Today the US Supreme Court has legalised gay marriage across the United States. The 14 states that previously held bans on gay marriage, including Georgia and Texas, have been forced to lift them.
President Barack Obama called the ruling a ‘victory for America’ saying that ‘when all Americans are treated as equal we are all more free.’
There has however been some predictable backlash from conservative Christians with 2016 presidential candidate Mike Huckabee marked the decision and act of ‘judicial tyranny’. Some of the affected states have also stated that they would take no action until ‘procedural issues were addressed’.
The decision marks the conclusion of years of legal battles for same sex couples to reach equality in the US and at last same sex marriage has be deemed constitutional by the Supreme Court. Same sex marriages first became legal in America in Massachusetts in 2004 and in 2012 the Supreme Court struck down a federal anti-gay law.
As more and more states began to legalise gay marriages public opinion saw a major shift towards support for the equal rights of same sex couples. Hopefully this decision will mean more progress for America’s domestic politics and the Supreme Court’s willingness to make socially beneficial constitutional decisions.
Jamie Hutton
