientation by public accommodations, does not apply to it, and that it is entitled under the 1st Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause to maintain its religiously-based policy without forfeiting its longstanding role within the City’s foster care system.

The Petition filed with the Clerk of the Court on July 22 is one of a small stream of petitions the Court has received in the aftermath of its June 26, 2015, marriage equality decision, Obergefell v. Hodges, 135 S. Ct. 2584, in which the Court held that same-sex couples have a right to marry and have their marriages recognized by the states under the 14th Amendment’s Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses.   Dissenters in that 5-4 case predicted that the ruling would lead to clashes based on religious objections to same-sex marriage.  Most of those cases have involved small businesses that refuse to provide their goods or services for same-sex weddings, such as the Masterpiece Cakeshop decision from last spring, 138 S. Ct. 1719 (2018).

This new petition is one of many that may end up at the Court as a result of clashes between local governments that ban sexual orientation discrimination and government contractors who insist that they must discriminate against same-sex couples for religious reasons.  Catholic foster care and adoption services have actually closed down in several cities rather than agree to drop their policies against providing services to same-sex couples. CSS argues that it will suffer the same fate, since the services it provides – screening applicants through home studies, assisting in matching children with foster parents, and providing support financially and logistically to its foster families through funding provided by the City – can only legally be provided by an agency that has a contract with the City, and that even as its current contract plays out, the refusal of the City to accept any more of its referrals has resulted in its active roster of foster placements dropping by half in a short period of time, requiring laying off part of its staff.

Desperate to keep the program running, CSS went to federal district court seeking preliminary injunctive relief while the case is litigated, but it was turned down at every stage.  Last summer, when the 3rd Circuit denied a motion to overturn the district court’s denial of preliminary relief, CSS applied to the Supreme Court for “injunctive relief pending appeal,” which was denied on August 30, with the Court noting that Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch would have granted the Application.  See 139 S. Ct. 49 (2018). That at least three justices would have provided interim relief suggests that CSS’s Petition for review may be granted, since the Court grants review on the vote of four justices, and Brett Kavanaugh, who was not on the Court last August, might provide the fourth vote.

According to its Petition, CSS dates from 1917, when the City of Philadelphia was not even involved in screening and licensing foster parents.  CSS claims that from 1917 until the start of this lawsuit, it had never been approached by a same-sex couple seeking to be certified as prospective foster parents.  CSS argues that as there are thirty different agencies in Philadelphia with City contract to provide this service, same-sex couples seeking to be foster parents have numerous alternatives and if any were to approach CSS, they would be promptly referred to another agency.  CSS argues that referrals of applicants among agencies are a common and frequent practice, not a sign of discrimination.

CSS has three different arguments seeking to attract the Court’s attention.  One is that it was singled out due to official hostility to its religiously-motivated policy and that the City’s introduction of a requirement that foster agencies affirmatively agree to provide services to same-sex couples was inappropriately adopted specifically to target CSS.  Another is that the 3rd Circuit misapplied Supreme Court precedents to find that the City’s policy was a “neutral law of general application” under the 1990 Supreme Court precedent of Employment Division v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990), and thus not subject to serious constitutional challenge.  Finally, CSS argues, the Smith precedent has given rise to confusion and disagreement among the lower federal courts and should be reconsidered by the Supreme Court.

Opponents of same-sex marriage have been urging the Court to reconsider Smith, which was a controversial decision from the outset.  In Smith, the Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the Oregon Unemployment System’s refusal to provide benefits to an employee who was discharged for flunking a drug test. The employee, a native American, had used peyote in a religious ceremony, and claimed the denial violated his 1st Amendment rights.  The Court disagreed, in an opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia, holding that state laws that are neutral regarding religion and of general application could be enforced even though they incidentally burdened somebody’s religious practices.  Last year, Justice Neil Gorsuch’s opinion, concurring in part and dissenting in part in Masterpiece Cakeshop, suggested reconsideration of Smith, and since the Masterpiece ruling, other Petitions have asked the Court to reconsider Smith, including the “Sweetcakes by Melissa” wedding cake case from Oregon.  So far, the Court has not committed itself to such reconsideration.  In the Sweetcakes case, it vacated an Oregon appellate ruling against the recalcitrant baker and sent the case back to the state court for “further consideration” in light of the Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling, but said nothing about reconsidering Smith.

The CSS lawsuit arose when a local newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, published an article reporting that CSS would not provide foster care services for same-sex couples.  The article sparked a City Council resolution calling for an investigation into CSS.  Then the Mayor asked the Commission on Human Relations (CHR), which enforces the City’s Fair Practices Ordinance (FPO), and the Department of Human Services (DHS), which contracts with foster care agencies, to investigate.  The head of DHS, reacting to the article’s report about religious objections to serving same-sex couples, did not investigate the policies of the many secular foster care agencies.  She contact religious agencies, and in the end, only CSS insisted that it could not provide services to same-sex couples, but would refer them to other agencies.

After correspondence back and forth and some face to face meetings between Department and CSS officials, DHS “cut off CSS’s foster care referrals,” which meant that “no new foster children could be placed with any foster parents certified by CSS.”  DHS wrote CSS that its practice violated the FPO, and that unless it changed its practice, its annual contract with the City would not be renewed. This meant that not only would it receive no referrals, but payments would be suspended upon expiration of the current contract, and CSS could no longer continue its foster care operation.  CSS and several women who had been certified by CSS as foster parents then filed suit seeking a preliminary injunction to keep the program going, which they were denied.

CSS’s Petition is artfully fashioned to persuade the Court that the 3rd Circuit’s approach in this case, while consistent with cases from the 9th Circuit, is out of sync with the approach of several other circuit courts in deciding whether a government policy is shielded from 1st Amendment attack under Smith.  Furthermore, it emphasizes the differing approaches of lower federal courts in determining how Smith applies to the cases before them.  The Supreme Court’s interest in taking a case crucially depends on persuading the Court that there is an urgent need to resolve lower court conflicts so that there is a unified approach throughout the country to the interpretation and application of constitutional rights.

The Petition names as Respondents the City of Philadelphia, DHS, CHR, and Support Center for Child Advocates and Philadelphia Family Pride, who were defendant-intervenors in the lower courts.  Once the Clerk has placed the Petition on the Court’s docket, the respondents have thirty days to file responding briefs, although respondents frequently request and receive extensions of time, especially over the summer when the Court is not in session.  Once all responses are in, the case will be distributed to the Justices’ chambers and placed on the agenda for a conference.  The Court’s first conference for the new Term will be on October 1.

Last summer, when the Court was considering Petitions on cases involving whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act forbids sexual orientation or gender identity discrimination, the U.S. Solicitor General received numerous extensions of time to respond to the Petitions, so those cases were not actually conferenced until the middle of the Term and review was not granted until April 22.  Those cases will be argued on October 8, the second hearing date of the Court’s new Term.

The Petitioners are represented by attorneys from The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a conservative religiously-oriented litigation group that advocates for broad rights of free exercise of religion, and local Philadelphia attorneys Nicholas M. Centrella and Conrad O’Brien.  Their framing of this case is reflected in the headline of their press release announcing the Petition: “Philly foster mothers ask Supreme Court to protect foster kids.”

Municipal respondents are represented by Philadelphia’s City Law Department.  Attorneys from the ACLU represented the Intervenors, who were backing up the City’s position, in the lower courts.

The 3rd Circuit was flooded with amicus briefs from religious freedom groups (on both sides of the issues), separation of church and state groups, LGBT rights and civil liberties groups, and government officials.  One brief in support of CSS’s position was filed by numerous Republican members of Congress; another by attorney generals of several conservative states.  The wide range and number of amicus briefs filed in the 3rd Circuit suggests that the Supreme Court will be hearing from many of these groups as well, which may influence the Court to conclude that the matter is sufficiently important to justify Supreme Court consideration.

Two Lawsuits Challenge State Department’s Refusal to Recognize Same-Sex Marriages

Posted on: January 25th, 2018 by Art Leonard No Comments

 

Immigration Equality and cooperating attorneys from Sullivan & Cromwell LLP have filed two lawsuits against the U.S. State Department, challenging the Department’s refusal to recognize the birthright citizenship of two youngsters who are children of dual-nation married same-sex couples. The complicated cases turn on interpretation of a federal statute, Section 301(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (referred to as the INA), which establishes the citizenship status of persons born abroad to married U.S. citizens.  Blixt v. U.S. Department of State, Case 1:18-cv-00124 (D.D.C., filed Jan. 22, 2018); Dvash-Banks v. U.S. Department of State, Case 2:18-cv-00523 (C.D. Cal., filed Jan. 22, 2018).

