Baker v. Nelson | |
---|---|
Court | Minnesota Supreme Court |
Full case name | Richard John Baker et al., Appellants, v. Gerald Nelson, Clerk of District Court, Fourth Judicial District, in Hennepin County, Respondent |
Decided | October 15, 1971 |
Citation(s) | 291 Minn. 310, 191 N.W.2d 185 (1971) |
Case history | |
Prior action(s) | Plaintiff's claim dismissed |
Appealed from | Hennepin County |
Holding | |
OPINION: [1] Denial of the statutory entitlement demanded by gay citizens to marry the adult of one's choice "does not offend the . . . United States Constitution". | |
Court membership | |
Chief judge | Oscar Knutson |
Case opinions | |
Decision by | C. Donald Peterson |
Majority | unanimous |
Concurrence | Martin A. Nelson, William P. Murphy, James C. Otis, Walter F. Rogosheske, Fallon Kelly |
Laws applied | |
Minn.St. c. 517; U.S. Const. amends I, VIII, IX and XIV | |
Overruled by | |
Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) |
Richard John Baker v. Gerald R. Nelson, 291 Minn. 310, 191 N.W.2d 185 (1971), was a case in which the Minnesota Supreme Court decided that construing a marriage statute to restrict marriage licenses to persons of the opposite sex "does not offend" the U.S. Constitution. Baker appealed the decision, and on October 10, 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed the appeal "for want of a substantial federal question". [2]
Because the case came to the Supreme Court through mandatory appellate review (not certiorari ), the dismissal constituted a decision on the merits and established Baker v. Nelson as precedent, [3] although the extent of its precedential effect had been subject to debate. [4] In May 2013, Minnesota legalized same-sex marriage and it took effect on August 1, 2013. [5] On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court explicitly overruled Baker in Obergefell v. Hodges , making same-sex marriage legal nationwide. [6]
On 18 May 1970, activists James Michael McConnell, librarian, [7] and Richard John Baker, law student on the Minneapolis campus [8] of the University of Minnesota, [9] applied for a marriage license in Minneapolis. Gerald Nelson, Clerk of District Court in Hennepin County, denied the request on the sole ground that the two were of the same sex. The couple filed suit in district court to force Nelson to issue the license. [10]
The couple first contended that their request for a marriage license was not forbidden. [11] If the court were to construe the statutes to require different-sex couples, however, Baker claimed such a reading would violate several provisions of the U.S. Constitution: [12]
The trial court dismissed the couple's claims and ordered the clerk not to issue the license.[ clarification needed ] [13]
The couple appealed the district court's decision to the Minnesota Supreme Court. The Court heard oral argument in the case on September 21, 1971. During the oral argument, while Baker and McConnell's lawyer was presenting his case, Justice Fallon Kelly turned his chair around, thus literally turning his back on the attorney. The justices did not ask a single question during the oral argument to Baker and McConnell's lawyer or to the assistant county attorney who represented the clerk. [14]
In a brief opinion issued on October 15, 1971, authored by Justice C. Donald Peterson, the Minnesota Supreme Court unanimously affirmed the trial court's dismissal. Based on the common usage of the term "marriage" and gender-specific references elsewhere in the same chapter, the Court held that the statutes prohibited marriage between persons of the same sex. [15] This restriction, the Court reasoned, did not offend the Due Process Clause because procreation and child rearing were central to the constitutional protection given to marriage. [16]
With respect to the claim of an equal-protection violation, the Court found that childless marriages presented no more than a theoretical imperfection in the state's rationale for limiting marriage to different-sex couples. It found the plaintiffs' reliance on the U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision in Loving v. Virginia , finding an anti-miscegenation law unconstitutional, failed to provide a parallel: "in commonsense and in a constitutional sense, there is a clear distinction between a marital restriction based merely upon race and one based upon the fundamental difference in sex." [17]
The Court acknowledged that Justice Goldberg's concurrence in Griswold v. Connecticut , which argued that criminalizing the possession of contraceptives violated the right to marital privacy, found support for marital privacy partly in the Ninth Amendment, but the Court distinguished Griswold and found no authority for the Ninth Amendment being binding on the states. [18] The Court dismissed the plaintiffs' claims under the First and Eighth Amendments without discussion. [19]
Baker and McConnell appealed the Minnesota court's opinion [1] to the U.S. Supreme Court. There, they claimed that the marriage statute, [11] as construed, implicated three rights: it abridged their fundamental right to marry under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment; discriminated based on gender, contrary to the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment; and deprived them of privacy rights flowing from the Ninth Amendment to the United States Constitution. [20]
In his "Motion to Dismiss Appeal and Brief", the Hennepin County Attorney argued, correctly, that the marriage license issued previously [21] made this case moot. [22] On October 10, 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court responded with a one-sentence order: "The appeal is dismissed for want of a substantial federal question." [23] [24]
In most cases presented to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Court's refusal to hear the case is not an endorsement of the decision below. [25] However, since this case came to the Court through mandatory appellate review, [note 1] the summary dismissal is a decision on the merits of the case. [3] As binding precedent, Baker prevented lower courts from coming to a contrary conclusion when presented with the precise issue the Court adjudicated in dismissing the case. [26]
The "moot" question suggested that perhaps the "precise issue" was not the right of citizens to marry the adult of one's choice.
