The U.S. Senate took a momentous step Tuesday, passing a same-sex marriage law that offers a vital backstop for LGBTQ folks in Kansas and the nation. While the Respect for Marriage Act falls short in some ways, it shows how far we’ve come over the past few decades.
In 1996, after all, President Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act into law. That forbade the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages, and allowed states to ignore such marriages performed elsewhere. Only five years later, in the fall of 2001, I met the man who would become my husband.
Our time together has seen sweeping change throughout these United States.
In 2001, not only was same-sex marriage illegal, but several states still made sex between people of the same gender a crime. Kansas was one of them. The dominos began to fall with Lawrence v. Texas in 2003, in which the U.S. Supreme Court overturned so-called sodomy laws. My husband and I moved to New Hampshire in 2005, which legalized civil unions three years later. In 2010, it upgraded those matches into full-fledged marriages. The next year, we became parents.
Finally, in 2015 the Supreme Court overturned the last vestiges of the Defense of Marriage Act and made same-sex marriage legal across the entire country. But that change didn’t happen in isolation. It was accompanied by a sweeping change in public attitudes toward relationships like mine. A full 71% of the public now supports same-sex marriages, according to Gallup.
With Senate approval, the bill returns to the U.S. House for final passage.
Or as U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids put it on Twitter: “Ensuring every American can marry the person they love is long overdue. Excited to get this bill across the finish line!”
Motivated to move
So why, then, did the U.S. Congress take action this year?
You can thank those onetime allies in the Supreme Court. In overturning the seemingly ironclad precedent of Roe v. Wade, hard-right justices alarmed those whose unions depended on another precedent. Justice Clarence Thomas singled out the 2015 case — Obergefell v. Hodges — as one of those ripe for reexamination.
The Respect for Marriage Act looked like an ideal response. The bill sailed through the House of Representatives this summer thanks to a surprisingly bipartisan vote. Sure, Democrats voted for it, but so did 47 Republicans. Senators sat up and took notice. Maybe, they realized, they should also support widely popular rights enjoyed by families across the country.
It took months of wrangling and an entirely superfluous religious liberty amendment, but that voyage ended in success Tuesday evening.
As I said earlier, the bill isn’t perfect. It functions as a backup plan if the Supreme Court decides at some future date to overturn Obergefell. The measure doesn’t establish a true national right for same-sex couples to marry. But it does require that states recognize all valid marriages performed in other states. Similarly, the federal government has to honor such unions. Thus, the worst-case scenario would be that some states don’t perform same-sex marriages but respect those conducted elsewhere.
“It’s complicated, and maybe unnecessarily so,” said Kansas state Rep. Stephanie Byers, one of the Legislature’s LGBTQ members. I reached out to all of them when it appeared the bill was going to pass. Byers pointed out that state income tax is based on federal law, which could lead to problems for same-sex couples of the kind seen before 2015.
“We could see a return to those frustrations and complications,” she said.