The Constitution provides in the 14th Amendment that every person born in the United States is a citizen of the U.S.A. and of the state in which they were born. In the INA, Congress addressed the question whether people born overseas would also be treated as citizens if their parents are U.S. citizens.  The statute provides that a person born abroad will be treated as a U.S. citizen at birth if at least one of the person’s married parents is a U.S. citizen, and  as long as the U.S. citizen parent had been “physically present” in the U.S. for at least 5 years after their 14th birthday.

One of the lawsuits, filed in a U.S. District Court in the Central District of California (whose main courthouse is in Los Angeles), concerns Andrew Mason Dvash-Banks and Elad Dvash-Banks, a married couple, and their twin children, Ethan and Aiden. Andrew is a U.S. citizen, born in California in 1981, who lived continuously in the U.S. until 2005, when he moved to Israel and subsequently enrolled in a graduate program at Tel Aviv University.  There he met Elad Dvash in 2008.  Elad was born in Israel in 1985 and had lived there his entire life before meeting Andrew.  The two men went to Toronto, Canada, and were married there in a civil ceremony on August 19, 2010.

An act of the Canadian parliament, responding to rulings by various Canadian courts, established same-sex marriage in that country several years earlier. After marrying, Andrew and Elad moved to California, where they decided to raise a family. Because the federal Defense of Marriage Act precluded any recognition of their marriage by the U.S. government, Elad could not obtain permanent residence in the U.S. as Andrew’s legally recognized spouse, so they decided to move back to Toronto, where they could live together as a legally recognized married couple and start their family.

They decided to have twins using one surrogate who carried two embryos through to delivery of their sons. Each of the men is the biological father of one of the twins, who were born in Ontario in September, 2016.  Their Canadian birth certificates list both men as the fathers of each of the children, Ethan and Aidan.  The U.S. Defense of Marriage Act was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2013, so at the time the twins were born there was no legal impediment to their Canadian marriage being recognized by the U.S. government in the same way any other legally valid marriage between a U.S. citizen and a non-citizen conducted abroad would normally be recognized.

After the children were born, their parents took them to the U.S. Consulate in Toronto to apply for their “Consular Reports of Birth Abroad” and to obtain U.S. passports for them. Because Andrew is a U.S. citizen and the children were born in 2016 within his legal marriage to Elad, he contends, both boys are entitled under Section 301(g) to be treated as U.S. citizens at birth.  But the officials with whom they dealt in Toronto didn’t see things that way.  They insisted that only Aiden, who was conceived using Andrew’s sperm, would be considered a U.S. citizen.  Ethan, who was conceived using Elad’s sperm, would not, because as far as the State Department was concerned, he had no genetic tie to a U.S. citizen, which the State Department decided was necessary for him to be treated as a U.S. citizen, relying on a different section of the law dealing with children born outside the United States out of wedlock.

In effect, the State Department was treating the marriage of Andrew and Elad as having no legal significance in determining Ethan’s citizenship.

This appears, on its face, inconsistent with the Supreme Court’s decisions in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) and Pavan v. Smith (2017), which make clear that same-sex marriages are to be treated the same as different-sex marriages for all purposes of U.S. law. It also seems inconsistent with U.S. v. Windsor, which ruled that the U.S. government is required to recognize lawfully contracted same-sex marriages.

The other lawsuit, filed in Washington, D.C., presents a variation on the same story, involving Allison Dawn Blixt, who was born and raised in the United States, and her Italian wife, Stefania Zaccari, and their two sons, Lucas and Massi.

Alison lived in the U.S. continuously from her birth until 2008. She is a lawyer who began practicing at a law firm in New York beginning in 2005.  Stefania, born in Italy, met Allison in 2006 when Stefania was visiting New York on vacation.  After Stefania returned home, the women’s relationship continued at a distance.  Wanting to live together as a married couple, they moved to London, where Allison worked in the London office of her law firm and Stefania could freely relocate from Italy because of the freedom of movement within the European Union.  The women entered a civil partnership in England in 2009.  After the U.K. legislated for marriage equality, they took the necessary steps to convert their civil partnership into a legal marriage in 2015, retroactive to 2009 as allowed under British law.

Meanwhile, they decided to have children. Stefania gave birth to their first son, Lucas, conceived with sperm from an anonymous donor, in January 2015, a few weeks after they had converted their civil partnership into a marriage, and both women were listed on the birth certificate as parents.  They had another child in 2017, Massi, with Allison as the birth mother using sperm from the same anonymous donor, so that the boys would be biological half-brothers.  Massi’s birth certificate lists both women as his parents.  Both sons were born when their mothers were legally married, and at a time when under U.S. law their British marriage would be entitled to recognition.

After each child was born, they went to the U.S. Embassy in London to apply for a Consular Report of Birth Abroad and a U.S. passport for their sons. In 2015 they were told they couldn’t apply for Lucas, the first-born, because he was not biologically related to Allison, the U.S. citizen of the couple.

They returned to the Embassy after Massi was born in 2017, seeking to apply on behalf of both boys. Massi’s application was granted based on Allison’s U.S. citizenship, but Lucas’s application was denied.  In a letter communicating the denial, the State Department said: “It has been determined that there is not a biological relationship between the U.S. citizen mother and child, through either a genetic parental relationship or a gestational relationship, as required under the provisions of Section 309(c) of the Immigration and Nationality Act.”  Section 309(c) is, however, irrelevant, because it deals with children born “out of wedlock,” that is, to unmarried parents.  But Allison and Stefania are married, and they have a constitutional right to recognition of their marriage by the U.S. government.

In essence, the State Department is flouting the Supreme Court’s decisions. Pavan v. Smith was a dispute about Arkansas’s refusal to issue birth certificates showing both mothers of children born to married lesbian couples who conceived their children using donated sperm.  The Court said that Arkansas had to apply the same rule it used when different-sex married couples had children through donor insemination.  Although the father in such a case is not biologically related to the child, nonetheless he is entitled to be listed on the birth certificate and treated as the child’s legal father.  The Supreme Court, quoting from its early decision in Obergefell, said that married same-sex couples are entitled to the same “constellation” of rights as married different-sex couples.  And, of course, in U.S. v. Windsor, the Court made clear that legally married same-sex couples are entitled to have their marriages recognized on the same basis as the marriages of different-sex couples by the U.S. government.

That includes, these two new lawsuits argue, having their marriages recognized under Section 301(g), and thus conferring on their children U.S. citizenship, regardless which of the parents is their biological father or mother.

This is not just a new Trump Administration move. The Dvash-Banks family encountered their problem with the State Department in 2016, during the last year of the Obama Administration, and the Blixt family’s attempt to get a passport for Lucas was rebuffed in 2015.  What these cases will require is for the courts to be faithful to the broad rulings in Obergefell, Pavan and Windsor, and to treat these boys as U.S. citizens since they were born to married couples, each of which included one spouse who is a U.S. citizen and who clearly fulfills the residency requirements established in Section 301(g).  Treating them as children born “out of wedlock” is a failure of their rights to equal protection and due process of law under the 5th Amendment, argues the complaint.

Both complaints seek a declaratory judgment stating that the State Department’s application of its policies in these cases is unconstitutional and that each of the boys in question is a U.S. citizen. The complaints seek injunctions ordering the State Department to cease discriminating against married same-sex couples by classifying their children as being “born out of wedlock.” Of course, if the courts grant the requested relief, the plaintiffs are also seeking an award of attorneys’ fees and reasonable litigation costs.

Foreign and International Courts Issue a Burst of LGBT Rights Rulings

Posted on: January 11th, 2018 by Art Leonard No Comments

 

Over the course of just four days, January 8 through 11, 2018, major courts on three continents have issued rulings that will affect the rights of tens of millions of LGBT people. On January 8, the Supreme Court of India ordered reconsideration of the 2014 decision that had restored the country’s law against gay sex, in an Order that quoted extensively from prior rulings critical of the 2014 decision.  On January 9, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights advised Costa Rica – and thus also sixteen other countries in Central and South America that are bound by the American Convention of Human Rights and do not yet have marriage equality – that same-sex couples are entitled to marry and that transgender people are entitled to get legal name changes without having to undergo sex reassignment surgery.  And on January 11, one of the Advocates General of the European Court of Justice (ECJ), responding to a request for a preliminary ruling from the Constitutional Court of Romania, advised the ECJ that same-sex spouses of the citizens of member nations must be treated the same as different-sex spouses under the European Union Directive governing movement between states.

