A constitutional right

By S.M. | NEW YORK

THIS morning, on the anniversary of twoprevious rulings expanding gay rights, and on the eve of gay-pride weekend in New York and San Francisco, America's Supreme Court announced a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

By a vote of 5-4, the justices ruled that the 14th amendment prohibits states from banning gay nuptials. The case, Obergefell v Hodges, was argued in April.

In his majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy began by noting that "[t]he centrality of marriage to the human condition makes it unsurprising that the institution has existed for millennia and across civilizations", referring to sources from Confucius to Cicero:

Like choices concerning contraception, family relationships, procreation, and childrearing, all of which are protected by the Constitution, decisions concerning marriage are among the most intimate that an individual can make.

Surveying the development of gay rights over the past several decades, Justice Kennedy then held:

Excluding same-sex couples from marriage thus conflicts with a central premise of the right to marry. Without the recognition, stability, and predictability marriage offers, their children suffer the stigma of knowing their families are somehow lesser. They also suffer the significant material costs of being raised by unmarried parents, relegated through no fault of their own to a more difficult and uncertain family life. The marriage laws at issue here thus harm and humiliate the children of same-sex couples.

Each of the four dissenters—Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas—wrote an opinion, bringing the total length of today's decision to 103 pages. Two years ago, Justice Scalia had predicted the very decision he lambastes today as a "threat to American democracy". It is “inevitable", he wrote in 2013, that the court would one day announce a right to gay marriage.

In 2004, Massachusetts became the first state where gays could wed. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court found that its state constitution "affirms the dignity and equality of all individuals" and "forbids the creation of second-class citizens". Over the next decade, 15 more states and the District of Columbia legalised same-sex marriage, via court rulings or legislative acts. In the wake of the Supreme Court's ruling in United States v Windsor striking down the heart of the federal Defence of Marriage Act in 2013, a cascade of federal court rulings invalidated marriage bans in 20 more states. But it took a ruling by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in November 2014 upholding bans in Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky and Tennessee to persuade the justices to take up the matter it decided today.