Supreme Court rules 5-4: every state must license and recognize same-sex marriage
James Obergefell had flown his terminally ill husband to Maryland to marry, then returned to Ohio to watch him die — and found himself fighting in court for the right to be named a surviving spouse on a death certificate. On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court settled that fight and every one like it: in a 5-4 ruling, Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion held that the Fourteenth Amendment requires all states to license and recognize same-sex marriages. The decision, which consolidated six cases from four states, extended to all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. territories.
The Fourteenth Amendment — ratified in 1868 to guarantee equal citizenship after the Civil War — became the legal foundation for a civil rights ruling nearly 150 years later. Obergefell resolved a circuit split and settled a question that 37 states and the federal government had answered inconsistently for two decades, making the constitutional guarantee of marriage equality uniform from Hawaii to Maine.
QWhy did James Obergefell and John Arthur have to board a medical plane to get married?
John Arthur was in the final stages of ALS — amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — and could not travel by conventional means. Ohio did not permit same-sex marriage, so Obergefell chartered a medical transport aircraft and the two men flew to Maryland, which did. They married on the tarmac, inside the plane, because Arthur was too ill to leave it. Arthur died three months later. Ohio's refusal to recognize the marriage on his death certificate is what sent the case to federal court and ultimately to the Supreme Court.
QHow did a second Ohio case in the same ruling also hinge on a death certificate?
David Michener and William Herbert Ives married in Delaware, a state that recognized same-sex marriage. When Ives died unexpectedly back in Ohio, Michener faced the same problem Obergefell did: Ohio would not list him as surviving spouse on the death certificate. Two of the named plaintiffs in the Ohio portion of the consolidated case were therefore widowers, not couples seeking to marry — men who had already lost their husbands and were fighting for recognition after the fact. The Court's ruling covered that circumstance explicitly.
QWhat was Baker v. Nelson, and why had it blocked same-sex marriage cases for four decades?
In 1972, two men in Minnesota sought a marriage license, were refused, and appealed to the Supreme Court. The Court dismissed the case 'for want of a substantial federal question' — meaning it didn't even consider it worth hearing, let alone deciding. That single-sentence dismissal technically counted as a binding precedent, and the Sixth Circuit cited it in upholding Ohio's ban, arguing the Supreme Court had already answered the question. Kennedy's majority in Obergefell formally overruled Baker v. Nelson, clearing the precedent that lower courts had used as a shield for 43 years.