 

India has the second largest population of any country, over 1.3 billion people by the latest estimate. The European Union member countries have more than 500 million residents, and the combined countries within the Inter-American Union have close to a billion people, although some large countries, including Canada and the United States, are not subject to the Inter-American court’s ruling.  But, of course, both Canada and the United States have marriage equality and don’t criminalize consensual gay sex among adults.   This means that within the space of four days courts have potentially expanded LGBTQ rights to an extraordinary proportion of the world’s population, which is currently estimated at about 7.6 billion people, and marriage equality may soon become the norm throughout the Western Hemisphere, with only a few holdouts among states that do not recognize the jurisdiction of the Inter-American court.

 

The India ruling is yet another step in a complicated and long-running story. In 1860, under British Administration, the Indian Penal Code was adopted including what is now Section 377, providing, “Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to fine.”  This colonial enactment was carried over into national law when India became independent and self-governing after World War II.  It has been interpreted to outlaw all same-sex oral and anal intercourse. Although infrequently enforced, it has had the same stigmatizing effect as anti-sodomy laws in western societies before the slow process of decriminalization got under way during the second half of the 20th century.

 

Many LGBTQ people in India rejoiced and went heavily public in celebratory demonstrations in 2009 when the Delhi High Court, responding to a lawsuit filed by the NAZ Foundation, an HIV/AIDS advocacy non-governmental agency, ruled that Section 377 was unconstitutional as applied to private consensual adult same-sex intercourse. NAZ Foundation v. Government of NCT of Delhi, 111 DRJ 1 (2009). As the government did not initiate an appeal, many saw the lengthy, scholarly ruling as final and definitive.

 

However, Indian jurisprudence allows for anybody who is offended by a court ruling to ask the nation’s Supreme Court to review it, and a group of religious and social conservatives, led by Suresh Kumar Koushal, a Hindu astrologist, brought their case to the Supreme Court, where a two-judge bench reversed the High Court ruling in 2014, holding that the Constitution of India did not impede the government from maintaining the existing law, and rejecting the High Court’s citation of decisions from other countries (such as the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2003 Lawrence v. Texas ruling) to support its decision. Koushal v. NAZ Foundation, 1 SCC 1 (2014).  The Supreme Court panel minimized the significance of the issue, claiming that because there were very few homosexuals as a proportion of the population, it was not a matter of great importance.  It also opined that the question of what sexual conduct to outlaw was for the legislature, not the courts, to decide.

 

Obtaining further review from a larger panel of the Court (which has 26 judges overall) is a time-consuming process, requiring filing “corrective petitions” and persuading a panel of the Court that the issue should be taken up anew. This process has been ongoing at the instance of NAZ Foundation and its supporters, but a new group of plaintiffs emerged in 2016 and initiated a petition directly with the Supreme Court, arguing that recent rulings in other cases by the Court, most notably a later 2014 ruling on the rights of transgender people, National Legal Service Authority v. Union of India 5 SCC 438 (2014), had cast significant doubt on the reasoning of the Koushal decision.  This argument was bolstered last year when a nine-member panel of the Court, ruling on a challenge to a new national genetic identification system, Puttaswamy v. Union of India, 10 SCC 1 (2017), specifically discussed and disparaged the Koushal decision’s treatment of constitutional privacy and the rights of LGBTQ people.

 

The Court’s January 8 Order in Johar v. Union of India Ministry of Law and Justice, Writ Petition No. 76/2016, by a three-judge panel including Chief Justice Dipak Misra, provided an extensive summary of the arguments against the constitutionality of Section 377, quoting extensively from the 2014 transgender and 2017 privacy rulings, particularly those passages critical of the Koushal decision, and granted the petitioners’ request that a larger panel of the Court be convened to reconsider that decision. Interestingly, only the Petitioners were present at the Court’s hearing on January 8, with the argument being presented by Senior Advocate Arvind Datar.  Nobody appeared from the government to oppose the request for reconsideration.  The Order emerged immediately after the hearing.

 

While the Order does not specifically state that all of the Petitioners’ arguments are correct, after concluding its summary of the arguments and what the Petitioners are seeking, the Court stated, “Taking all the aspects in a cumulative manner, we are of the view, the decision in Suresh Kumar Koushal’s case requires re-consideration. As the question relates to constitutional issues, we think it appropriate to refer the matter to a larger Bench.”

 

A different Bench of the Court is presently considering the curative petition that was filed by the NAZ Foundation, so there was some speculation in the Indian press that the two cases could be combined before that larger panel. “In the meantime,” wrote the Court, “a copy of the petition be served on the Central Agency so that the Union of India can be represented in the instant matter.  Let the matter be placed before Honorable the Chief Justice of India, on the administrative side, for consideration of the appropriate larger Bench.”

 

Indian jurisprudence is famous for its slow motion, but there was some optimistic speculation that an opinion from a larger Bench of the Court may emerge later this year. In light of the serious criticisms of the Koushal decision by other Benches of the Court, commentators were optimistic that the Delhi High Court’s original ruling striking down criminalization of consensual gay sex will ultimately prevail, and gay sex will become legal in the world’s second largest country.

 

The Inter-American Court’s ruling on January 9 came in response to a petition submitted two years ago by Luis Guillermo Solis, the President of Costa Rica, who had run for office on a pledge to expand LGBTQ rights in his Central American country. Opinion Consultiva, OC-24/17 (2017). In the face of legislative intransigence, Solis inquired whether Costa Rica was obligated under the American Convention on Human Rights to let same-sex couples marry.  He also inquired about transgender rights.  The Court, which actually sits in Costa Rica’s capital city, came back with a strong affirmation for LGBTQ rights.  The opinion is initially available only in Spanish. According to translations published in English-language media sources, the court said that governments subject to the Convention “must recognize and guarantee all the rights that are derived from a family bond between people of the same sex,” and that establishing a separate institution for same-sex couples, such as civil unions, was not adequate from the point of view of legal equality.  The governments must “guarantee access to all existing forms of domestic legal systems, including the right to marriage, in order to ensure the protection of all rights of families formed by same-sex couples without discrimination.”

 

However, recognizing the kind of legislative intransigence encountered in Costa Rica and many other Central and South American countries, where the Roman Catholic Church has a heavy influence on social policy, the court recommended that government pass “temporary decrees” while new legislation is considered.

 

The Inter-American Court, in common with the European Court of Human Rights, is not empowered directly to order a government to do anything. Compliance requires acquiescence, and sometimes the court has resorted to demanding that governments explain why they have not complied with its rulings.  For example, it took Costa Rica several years to come into compliance with a ruling by the Inter-American Court against bans on the use of in vitro fertilization.

 

President Solis reacted to the decision by calling for full compliance by the countries of the Inter-American Union. The Tico Times reported on January 10 that he told reporters, “Costa Rica and the other countries that have accepted the jurisdiction of the Inter-American Court must fully comply with the court’s opinion, respecting each country’s processing time, jurisdictional and administrative spaces.  Solis pointed out that Costa Rica’s compliance would require a “gradual process,” requiring consultation between the various branches of government and the political parties.

 

The Court also addressed a question of transgender rights, recognizing as a human right that transgender people should be able to register themselves using the name and sex with which they identify, thus lining up with those countries that have in recent years moved towards recognizing self-declared gender identity without interposing a requirement that the individual document surgical gender confirmation procedures.

 

Commented Solis, “The court’s opinion ratifies our commitment to guaranteeing people access to the rights they acquire through their personal relations, without any sort of discrimination.” In a formal press release, the government stated: “Love is a human condition that should be respected, without discrimination of any kind.  The State confirms its commitment to comply.”

 

The countries that are legally bound by rulings of the court include Argentina, Barbados, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Surinam and Uruguay. Some of those countries still penalize gay sex, while others already have marriage equality: Colombia, Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina.  Litigation over marriage equality is pending in the Supreme Court of Panama.  In Mexico, same-sex couples can marry in several states and the capital district, and all of the states are required to recognize those marriages, while a Supreme Court ruling mandates that lower courts issue orders, called “amparos,” requiring local officials to allow particular same-sex couples (or groups of couples) who obtain the orders to marry.  The Inter-American Court’s ruling may hasten the spread of marriage equality to the remaining Mexican states.

 

Meanwhile, back in the European Union, Advocate General Melchior Wathelet’s preliminary ruling in the case of Relu Adrian Coman, a Romanian citizen who married Robert Clabourn Hamilton, an American citizen, in Brussels, Belgium, while Coman was living there and working for a European Union agency, may portend a significant advance for marriage equality in Europe. Coman v. Inspectorate General for Immigration, Case C-673/16 (January 11, 2018).  Coman sought to bring his spouse back home to Romania, but the Romanian government was unwilling to issue the kind of spousal visa that is routinely granted when Romanians contract different-sex marriages elsewhere in Europe.  Coman brought his case to the Constitutional Court of Romania, which referred the issue to the European Court of Justice for a determination of what obligation the country might have as a member of the Union.

