Obergefell Decision

This morning the U.S. Supreme Court decided in Obergefell v. Hodges that gay and lesbian couples have a right to marry (and that the states currently forbidding it must recognize other states' legal marriages and allow their own). I'm personally very glad for the decision, even while trying to be respectful of people who aren't. (Those people include family members, including the closest of them, who for religious reasons disagree.) It's my opinion that there isn't a nonreligious reason to disallow those people's rights, and in this nation solely religious reasons are not valid under the law.

There will almost certainly be ongoing controversies about religious exemptions: what happens to religious organizations (and their tax exemptions) that don't want to comply, for example with respect to their employees; what happens to individuals or entities that claims religious conscience forbids them from recognizing or participating in such marriages; etc.

And my last comment: this is another example of a complexity the Roberts court has demonstrated beyond its reputation. I strongly dislike the decision in Citizens United. I didn't like the decision in AT&T Mobility v Concepcion (which basically affirms the rights of companies to impose binding, individual arbitration clauses in lieu of potential future class action cases). I'm uncomfortable with Shelby County v Holder, which overturned part of the Voting Rights Act. Each of these were strongly conservative (or at least Republican) leaning decisions. Yet we have Obergefell and Windsor (which overturned DOMA) affirming gay rights and two decisions upholding the legality/constitutionality of the ACA. For better or worse, this court is not a one-trick pony.

Last (meaning yes, I lied last time I said I was making my last comment), I'm glad that even when our rhetoric is heated on issues including those mentioned above, we're spared from the kind of ideological violence happening elsewhere in the world today: France, Tunisia, Kuwait, at least 55 dead. We're nowhere near immune to ideological violence here, either, as we've seen too often, but at least we do have the structure and culture to promote peaceful disagreement.