When dealing with precedents like Baker, lower courts may have to guess at the meaning of these unexplained decisions. [27] The Supreme Court has laid out rules, however, to guide lower courts in narrowly applying these summary dispositions: [28]
In recent years, most judges faced with claims like those in Baker have concluded that subsequent developments render Baker no longer authoritative. During the 2013 oral argument in Hollingsworth v. Perry , U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg summarized her view of Baker: "The Supreme Court hadn't even decided that gender-based classifications get any kind of heightened scrutiny. And the same-sex intimate conduct was considered criminal in many states in 1971, so I don't think we can extract much in Baker v. Nelson." [33]
Following the Supreme Court's ruling in June 2013 in United States v. Windsor that found unconstitutional the provision of the Defense of Marriage Act that forbade federal government recognition of same-sex marriages, no U.S. Court of Appeals held that Baker controlled in a case challenging a state ban on same-sex marriage, [34] until November 6, 2014, when the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Baker precluded it from considering several such cases from Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee. [35] The author of the opinion, Judge Jeffrey Sutton, argued that Windsor in no way contradicted Baker: "Windsor invalidated a federal law that refused to respect state laws permitting gay marriage, while Baker upheld the right of the people of a State to define marriage as they see it." He wrote in DeBoer v. Snyder that: [36]
It matters not whether we think the decision [in Baker] was right in its time, remains right today, or will be followed by the Court in the future. Only the Supreme Court may overrule its own precedents, and we remain bound even by its summary decisions.... The Court has yet to inform us that we are not, and we have no license to engage in a guessing game about whether the Court will change its mind or, more aggressively, to assume authority to overrule Baker ourselves.
Conversely, Judge Martha Craig Daughtrey dissented from the court's decision that Baker was binding precedent. She wrote:
And although the argument [Baker precedent] was vigorously pressed by the DOMA proponents in their Supreme Court brief in Windsor neither Justice Kennedy in his opinion for the court nor any of the four dissenting judges in their three separate opinions mentioned Baker.
The precedential value of Baker was the subject of ongoing disputes in some other circuits. In the First Circuit, an October 2014 district court decision rejected a similar challenge to Puerto Rico's ban on same-sex marriage and said the First Circuit had "expressly acknowledged–a mere two years ago–that Baker remains binding precedent" in Massachusetts v. United States Department of Health and Human Services . [37] [38] There were also dissenting opinions from the U.S. Courts of Appeal for the Fourth and Tenth Circuits in 2014 that found Baker controlling. [33]
On June 26, 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court overruled Baker in Obergefell v. Hodges . In that decision, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote: [6]
The Court now holds that same-sex couples may exercise the fundamental right to marry. No longer may this liberty be denied to them. Baker v. Nelson must be and now is overruled, and the State laws challenged by Petitioners in these cases are now held invalid to the extent they exclude same-sex couples from civil marriage on the same terms and conditions as opposite-sex couples.