 

Such matters are first presented to the office of the Advocate General (of which there are several), for an opinion advising the Court.  If the Court decides to follow the Advocate General’s recommendation, its ruling becomes law throughout the European Union.

 

In some respects, Wathelet’s opinion is narrow and technical, because it doesn’t address a broad question of rights, but rather the narrower question of interpreting the Directive that guarantees freedom of movement within the European Union, with an eye to breaking down nationality barriers that would inhibit the movement of labor across national lines.   Directive 2004/38 describes the “free movement of persons” as “one of the fundamental freedoms of the internal market.”  The Directive supports such freedom by requiring member states to grant freedom of movement to family members of their citizens, and of course a “spouse” is a family member, but the term “spouse” is not generally defined.  When the Directive was adopted in 2004, only two countries in Europe allowed same-sex marriage, but many others had registered partnerships for same-sex couples, so the Directive provides for free movement rights for such partners, but only “if the legislation of the host Member State treats registered partnerships as equivalent to marriage.”

 

In the case of Romania, not only is marriage defined as the union of a man and a woman, but the country’s marriage law specifies that same-sex couples may not marry, and the county provides no registered partnership status for same-sex couples. Thus, the question under EU law is whether the protection for family life and for spousal relationships would extend to same-sex spouses, overriding national law on the question of who is entitled to a residence visa (as opposed to the short-term entry visa of up to three months for tourists and business visitors).  The key to this, it proved, was the established practice both in this Court and the European Court of Human Rights to adjust the definitions of terms in reaction to social developments.

 

Wathelet quoted an earlier decision stating that “EU law must be interpreted ‘in the light of present day circumstances,’ that is to say, taking the ‘modern reality’ of the Union into account.” This is to avoid the law become static and placing a drag on economic and social development.  Wathelet noted that in a 2001 ruling, reflecting “present day circumstances” at that time, the Court had considered marriage to be “a union between persons of the opposite sex.”  But this does not reflect the “modern reality.”

 

“In fact,” he wrote, “while at the end of the year 2004 only two Member States allowed marriage between persons of the same sex, 11 more Member States have since amended their legislation to that effect and same-sex marriage will be possible in Austria, too, by 1 January 2019 at the latest. That legal recognition of same-sex marriage does no more than reflect a general development in society with regard to the question.  Statistical investigations confirm it; the authorization of marriage between persons of the same sex in a referendum in Ireland also serves as an illustration.  While different perspectives on the matter still remain, including within the Union, the development nonetheless forms part of a general movement.  In fact, this kind of marriage is now recognized in all continents.  It is not something associated with a specific culture or history; on the contrary, it corresponds to a universal recognition of the diversity of families.”

 

Wathelet also referred to decisions by the European Court of Human Rights, including those protecting the right of a national of a signatory state to the European Convention on Human Rights to bring a same-sex partner into the country. He also noted that European law now includes a ban on sexual orientation discrimination by Member States, and strong protection both under the European Union’s Charter and under the Human Rights Convention for “family life.”

 

He also contended that adopting a gender-neutral concept of spouse was consistent with the objective of the Directive, “to facilitate that primary and individual right to move and reside freely within the territory of the Member States which is directly conferred on citizens of the Union.” Freedom of movement would be impeded if lawfully married individuals could not bring the legal spouses with whom they have established a family relationship with them to return to live in their home country.

 

Thus, he recommended that the Court answer the questions posed by the Romanian Constitutional Court as follows: that “the term ‘spouse’ applies to a national of a third State of the same sex as the citizen of the European Union to whom he or she is married” for purposes of complying with Directive 2004/38 on freedom of movement.  As applied directly to Mr. Coman’s case, it means that his marriage to an American citizen while Coman was living in Belgium, a European Union country that allows same-sex marriages, gives his spouse a derivative right under the Directive to obtain, automatically, the same kind of spousal visa to enter and live in Romania that would be provided to a different-sex spouse.  Since Hamilton is not a citizen of any European Union Member State, his right is not direct and must be derived from the right of his husband to have Romania respect his marriage and family life, at least to the extent of allowing him to live together with his husband in his home country.

 

Reflecting the social divisions within the Union, several Eastern European nations – Latvia, Hungary, Poland and Romania – opposed this conclusion, while it was supported by submissions from the Netherlands and the European Commission.

 

 

 

Former Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Seeks Reversal of His Old Court’s Opinion

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

On June 30, the Texas Supreme Court issued a ruling claiming that the U.S. Supreme Court’s Obergefell marriage equality decision from June 2015 did not necessarily require state and local governments to treat same-sex and different-sex marriages the same for government employee benefits purposes. On September 15, asserting that his old court’s decision was clearly wrong, retired Texas Supreme Court Justice Wallace B. Jefferson and lawyers from his Austin firm, Alexander Dubose Jefferson & Townsend LLP, asked the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse the ruling.

Jefferson, an African-American Republican, was appointed to the court in 2001 by Governor Rick Perry, who then elevated him in 2004 to the Chief Justice position, where he served until retirement in October 2013. Justice Jefferson was the first African-American to serve on Texas’s highest court.  His law firm was retained by Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner to represent the City in petitioning the Supreme Court for review.

The case arose in 2013 when then-Mayor Annise Parker, an out lesbian and longtime LGBT rights activist, reacted to the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the federal Defense of Marriage Act by asking her City Attorney whether the reasoning of that case would require the City of Houston to recognize same-sex marriages of City employees. Although Texas did not allow same-sex marriages then, some City employees had gone out of state to marry and were seeking health care benefits for their spouses under the City’s employee benefits plan.  Parker got the answer she was seeking and ordered an extension of benefits to City employees’ same-sex spouses.

Two local Republican activists, Jack Pidgeon and Larry Hicks, sued the City and Mayor Parker, seeking an injunction against extension of the benefits. They persuaded a state trial judge to issue a preliminary injunction, barring the benefits from going into effect pending the outcome of the litigation.  The court relied on the Texas constitutional and statutory bans on same-sex marriage, which had not yet been challenged in court as of that time.  The City appealed the preliminary injunction.

While the appeal was pending before the Texas Court of Appeals, the U.S. Supreme Court decided the Obergefell case, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, which is based in Houston, promptly affirmed a 2014 marriage equality ruling by the federal district court in San Antonio, DeLeon v. Abbott, declaring unconstitutional the Texas same-sex marriage bans that had been the basis for the trial court’s injunction. Then the Texas Court of Appeals issued a ruling reversing the trial court’s preliminary injunction and instructing that court to decide the case consistent with the DeLeon decision.  Pidgeon and Hicks appealed that ruling to the Texas Supreme Court.

 

After extensively considering the matter, the Texas Supreme Court announced that it would deny review of the Court of Appeals ruling. This outraged Texas Republican leaders, including Governor Abbott, and the state Republican Party went to work encouraging people to bombard the court with communications urging it to reconsider and grant review, and then to reverse the court of appeals.  Perhaps it is not surprising, considering the very political nature of that court, made up entirely of Republican justices (since Texas has not had a Democratic governor since George W. Bush defeated Ann Richards in 1994), that the court succumbed to these demands, reconsidered, and granted review.

On June 26, 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in Pavan v. Smith, a challenge to the refusal by Arkansas officials to list both members of married lesbian couples on birth certificates when one of them gave birth to a child through donor insemination. In that ruling, the Supreme Court made abundantly clear that the Obergefell decision had effectively decided the Pavan case by holding that same-sex couples had the same constitutional rights regarding marriage as different sex couples, extending to the entire “constellation of rights” that went with marriage.  The Supreme Court did not even bother to hold oral argument in the Pavan case, simultaneously granting the petition to review an adverse decision by the Arkansas Supreme Court and issuing a brief memorandum opinion, from which three members of the Court dissented in an argumentative and disingenuous memorandum attributed to recently-appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch and signed by Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.  The Pavan opinion left no doubt that same-sex and different-sex married couples must be treated the same by government entities under the 14th Amendment.

