This afternoon, in front of a crowd of more than 5,000 people on the South Lawn of the White House, President Joe Biden signed H.R. 8404, the Respect for Marriage Act, into law. The new law protects same-sex and interracial marriages after the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision brought their safety into question.
The new law overrides the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which said the federal government could not recognize marriages that were not between a woman and a man. It also requires states to recognize marriages performed in other states. The Supreme Court protected the right to interracial marriage in 1967 in Loving v. Virginia, and the right to same-sex marriage in 2015 in Obergefell v. Hodges.
The Loving case came from the marriage of Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving, who married in 1958 in Washington, D.C., to avoid their home state of Virginia’s so-called Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which criminalized interracial marriage. When they returned to Virginia, police raided their home, and when Mrs. Loving showed them their marriage certificate, the officers said it was invalid in Virginia. The Lovings were charged with violating the law and pleaded guilty to “cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth.” In 1959 the court sentenced them to a year in prison, suspending it if they left Virginia for at least 25 years. They moved to Washington, D.C., where they asked the American Civil Liberties Union to defend their rights.
The Obergefell case, which was one of the many that made up the Supreme Court’s decision, revealed another danger of states refusing to recognize marriage. James Obergefell and John Arthur married in Maryland, but their home state of Ohio refused to recognize the marriage. Arthur was terminally ill and wanted Obergefell identified as his surviving spouse on his death certificate. In June 2015 a majority of the court decided that states must recognize marriages performed in other states. Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito all dissented. Arthur died before the decision was handed down.
The present Supreme Court, stacked by Trump with three far-right justices, has backed away from permitting the Fourteenth Amendment to protect civil rights. When its radical majority overturned Roe v. Wade this summer, Justice Clarence Thomas indicated he thought the right to same-sex marriage should also be revisited. He did not mention Loving v. Virginia—he himself is in an interracial marriage—but others noted that the court protected it, as well as the other cases, under the same clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
And so, Congress has protected the right to have marriages recognized, although not the right for same-sex couples to marry in states that prohibit it. That limit is due in part to the need for Republican votes to break a filibuster. In the final vote, 39 Republicans in the House supported the new law and 12 Republican Senators joined the Democrats to pass the measure, while 36 Republican Senators opposed it. The willingness of the Republicans to sign on reflects the popularity of same-sex and interracial marriage in the country: a Gallup poll in June 2022 showed support for same-sex marriage at 71%, and a September 2021 poll showed support for interracial marriage at 94%.
In his remarks about the law, Biden emphasized its bipartisan support, apparently hoping to build consensus on other issues going forward.
In 2012, Biden got out ahead of the Barack Obama White House when he publicly supported gay marriage. Today he reiterated his sentiments of a decade ago as he signed the bill into law. “Marriage is a simple proposition: Who do you love, and will you be loyal to that person you love?” Biden said in the signing ceremony. “It's not more complicated than that. We all recognize that everyone should have the right to answer those questions for themselves without…government interference.”
As if right on cue, Trump-appointed Texas judge Matthew Kacsmaryk last week handed down a decision claiming that Title X, a federal program that offers grants to family-planning services, which can treat minors, “violates the constitutional right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children.” If upheld, according to Ian Millhiser of Vox, that decision would undermine a minor’s right to privacy, including the right to contraception. The plaintiff in the case says he is “raising each of his daughters in accordance with Christian teaching on matters of sexuality, which requires unmarried children to practice abstinence and refrain from sexual intercourse until marriage,” and while he doesn’t say they’ve used contraceptive services, he doesn’t want them to have that option.
Still, the mood was upbeat at the White House today. New numbers out this morning show that inflation is slowing faster than expected, hitting 7.1% in November—still high, but lower than the 7.3% economists predicted, and down significantly from October’s 7.7%. The moderation was not just in a single product—like gas, which is selling for less than it was a year ago, before Russia invaded Ukraine—but across the board.
The worst category is the price of eggs, which is high because of a virulent outbreak of bird flu in the U.S., affecting layers but not birds raised for meat. But everything transported with diesel is also costly, as diesel is still close to $5 a gallon.
In remarks in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Biden noted that this was the fifth month in a row of good news about inflation. “Prices are still too high,” he said, “but things are getting better, headed in the right direction.” He reiterated that his economic plan is working: “We’re just getting started.”
Finally, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility formally announced the first nuclear fusion reaction that produced more energy than it took to create the reaction. This is a huge deal. If it can be recreated at scale, it would provide limitless, carbon-free energy. While that application is still decades away, today’s announcement is the culmination of decades of work to get to this point. Heartfelt congratulations to the scientists.
So it has been a day that looks to the future. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, the first Black person and the first openly LGBTQ person to serve in the position, opened today’s press briefing by calling this “an extremely historic day, a proud day for me and so many of us here at the White House and so many Americans…across the country.”
A reporter asked her whether the president had shared with her his reflections on this historic day, or if she had any thoughts. Uncharacteristically, she answered not for him, but for herself.
“This is a big day for me, but not just me; there are many colleagues that I work with here who are allies, who are also part of the community, who are very incredibly proud…. And the thing that I remember was, 10 years ago…[Biden] said something that, really, no other national elected official was saying at the time: that marriage is a proposition…about…who you love, but also about if you're going to be loyal to that person. And I think that's important.”
Jean-Pierre continued: “[Biden] has always been an ally. I think I speak for many of us at the White House today that we could not be prouder to be working for this administration, to be working for this particular President, and to working on all the issues that are going to change Americans’ lives….”
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Notes:
https://www.insider.com/roe-wade-loving-virginia-interracial-marriage-scotus-overturns-2022-6
https://news.gallup.com/poll/393197/same-sex-marriage-support-inches-new-high.aspx
https://news.gallup.com/poll/354638/approval-interracial-marriage-new-high.aspx
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/12/13/biden-s-codifying-same-sex-interracial-marriage-00073762
https://www.npr.org/2022/12/13/1141907024/gas-food-inflation-november-prices-economy-cpi
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/11/why-egg-prices-are-surging-but-chicken-prices-are-falling.html
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/13/heres-the-inflation-breakdown-for-november-2022-in-one-chart.html
https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/biden-signs-respect-for-marriage-act-equality-federal-law/
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/12/us/common-questions-nuclear-fusion-climate/index.html