During the pendency of the case, the plaintiffs Michael McConnell and Jack Baker [39] obtained a license in Blue Earth County, Minnesota, and returned to Minneapolis to be married on 3 September 1971 by a minister from the Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church. [40] [41]
As of May 2015 [update] , both were retired and living as a couple in Minneapolis. [40] In a 2016 interview, Baker revealed that some legal battles were still on-going. [42] In 2018, Assistant Chief Judge Gregory Anderson ruled that "The marriage is declared to be in all respects valid." [43] [44]
The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was a United States federal law passed by the 104th United States Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton on September 21, 1996. It banned federal recognition of same-sex marriage by limiting the definition of marriage to the union of one man and one woman, and it further allowed states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages granted under the laws of other states.
According to the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO), there are 1,138 statutory provisions in which marital status is a factor in determining benefits, rights, and privileges. These rights were a key issue in the debate over federal recognition of same-sex marriage. Under the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the federal government was prohibited from recognizing same-sex couples who were lawfully married under the laws of their state. The conflict between this definition and the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution led the U.S. Supreme Court to rule DOMA unconstitutional on June 26, 2013, in the case of United States v. Windsor. DOMA was finally repealed and replaced by the Respect for Marriage Act on December 13, 2022, which retains the same statutory provisions as DOMA and extends them to interracial and same-sex married couples.
Richard JohnBaker and James Michael McConnell are the first same-sex marriage couple known to obtain a marriage license, have the contract formalized on September 3, 1971, then added to the public record. Local officials waited more than 47 years to file their claim, retroactively, only after it was "declared to be in all respects valid."
Varnum v. Brien, 763 N.W.2d 862, was an Iowa Supreme Court case in which the Court unanimously held that the state's limitation of marriage to opposite-sex couples violated the equal protection clause of the Iowa Constitution. The case had the effect of legally recognizing same-sex marriage in Iowa. In 2007, a lower court had granted summary judgment in favor of six same-sex couples who sued Timothy Brien, Polk County Recorder, for refusing to grant them marriage licenses.
Same-sex marriage has been fully recognized in Minnesota since August 1, 2013. Same-sex marriages have been recognized if performed in other jurisdictions since July 1, 2013, and the state began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples on August 1, 2013. After 51.9% of state voters rejected a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage in November 2012, the Minnesota Legislature passed a same-sex marriage bill in May 2013, which Governor Mark Dayton signed on May 14, 2013. Minnesota was the second state in the Midwest, after Iowa, to legalize marriage between same-sex couples, and the first in the region to do so by enacting legislation rather than by court order. Minnesota was the first state to reject a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, though Arizona rejected one in 2006 that banned all legal recognition and later approved one banning only marriage.
Same-sex marriage has been legally recognized in Colorado since October 7, 2014. Colorado's state constitutional ban on same-sex marriage was struck down in state district court on July 9, 2014, and by the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado on July 23, 2014. The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals had already made similar rulings with respect to such bans in Utah on June 25 and Oklahoma on July 18, which are binding precedents on courts in Colorado. On October 6, 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the Tenth Circuit cases, and the Tenth Circuit lifted its stay. On October 7, the Colorado Supreme Court and the Tenth Circuit cleared the way for same-sex marriages to begin in Colorado.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons in the U.S. state of Minnesota have the same rights and responsibilities as non-LGBT people. Minnesota became the first U.S. state to outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in 1993, protecting LGBT people from discrimination in the fields of employment, housing, and public accommodations. In 2013, the state legalized same-sex marriage, after a bill allowing such marriages was passed by the Minnesota Legislature and subsequently signed into law by Governor Mark Dayton. This followed a 2012 ballot measure in which voters rejected constitutionally banning same-sex marriage.
Citizens for Equal Protection v. Bruning, 455 F.3d 859, was a federal lawsuit filed in the United States District Court for the District of Nebraska and decided on appeal by the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. It challenged the federal constitutionality of Nebraska Initiative Measure 416, a 2000 ballot initiative that amended the Nebraska Constitution to prohibit the recognition of same-sex marriages, civil unions, and other same-sex relationships.
United States v. Windsor, 570 U.S. 744 (2013), is a landmark United States Supreme Court civil rights case concerning same-sex marriage. The Court held that Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which denied federal recognition of same-sex marriages, was a violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment.
The state of Texas, located in the south in the United States, contains a large community of LGBTQ+ citizens. More specifically, the city Austin, Texas has the third largest population of LGBTQ+ people based on the size of the city. Austin, Texas, and Texas in general, is home to several icons of the LGBTQ+ community such as Karamo Brown, co-founder of the LGBTQ+ group "Queer Eye" and Demi Lovato, a queer artist and activist. There is history of heavy violence against the LGBTQ+ community within Texas such as riots, as well as liberation and parades celebrating those within the community.