But it was evidently not clear to a majority of the Texas Supreme Court, which just days later issued its ruling, reversing the court of appeals and sending the case back to the trial court in Houston, with instructions to give Pidgeon and Hicks an opportunity to try to convince the court that the City of Houston was still required to refuse recognition to the marriages of same-sex couples under its benefits plan, relying on the Texas constitutional and statutory ban that was declared unconstitutional by the 5th Circuit. A majority of the Texas Supreme Court clings to the idea that constitutional rulings by the lower federal courts are not binding on the Texas state courts.    The Texas court suggested that the U.S. Supreme Court’s opinion in Obergefell could be interpreted narrowly to address solely the question whether states must allow same-sex couples to marry and must recognize same-sex marriages contracted from out of state, but that the Obergefell opinion said nothing directly about what rights must be accorded to same-sex married couples.  This is, as Justice Jefferson’s Petition to the Supreme Court makes clear, blatantly untrue.  It treats the Pavan ruling as if Justice Gorsuch’s dissent was speaking for the Court.

Justice Jefferson’s Petition on behalf of Mayor Turner and the City of Houston makes mincemeat out of the work product of his former colleagues, quoting clear language from Obergefell which, among other things, specifically mentioned health insurance as an example of how the denial of marriage to same-sex couples violated their fundamental right to marry and to be treated equally with different-sex couples.

This case is just as clear as Pavan was, and is likely to receive the same treatment from the U.S. Supreme Court, unless that Court finds some procedural or jurisdictional reason to dismiss the Petition without deciding the question presented by the petitioners: “Did the Supreme Court of Texas correctly decide that Obergefell v. Hodges and Pavan v. Smith ‘did not hold that states must provide the same publicly funded benefits to all married persons,’ regardless of whether their marriages are same-sex or opposite-sex?” Some have suggested that because the Texas Supreme Court was ruling only on the validity of a preliminary injunction, the matter is not procedurally ripe for U.S. Supreme Court review, but any attempt to reinstate the preliminary injunction would directly violate the constitutional rights of Houston City employees in clear violation of the Obergefell ruling.

On a parallel track, Lambda Legal filed a federal district court lawsuit in Houston over the summer on behalf of some married LGBT City employees, seeking a declaratory judgment that they are entitled to the same benefits for their spouses that their straight colleagues get. If the Supreme Court does not grant Justice Jefferson’s Petition, it is likely that the matter can be resolved relatively quickly through Lambda’s case, since the City would eagerly comply with an order by the U.S. District Court to provide equal benefits.  This is, at heart, a dispute between the pro-LGBT Houston Democratic city government and the anti-LGBT Republican state government.

 

 

Texas Supreme Court Refuses to Dismiss Challenge to Spousal Benefits for Houston City Employees

Posted on: June 30th, 2017 by Art Leonard No Comments

In a clear misreading of the U.S. Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling from 2015, Obergefell v. Hodges, especially as elucidated just days ago by that Court in Pavan v. Smith, the Texas Supreme Court unanimously refused on June 30 to dismiss a lawsuit by two disgruntled Houston taxpayers who argue that the city of Houston may not provide employee benefits for the same-sex spouses of its employees. The case is Pidgeon v. Turner, 2017 Tex. LEXIS 654.

Instead, while affirming a ruling by the Texas Court of Appeals that had reversed the preliminary injunction that a Texas trial court issued in 2014 against payment of the benefits, the Texas Supreme Court sent the case back to the trial court for it to decide whether the Obergefell decision obligates Houston to provide equal benefits to same-sex spouses of its employees, and also to consider the taxpayers’ argument that the city should be required to “claw back” the value of benefits that were paid prior to the Obergefell decision, on the theory that Texas’s refusal to recognize same-sex marriages contracted out-of-state was valid until the U.S. Supreme Court ruling was announced.

In Pavan v. Smith, the Arkansas Supreme Court had ruled that the Obergefell decision did not require the state to treat same-sex spouses the same as different-sex spouses for listing as a parent on the birth certificate of a child born to their spouse. Reversing that ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court said: “As we explained [in Obergefell], a State may not ‘exclude same-sex couples from civil marriage on the same terms and conditions as opposite-sex couples.’ Indeed, in listing those terms and conditions — the ‘rights, benefits, and responsibilities’ to which same-sex couples, no less than opposite-sex couples, must have access — we expressly identified ‘birth and death certificates.’ That was no accident…”

Thus, the Supreme Court made clear in Pavan, contrary to the Arkansas Supreme Court’s unduly narrow reading of Obergefell, that same-sex couples are entitled to the same rights and benefits of marriage as different-sex couples. In listing some of the rights and benefits of marriage that same-sex couples had wrongly been denied, the Obergefell court specifically mentioned health insurance, an employee benefit that is at issue in the Texas case.  Thus, to claim that the Obergefell opinion fails to deal with this issue explicitly is totally disingenuous.

And yet, Justice Jeffrey S. Boyd wrote for the Texas Supreme Court in Pidgeon v. Turner, “The Supreme Court held in Obergefell that the Constitution requires states to license and recognize same-sex marriages to the same extent that they license and recognize opposite-sex marriages, but it did not hold that states must provide the same publicly funded benefits to all married persons, and – unlike the Fifth Circuit in DeLeon – it did not hold that the Texas DOMAs are unconstitutional.” “DeLeon” refers to the Texas marriage equality decision that was issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit a few days after the Obergefell decision, holding that the Texas ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional in light of Obergefell.

Instead of cutting through procedural complications and saving everybody involved lots of wasted time and money through prolonged litigation, the Texas court has now repeated the error of the Arkansas Supreme Court by insisting that the Obergefell ruling does not clearly require “the same” rights, benefits and responsibilities, and, incredibly, cited in support of this point the Supreme Court’s decision on June 26 to grant review of a Colorado Court of Appeals ruling, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Human Rights Commission, which concerns a totally different question: whether a baker has a 1st Amendment right to discriminate against a same-sex couple by refusing an order for a wedding cake in violation of a state anti-discrimination law.  The Supreme Court did not address in Obergefell the question of reconciling a potential clash between anti-discrimination laws and the rights of free exercise of religion and freedom of speech enjoyed by non-governmental entities and individuals.  But the Court most emphatically did address the issue that governmental actors, bound by the 14th Amendment, must accord the same rights to all married couples, whether same-sex or different-sex, and it reiterated that point in Pavan.

The Texas case dates back to 2013, when Houston’s Mayor Annise Parker, an out lesbian, reacted to the Supreme Court’s Windsor decision by extending benefits to the same-sex spouses of Houston city employees who had gone out of state to get married. At the time, Texas had both a state Defense of Marriage Act and a similar constitutional amendment, and Houston had a charter provision limiting municipal employee benefits to legal spouses and children of employees.  Relying on an advisory opinion from the city attorney, Parker concluded that after Windsor it was unconstitutional to refuse to recognize those out-of-state marriages.

Jack Pidgeon and Larry Hicks, Houston taxpayers who identified themselves as devout Christians who did not want their tax money going to subsidize same-sex marriages, filed a lawsuit challenging the benefits extension in December 2013, and refiled in October 2014 after the first case was dismissed for “want of prosecution” while the parties were wrangling about the city’s attempt to remove the case to federal court. Pidgeon and Hicks claimed, based on state and city law, that the benefits extension was “expending significant public funds on an illegal activity.”  They persuaded a local trial judge to issue a preliminary injunction against continued payment of the benefits while the case was pending, and the city appealed.

The Texas Court of Appeals sat on the appeal while marriage equality litigation proceeded both in the federal courts in Texas – the DeLeon v. Perry case – and nationally. Shortly after the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell on June 26, 2015, the 5th Circuit, affirming a federal district court ruling, held in DeLeon that the Texas laws banning same-sex marriage were unconstitutional.

Then the Texas Court of Appeals reversed the trial court’s preliminary injunction in the Pidgeon case and sent the case back to the trial court with instructions to decide the case “consistent with DeLeon.” Pidgeon and Hicks sought to appeal this ruling to the Texas Supreme Court, but were initially turned down by that court.  Then the top Republican elected officials in the state – the governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general – and a bunch of other non-parties filed papers with the Supreme Court urging it to change its mind and allow the appeal, which the court eventually agreed to do.

In its June 30 ruling, the court buried itself in procedural complications. Based on its incorrect conclusion that the Obergefell decision, as amplified by the Pavan ruling, does not decide the merits of this case, and further giving credence to the plaintiffs’ argument that Obergefell cannot be construed to have any retroactive effect because “the Supreme Court acknowledged that it was attributing a new meaning to the Fourteenth Amendment based on ‘new insights and societal understandings,”  the court opined that Pidgeon and Hicks should have an opportunity to “develop” their argument before the trial court.  This contention on retroactivity is not the view that has been taken by other courts, including some that have retroactively applied Obergefell to find that cohabiting same-sex couples in states that still have a common law marriage doctrine can be held to have been legally married prior to that ruling.  Indeed, the federal government even gave Windsor retroactive application, allowing same-sex couples to file for tax refunds for earlier years on the basis that the Internal Revenue Service’s refusal to recognize their state-law marriages under DOMA had been unconstitutional.

