LGBT issues

by Jeremy Leaming

Marriage equality as significant as it is should hardly be viewed as the crown jewel of the movement for LGBT equality.

Nevertheless with the coverage given to the two cases before the U.S. Supreme Court -- both centering on marriage equality concerns -- one might be lulled into thinking that if and when government recognizes same-sex marriages in the same way it does opposite-sex marriages the nation will be so much closer to its lofty promise of equal rights. But such thinking would be as lazy as it is delusional.

As noted here last year, Kate Redburn in a post for Jacobin’s blog blasted the obsession over marriage equality as being “designed to distract liberal consciences and give Democrats political cover to gut social services.” And then she went onto to note examples, such as New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s decision last year to gut funding for homeless shelters, noting that in NYC 40 percent of the homeless are LGBT youth. Redburn also remarked that only “the most privileged among us could possibly see the fight for the right to party [a wedding celebration] as a movement for social justice.”

Besides, as this blog has noted, it is far from certain the Supreme Court controlled by right-wing justices will grant a sweeping victory for marriage equality anyway. (Instead it is possible the high court will toss Hollingsworth v. Perry, the challenge to California’s Proposition 8, on standing, and rule in U.S. v. Windsor  a major provision of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act encroaches on states’ rights or federalism grounds. Thus it is very likely the conservative Supreme Court won’t get near the question of whether laws that celebrate heterosexual marriages and denigrate same-sex relationships violate equal rights).

But as money, time and energy are funneled into marriage equality, other groups and lawmakers are striving to move forward on other fronts for equality. For example, earlier this year, Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) introduced legislation intended to ensure LGBT military families are treated in similar fashion to their straight counterparts.

And later this week, congressional lawmakers will introduce other measures aimed at advancing equality, such as another effort to outlaw workplace discrimination against people because of their gender identity or sexual orientation. At the moment a little more than a dozen states ban employers from hiring and firing people because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.

Reporting for the Washington Blade, Chris Johnson says members of both chambers will later this week introduce, once again, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act or ENDA. The bill was first introduced in 1994 and has languished in every Congress it was introduced. The measure if enacted would prohibit employers from hiring and firing people based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. As Johnson, reports, however, the bill has been a work in progress and could still use some tweaks to block employers, including religious ones, from discriminating against the LGBT community in the workforce.

by Mary Bonauto and Paul Smith. Ms. Bonauto is the Civil Rights Project Director at Gay & Lesbian Defenders in Boston. She was lead counsel in the Goodridge Massachusetts marriage case in 2003. Mr. Smith practices law in Washington, D.C. and argued the landmark Lawrence v. Texas gay rights case in the Supreme Court in 2003.

We are co-counsel in two of the lawsuits challenging the Defense of Marriage Act that are now awaiting the Supreme Court’s ruling in United States v. Windsor. We principally chose “DOMA” as a litigation target because it so clearly denies gay and lesbian married couples the equal protection of the law guaranteed by the Constitution -- treating those married couples, and only those couples,  as though they are single for purposes of all 1,100-plus federal laws that take marital status into account. Significantly though, DOMA also involves a decision by Congress to second-guess the choices made by individual states that have married same-sex couples. By defining “marriage,” for all federal purposes, as limited to heterosexual unions, the law vitiates the States’ determination that married same-sex couples are married for federal purposes. The ability to say who is married has been the virtually exclusive domain of the states -- not Congress -- and is bounded only by other constitutional guarantees of due process and equal protection.

We have always felt that this limited federalism aspect of the DOMA litigation is also helpful on the equal protection challenge. In our briefs (as in Edie Windsor’s in the Supreme Court), the fact that states control marriage policy in this country is used to undercut the claimed justifications for discriminating based on sexual orientation that have been offered up by the law’s defenders.  Although neither we nor Windsor raised these claims, one state, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, has its own pending case in which it argues that DOMA undermines state prerogatives to license marriages for same-sex couples as it does for others. A prominent amicus brief by conservative legal scholars filed in the Windsor case also sounded concerns that DOMA goes beyond defining marriage for federal purposes and interferes with state law. And at the Supreme Court arguments on March 27, Justice Kennedy and others asked questions suggesting they might agree that DOMA violates principles of federalism.

But the prospect that the Court might give considerable weight to federalism in a decision invalidating DOMA has caused grave concerns among some progressive observers – most notably Linda Greenhouse in her recent column ominously named “Trojan Horse.” The primary concern she expressed was that a decision invalidating DOMA on federalism grounds would, by emphasizing the primacy of states in setting marriage policy, somehow immunize from constitutional challenge those states that have chosen not to extend marriage rights to same-sex couples. But this concern reflects a mixing of constitutional apples and oranges.