Adams v. Howerton, 673 F.2d 1036, cert. denied, 458 U.S. 1111 (1982) is a decision from the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that held that the term "spouse" refers to an opposite-sex partner for the purposes of immigration law and that this definition met the standard at the time for rational basis review. It was the first U.S. lawsuit to seek recognition of a same-sex marriage by the federal government.
This article contains a timeline of significant events regarding same-sex marriage in the United States. On June 26, 2015, the landmark US Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges effectively ended restrictions on same-sex marriage in the United States.
This article addresses the history of gay men in the United States. Unless otherwise noted, the members of same-sex male couples discussed here are not known to be gay, but they are mentioned as part of discussing the practice of male homosexuality—that is, same-sex male sexual and romantic behavior.
Same-sex marriage has been legal in Oklahoma since October 6, 2014, following the resolution of a lawsuit challenging the state's ban on same-sex marriage. On that day, following the U.S. Supreme Court's refusal to review Bishop v. Smith, a case that had found the ban unconstitutional, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered Oklahoma to recognize same-sex marriages. On January 14, 2014, Judge Terence C. Kern of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma declared the state's statutory and constitutional same-sex marriage bans unconstitutional. The case, Bishop v. Smith, was stayed pending appeal. On July 18, 2014, a panel of the Tenth Circuit upheld Kern's ruling overturning Oklahoma's same-sex marriage ban. However, the panel put its ruling on hold pending disposition of a petition for certiorari by the U.S. Supreme Court. On October 6, 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the request for review, leaving the Tenth Circuit Court's ruling in place. State officials responded by implementing the Tenth Circuit's ruling, recognizing same-sex marriage in the state.
Kitchen v. Herbert, 961 F.Supp.2d 1181, affirmed, 755 F.3d 1193 ; stay granted, 134 S.Ct. 893 (2014); petition for certiorari denied, No. 14-124, 2014 WL 3841263, is the federal case that successfully challenged Utah's constitutional ban on marriage for same-sex couples and similar statutes. Three same-sex couples filed suit in March 2013, naming as defendants Utah Governor Gary R. Herbert, Attorney General John Swallow, and Salt Lake County Clerk Sherrie Swensen in their official capacities.
The lead cases on same-sex marriage in Kentucky are Bourke v. Beshear, and its companion case Love v. Beshear. In Bourke, a U.S. district court found that the Equal Protection Clause requires Kentucky to recognize valid same-sex marriages from other jurisdictions. In Love, the same court found that this same clause renders Kentucky's ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional. Both decisions were stayed and consolidated upon appeal to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, which heard oral arguments in both cases on August 6, 2014. On November 6, the Sixth Circuit upheld Kentucky's ban on same-sex marriage.
Tanco v. Haslam was the lead case in the dispute of same-sex marriage in Tennessee. A U.S. District Court granted a preliminary injunction requiring the state to recognize the marriages of the plaintiffs, three same-sex couples. The court found the equal protection analysis used in Bourke v. Beshear, a case dealing with a comparable Kentucky statute "especially persuasive." On April 25, 2014, that injunction was stayed by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. Tanco was appealed to the Sixth Circuit, which reversed the district court and upheld Tennessee's refusal to recognize same-sex marriages from other jurisdictions on November 6.
In the United States, the history of same-sex marriage dates from the early 1940s, when the first lawsuits seeking legal recognition of same-sex relationships brought the question of civil marriage rights and benefits for same-sex couples to public attention though they proved unsuccessful. However marriage wasn't a request for the LGBTQ movement until the Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights in Washington (1987). The subject became increasingly prominent in U.S. politics following the 1993 Hawaii Supreme Court decision in Baehr v. Miike that suggested the possibility that the state's prohibition might be unconstitutional. That decision was met by actions at both the federal and state level to restrict marriage to male-female couples, notably the enactment at the federal level of the Defense of Marriage Act.
This is a timeline of notable events in the history of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community in the United States.
a dismissal by the Supreme Court is an adjudication on the merits... a lower federal court must consider itself bound by the dismissal when a similar challenge comes before it