The Texas Supreme Court agreed with Pidgeon that the Texas Court of Appeals should not have directed the trial court to rule “consistent with DeLeon” because, technically, the state trial courts are not bound by constitutional rulings of the federal courts of appeals, only by U.S. Supreme Court rulings on questions of federal law. DeLeon could be a “persuasive” precedent, but not a “binding” precedent.  This merits a big “so what?”  After all, the real question in this case is whether Obergefell requires that married same-sex couples are entitled to the “same benefits” as different-sex couples from their municipal employer, and the answer to that could not be more clear, especially after Pavan v. Smith.  (Indeed, Justice Gorsuch’s dissenting opinion in Pavan repeats the same mistaken assertion — that Obergefell does not clearly require the “same” rights and benefits which the Court responds to by quoting from Obergefell to the opposite effect – and is just as disingenuous as Justice Boyd’s decision for the Texas court.)

Now the case goes back to the trial court in Houston, where the outcome should be dictated by Pavan v. Smith and Obergefell and the court should dismiss this case. But, since this is taking place in Texas, where contempt for federal law is openly expressed by public officials, who knows how it will turn out?

Same-Sex Marriage Looms for Taiwan after Constitutional Court Ruling

Posted on: May 24th, 2017 by Art Leonard No Comments

The Constitutional Court of the Republic of China (Taiwan) voted overwhelmingly that same-sex couples are entitled to marry, and that anti-gay discrimination violates the Republic’s Constitution. The May 24 ruling was greeted with relative equanimity by legislative leaders, who were ordered by the court to approve legislation to implement this decision by May 24, 2019.  Otherwise, the court said, the decision would go into effect automatically, and same-sex couples would be entitled to marry.  Only two justices dissented, and one abstained.  Press reports we saw differed as to whether the court has 14 or 15 members.  Either way, the majority was overwhelming.

This was the first ruling by an Asian high court to accept marriage equality as a constitutional right, although there might be political and ideological arguments about its significance in relation to the rest of Asia due to the unusual status of Taiwan, which the Peoples’ Republic of China (Mainland China) considers to be part of its country that is just temporarily self-governing and most countries do not recognize it as an independent nation. However, there is no disputing that when this ruling goes into effect, Taiwan will be the first place where same-sex marriages can be performed in Asia with the imprimatur of legally-recognized status.

The opinion, formally called Interpretation No. 748, was released only in Chinese, but the court simultaneously issued an English-language press release summarizing the ruling in detail.

The court was responding to petitions from LGBT rights activist Chia-Wei Chi and the Taipei City Government, seeking a definitive ruling on whether the freedom to marry, protected by Article 22 of the Constitution, was limited by the provisions of Chapter 2 on Marriage of Part IV on Family of the Civil Code, which defines marriage as exclusively a different-sex institution. The court also had to confront the question whether excluding same-sex couples from marriage violated the “people’s right to equality” guaranteed in Article 7 of the constitution.

The court found that both constitutional guarantees – the right to marry and the right to equality – were violated by the ban on same-sex marriage.

The court observed that the petitioner, Chia-Wei Chi, has been waging a campaign for same-sex marriage for more than thirty years. Although some progress had been made in getting the legislature to consider the issue, after more than ten years of bills being introduced and debated, nothing has been brought to a vote.  The court expressed concern about the frustration induced by this protracted legislative process.  “The representative body is to enact or revise the relevant laws in due time,” said the court.  “Nevertheless, the timetable for such legislative solution is hardly predictable now and yet these petitions involve the protection of people’s fundamental rights.  It is the constitutional duty of this Court to render a binding judicial decision, in time, on issues concerning the safeguarding of constitutional basic values such as the protection of peoples’ constitutional rights and the free democratic constitutional order.”

The court said that the freedom to marry extends both to deciding whether to marry and whom to marry. “Such decisional autonomy is vital to the sound development of personality and safeguarding of human dignity, and therefore is a fundamental right.”  The court insisted that allowing same-sex couples to marry “will not affect the application of the Marriage Chapter to the union of two persons of the opposite sex” and that it would not “alter the social order established upon the existing opposite-sex marriage.”  The court said that the failure of current law to allow same-sex couples to marry “is obviously a gross legislative flaw” and that the current provisions “are incompatible with the spirit and meaning of the freedom of marriage as protected by Article 22 of the Constitution.”

Moving to the equality issue, the court addressed the problem that Article 7, unlike the United States’ equal protection clause, explicitly requires equality “irrespective of sex, religion, class, or party affiliation,” but the court did not see this list as a barrier to protecting equality for gay people (or, it added, people with disabilities). They said that the classifications listed in Article 7 “are only exemplified, neither enumerated nor exhausted.”  In other words, this is a list of “including but not limited to” classifications, and the court saw sexual orientation as a classification governed by the same equality principle.

“Sexual orientation is an immutable characteristic that is resistant to change,” wrote the court. “The contributing factors to sexual orientation may include physical and psychological elements, living experience, and the social environment.  Major medical associations have stated that homosexuality is not a disease.  In our country, homosexuals were once denied by social tradition and custom in the past.  As a result, they have long been locked in the closet and suffered various forms of de facto or de jure exclusion or discrimination.  Besides, homosexuals, because of the demographic structure, have been a discrete and insular minority in the society.  Impacted by stereotypes, they have been among those lacking political power for a long time, unable to overturn their legally disadvantaged status through ordinary democratic process.  Accordingly, in determining the constitutionality of different treatment based on sexual orientation, a heightened standard shall be applied.”  This appears to be the equivalent of the U.S. legal concept of a “suspect classification,” one deemed illegitimate in the absence of good justification.

The court rejected any idea that reproductive capacity has anything to do with the freedom to marry, pointing out that different-sex couples may marry even if they are incapable of procreation or unwilling to engage in procreative activities. “Disallowing two persons of the same sex to marry, for the sake of their inability to reproduce, is a different treatment having no apparent rational basis,” wrote the court.  It also rejected the kind of moralistic arguments that are raised by marriage equality opponents, concluding, “Disallowing two persons of the same sex to marry, for the sake of safeguarding basic ethical orders, is a different treatment, also obviously having no rational basis.  Such different treatment is incompatible with the spirit and meaning of the right to equality as protected by Article 7 of the Constitution.”

While the court gave the government two years to make the necessary legislative adjustments to carry out this ruling, it warned that failure to do so would not prevent the decision from going into effect. Upon the two-year anniversary, if not sooner, same-sex couples will be entitled to apply for marriage registration to the usual authorities and to “be accorded the status of a legally recognized couple, and then enjoy the rights and bear the obligations arising on couples.”

Without being able to read and understand the original Chinese text, it is hard to assess whether the ruling leaves much leeway to the legislature to consider alternatives to true marriage equality. In Europe, for example, the Court of Human Rights has been willing to allow countries to adopt registered partnerships or civil unions rather than extending explicit marriage rights to same-sex couples, although that is likely to change as the number of countries having voluntarily legislated for marriage equality has grown to encompass several of the largest countries who are parties to the European Convention on Human Rights.  However, the clear import of the English summary is that same-sex marriages would have to include all the usual legal rights accompanying opposite-sex marriages to meet the equality test the court embraced, in a more explicit way than the U.S. Supreme Court did in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015.

The local English-language press in Taiwan reported that none of the major parties responded with opposition to the ruling, which was quickly embraced by Premier Lin Chuan, who “ordered Chen Mei-ling, secretary-general of the Executive Yuan, to coordinate the Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Interior and other branches to draft the revision proposal,” according to Cabinet spokesman Hsu Kuo-yung. The cabinet will approve a proposal to submit to the legislature. The two options that seem available are a bill amending existing laws to accommodate same-sex marriages, or a separate same-sex marriage bill.  In terms of timing, it seems possible that marriage equality will go into effect sooner than two years.  Although the current legislative session ends by May 31, the legislature will reconvene for some special sessions during July and August and will resume its regular session thereafter.

Appeals Courts Issue New LGBT-Related Rulings

Posted on: April 26th, 2017 by Art Leonard No Comments

Several appellate courts have issued significant LGBT-related rulings in recent days. Here is a brief summary of the new developments.

Roy Moore Loses Reinstatement Appeal before “Alabama Supreme Court”

The Alabama Supreme Court normally consists of seven justices elected by the people of the state, but when Roy Moore, who was suspended as chief justice by order of the state’s Court of the Judiciary on September 30, 2016, sought to exercise his right to appeal that ruling to the state’s Supreme Court, all of the other justices recused themselves. What to do?

The Supreme Court invoked a special procedure to authorize the Acting Chief Justice (who was appointed to occupy Moore’s seat for the duration of his elective term) to “participate” with then-Governor Bentley (who has since resigned because of a sex scandal) to create a substitute supreme court to consider Moore’s appeal. They assembled a list of all the retired judges in the state who were deemed “capable of service,” then conducted a lottery to compile a list of fifty potential judges, with the first seven names drawn to make up this special substitute version of the court unless one or more recused themselves or were disqualified for some other reason, in which case they would go back to the list of 50 until they had a full bench.

Moore was suspended because of his activities in opposition to marriage equality. After U.S. District Judge Callie Granade ruled on January 23, 2015, that the Alabama Marriage Amendment and the Alabama Marriage Protection Act, both of which prohibited formation or recognition of same-sex marriages, were unconstitutional, Moore sprang into action.  He undertook various efforts to block implementation of Judge Granade’s order by denouncing it as illegitimate, then encouraging and later directing the state’s probate judges to refrain from issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples.  As chief justice, Moore both presided over the Supreme Court and acted as the administrative head of the state court system, in which capacity he could issue directives to lower court judges.

As the marriage equality issue rose through the courts to the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 26, 2015, Obergefell v. Hodges ruling, finding a federal constitutional right for same-sex couples to marry, Moore remained outspokenly opposed, making every effort both publicly and behind the scenes to stave off the evil day when same-sex marriage might be fully accepted in Alabama. Although he recused himself from some of the Supreme Court’s actions after having issued his initial public denunciations of Granade’s rulings, he ultimately decided to participate in the court’s decision in 2016 to dismiss all pending proceedings and allow the probate judges to do their duty. But Moore wrote separately from the rest of the court, first to justify his decision not to recuse himself despite his prior actions and public statements, and then to inveigh against the federal constitutional ruling, reiterating his view that Alabama was entitled as a sovereign state to reject federal interference with its marriage laws.

This led to allegations that he was violating several provisions of the ethical code for judges, and charges were filed against him before the Court of the Judiciary, which found a string of ethical violations and suspended him from office.

In this appeal, Moore challenged the jurisdiction of the Court of the Judiciary to make its decision and contended that he had not violated any of the judicial ethical rules. He also contended that his suspension, which would run for over two years until the end of his elective term, was not warranted and was unduly long: far longer than any past disciplinary suspension of any sitting judge.

The specially-constituted substitute Supreme Court disagreed with Moore on every point, announcing on April 19 its determination, unanimously, that “the charges were proven by clear and convincing evidence and there is no indication that the sanction imposed was plainly and palpably wrong, manifestly unjust, or without supporting evidence,” so the court “shall not disturb the sanction imposed.”

This might not be the end for Moore as a “public servant,” however. Earlier in his career he had been ejected from the state supreme court for defying a federal court order to remove a 10 Commandments Monument he had installed in the lobby of the Supreme Court building.  He bided his time and eventually came back and won election to a new term as Chief Justice.  On April 26, he announced that he would enter the contest for the U.S. Senate seat that was vacated by Jeff Sessions when he became Trump’s Attorney General.  Former Governor Bentley had appointed the state’s attorney general, Luther Strange, to fill the seat pending a special election, and Strange has already announced he will be a candidate for the Republican nomination.  The deadline for candidates to qualify for the primary is May 17 and the party primaries will be held on August 15.  If no candidate wins an outright majority for the Republican nomination, a run-off will be held September 26, and the general election is December 12.

Over $600,000 Awarded to Victorious Lawyers in Texas Marriage Equality Case

In an appeal that has been pending before a panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals for more than a year, the court decided to reject an attempt by Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Attorney General Ken Paxton, and Commissioner John Hellerstedt of the Department of State Health Services to win a reduction of the large attorneys’ fees and costs awarded by U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia to the victorious attorneys who represented the plaintiffs in the Texas marriage equality case, DeLeon v. Perry (now titled DeLeon v. Abbott).

Two same-sex couples filed suit in 2013 against then-governor Rick Perry and other state officials seeking the right to marry and to win recognition of same-sex marriages performed out of state. In February 2014 Judge Garcia ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, but the decision was stayed as the state appealed to the 5th Circuit.  That court put off oral arguments until shortly before the Supreme Court announced that it would consider appeals in marriage cases from the 6th Circuit.  Then the 5th Circuit delayed ruling until after the Supreme Court announced its Obergefell decision, which made the 5th Circuit appeal purely academic.  That court quickly affirmed Judge Garcia’s decision, making the plaintiffs “prevailing parties” who were entitled to seek an award of attorneys’ fees and costs.

Judge Garcia awarded fees of $585,470.30 and costs of $20,202.90, more than $600,000 in all. In December 2015, the new line-up of official state defendants filed their appeal.  The 5th Circuit panel issued a brief opinion upholding Garcia’s award, emphasizing that the trial judge has “broad discretion” to award fees and costs if the judge “provides a concise but clear explanation for its reasons for the fee award.”    In this case, the court found that this standard had been met, but one member of the court, Circuit Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod, issued a dissent on three points.

She objected first to awarding fees for time spent opposing a motion by an anti-gay group to intervene as a co-defendant so that they could make arguments that the state was unlikely to make in defending the statute. Although the plaintiff’s lawyers were successful in beating back the intervention effort, Judge Elrod thought the state should not be required to pay them fees for doing so, since the state had not supported the intervention effort and was not the “losing party” on that issue.

She also objected to awarding fees for time that the attorneys spent “interacting with the media.” Plaintiffs’ lawyers in controversial public interest cases frequently spend time cultivating the media to win favorable coverage of the litigation and help build public support for the resulting court decision.  That was a key part of the litigation strategy in the marriage equality cases, and arguably the successful media cultivation helped to move public opinion so that the ultimate Supreme Court decision and its implementation did not arouse widespread opposition.  But Elrod argued that awarding fees for that time was “improper.”  “Plaintiffs have offered no explanation for how the media-related tasks included in the fee award were directly and intimately related to their successful representation, or were aimed at achieving their litigation goals,” she wrote.  As such, the state should not have to pay for them.

Finally, she objected to awarding fees for much of the time spent by the plaintiffs’ attorneys in recruiting and assisting various amicus curiae (so-called “friends of the court’) to file briefs supporting the plaintiffs in the case. She would have denied fees for such time on the theory, articulated by the 11th Circuit in a prior case, that because “amici are not entitled to attorneys’ fees as a ‘prevailing party,’ it would not allow this result to be changed ‘by the simple expedient of having counsel for a party do some or all of the amicus work.’’”  She would, however, agree to order the state to pay for time that plaintiffs’ attorneys spent reviewing the amicus briefs after they were filed, because the issues and arguments raised by amici might come into play during the trial or appeals of the case.  But she rejected the view that soliciting amicus parties and helping the amici to prepare their briefs was part of the work of representing the plaintiffs.  This seems the least plausible of her objections, since lawyers consider the presentation of forceful amicus briefs, carefully coordinated to avoid inconsistent arguments and assure coverage of all potential points of argument, to be an integral part of their strategy to educate the court and provide significant supplementation to the evidentiary record.  The courts of appeals and the Supreme Court have cited amicus briefs in their opinions in favor of marriage equality, showing that they are not merely peripheral window dressing in the effort to achieve the plaintiffs’ litigation goals.

Judge Elrod stated her objections in terms of concepts rather than dollar amounts, not suggesting how much she would have reduced the fee award, and the per curiam opinion does not respond to any of her arguments. The state could seek Supreme Court review, and Elrod’s partial dissent implicitly encouraged this by contending that some of the points she raised involved departures from 5th Circuit precedent or created splits between the 5th Circuit and other Circuit courts on the basis for awarding fees to prevailing parties.  The Supreme Court is rarely interested in cases about attorneys’ fees, but a circuit split in a high profile case might catch its attention.

2nd Circuit Panels Follow Christiansen Precedent in Title VII Sexual Orientation Cases

On March 27, a three-judge panel of the New York-based 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals released a ruling in Christiansen v. Omnicom Group, holding that prior 2nd Circuit decisions blocked any reconsideration by the panel of the question whether sexual orientation discrimination claims can be litigated under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination because of sex.  In an unusual move, two of the judges on the panel concurred in an opinion virtually accepting the argument that the circuit should reconsider and change its position on this question if presented with a petition for rehearing before the full bench of the circuit.

The 2nd Circuit has eleven active judges, of whom seven were appointed by Presidents Clinton or Obama, the rest by Republican presidents, holding out hope that an en banc review could lead to a favorable circuit precedent.  Although the panel ruled against Matthew Christiansen’s appeal on the sexual orientation question, it sent the case back to the district court to consider his claim of gender-stereotyping, which the Circuit may allow under the rubric of sex discrimination.

Since then, two different three-judge panels of the 2nd Circuit have issued decisions in other cases presenting the same question: whether sexual orientation discrimination claims are covered by Title VII.  In both cases, the courts found themselves bound by Christiansen and the prior precedents to reject a sexual orientation discrimination claim.

On April 18, a panel ruled in Zarda v. Altitude Express, per curiam, that it was bound by circuit precedent to uphold the trial court’s dismissal of a sexual orientation discrimination claim.   The case involved a gay male skydiver and instructor, since deceased, who was in no way gender-nonconforming – other than his failure to conform with the stereotype that men should be sexually attracted only to women, which the 2nd Circuit does not now recognize as the kind of stereotype that can give rise to a sex discrimination claim.

On April 25, a different panel ruled in Daniel v. T&M Protection Resources, a hostile environment case, that the district court correctly allowed Otis Daniel to maintain his sex discrimination claim, because the court found that the verbal harassment to which Daniel was subjected by his male supervisor could support a gender stereotyping claim. His supervisor “frequently called him ‘homo’ and told him to ‘Man up, be a man.”  The court pointedly observed that the case could not be litigated as a sexual orientation discrimination case because of prior 2nd Circuit rulings, including Zarda and Christiansen.

Attorneys for Christiansen (Susan Lask) and for Zarda’s estate executors (Gregory Antollino) have both indicated that they are filing petitions for en banc rehearing before the full 2nd Circuit.

In addition, Lambda Legal filed a petition on March 31 with the Atlanta-based 11th Circuit Court of Appeals seeking an en banc rehearing in Evans v. Georgia Regional Hospital, in which a three-judge panel voted 2-1 on March 10 to reject a sexual orientation discrimination claim under Title VII.  The panel sent the case back to a trial judge for possible litigation under a gender stereotyping theory.  Eight of the eleven active judges on the 11th Circuit are appointees of Clinton or Obama.

The 2nd and 11th Circuits both had many vacancies filled during President Obama’s first term, tipping the ideological balance of both circuits in a much more liberal direction, leaving hope that they might follow the lead of the Chicago-based 11th Circuit, which on April 4 became the first federal appeals court to ruled that sexual orientation claims are covered by Title VII, in a case brought by lesbian college instructor Kimberly Hively, represented before the appeals court by Lambda Legal.  The issue might be brought to the Supreme Court by a disappointed plaintiff or employer, depending how the courts rule on these continuing appeals.

 

 

 

Florida Ordered to Correct Death Certificates to List Surviving Same-Sex Spouses Without Requiring Individual Court Orders

Posted on: April 1st, 2017 by Art Leonard No Comments

U.S. District Judge Robert L. Hinkle, who rendered a decision prior to Obergefell v. Hodges finding that Florida’s ban on same-sex marriages was unconstitutional, had the opportunity to apply his ruling further in Birchfield v. Armstrong, Case No. 4:15-cv-00615 (N.D. Fla.), issued on March 23, 2017.  The case was brought by Lambda Legal as a class action on behalf of all survivors of same-sex spouses who died in Florida prior to the Obergefell decision, and who were thus not listed as surviving spouses on their death certificates.  Those certificate identify the decedents as being unmarried at death because Florida did not recognize their same-sex marriages, which had been performed out-of-state in jurisdictions that allowed such marriages.

There are two named plaintiffs, Hal B. Birchfield and Paul G. Mocko. Birchfield married James Merrick Smith in New York in 2012, the year after New York adopted its Marriage Equality Law.  Smith died in Florida in 2013.  Mocko married William Gregory Patterson in California in 2014, the year after the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed an appeal and left standing a federal court order striking down California Proposition 8, thus allowing the resumption of same-sex marriages in California as decreed by that state’s Supreme Court in 2008.  Patterson died in Florida later in 2014.  In both cases, the decedents were identified as unmarried on their death certificates, and any mention of their surviving spouses was omitted.

A proper death certificate is an important document for a surviving spouse to have as they settle the affairs of their decedent, especially when it comes to dealing with issues involving property ownership, bank accounts, survivor benefits under government programs, insurance policies and the like. To have to initiate litigation to obtain a proper death certificate is an inconvenience at a difficult time.

After the Obergefell decision, Birchfield and Mocko sought to get corrected death certificates.  But the state insisted, pursuant to a statute and an interpretive rule, that they could only get such certificates by obtaining an individual court order.  Lambda sued on their behalf in federal court seeking class relief, arguing that the Obergefell decision must be applied retroactively and that the state should have to issue corrected death certificates upon presentation of documentation of the out-of-state weddings, without requiring surviving spouses to go to state court for an order.

The state relied on Fla. Stat. Sec. 382.016(2), which states: “CERTIFICATE OF DEATH AMENDMENTS – Except for a misspelling or an omission on a death certificate with regard to the name of the surviving spouse, the department may not change the name of a surviving spouse on the certificate except by order of a court of competent jurisdiction.”

Judge Hinkle pointed out that one might plausibly read this statute to authorize exactly the relief that Lambda Legal was seeking in this case. “One might conclude that the explicit exception to the court-order requirement – the exception for ‘an omission on a death certificate with regard to the name of the surviving spouse’ – applies to a death certificate that both omits the fact that the decedent was married and omits the name of the surviving spouse.”  The problem, however, is that the ambiguity created by the wording of the statute had been addressed years ago through an interpretive rule adopted by the Health Department, which allows an amendment to marital statusor the name of a surviving spouse, but not both, without a court order.  “The defendants refused to depart from that interpretation,” the judge observed, without noting an explanation offered for such refusal.  The obvious explanation is sheer cussedness.  As far as Florida officials are concerned, apparently, they won’t do anything voluntarily to effectuate marriage equality beyond what a court orders them to do.  Witness, for example, the state’s obstinacy on the issue of parental status presumption for same-sex spouses of women who give birth.  Thus, the need for this wasteful litigation.

“As a matter of federal constitutional law,” wrote Judge Hinkle, “a state cannot properly refuse to correct a federal constitutional violation going forward, even if the violation arose before the dispute over the constitutional issue was settled. If the law were otherwise, the schools might still be segregated.”  Florida concedes in this case that as a result of Obergefell, declaring a constitutional right under a provision adopted as part of the Constitution shortly after the Civil War, its failure to recognize these marriages at the time of death was unconstitutional.  “They are willing to correct any pre-Obergefell constitutional violation,” Hinkle continued. “But the defendants insist that, as a prior condition to any correction, an affected party must obtain an order in response to an individual claim in state court.  Not so.  As the Supreme Court said long ago, 42 U.S.C. Section 1983 affords a person whose federal constitutional rights have been violated ‘a federal right in federal courts.’  In short, a federal court has jurisdiction to remedy a federal violation, including, when otherwise proper, through a class action.”

Hinkle found this was an appropriate case for such class relief. “To the extent the defendant state officials simply need a clear resolution of the perceived conflict between the federal constitutional requirement and the state statute, this order provides it.”  Acknowledging that state officials could legitimately seek proof that the marriages in question took place, Hinkle said that the state could require the submission of an application, affidavit, and appropriate documentary evidence.  “This order provides that, upon submission of the same materials, the defendants must correct a constitutional error that affected a death certificate’s information on both marital status and a spouse’s identity.”  If they were going to insist on a “court order” to make such a change, then a copy of Judge Hinkle’s order in this case can accompany the application.  “This injunctions binds the defendants [Florida’s Surgeon General/Secretary of Health and the State Registrar of Vital Statistics] and their officers, agents, servants, employees, and attorneys – and others in active concert or participation with any of them – who receive actual notice of this injunction by personal service or otherwise.”

Hinkle indicated that he would retain jurisdiction of the case “to enforce the injunction” if necessary and to “award costs and attorney’s fees” to the plaintiffs. If past is prologue, expect haggling about the amount of attorney’s fees the state will be ordered to pay.  Lambda Legal attorneys Karen L. Loewy and Tara L. Borelli represent the plaintiffs with volunteer co-counsel David P. Draigh and Stephanie S. Silk of White & Case LLP.