In my life, when it comes to the 14th Amendment, there's probably no more central moment than the case of Loving v. Virginia. Hi, I'm Martha Jones, professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. In 1967 in 18 states, the marriages between white and people said to be Not white. Weren't recognized. Loving v. Virginia is that moment when the U.S.
Supreme Court finally strikes down what we term anti-miscegenation laws. But my parents were married in 1957, 10 years earlier. My mother... white American woman, my father, an African American man.
They couldn't be married in his home state. They were married in New York. They were reviled and ridiculed.
We, their children, were branded unfortunates and worse. I am a child of Loving versus Virginia, which is to say that as I try and make sense of my own life. Shoot. You told me this was going to happen.
Loving we owe to the 14th Amendment. It's the Equal Protection Clause that is going to expressly be the vehicle for talking about inequality before the law. The case lends my family a kind of legitimacy.
So when I think about my own story, I think about the folks who waged those tireless and oftentimes thankless campaigns to breathe into the Constitution. Some kind of meaning that helps to make my life make sense. That's my story.
We are gathered here today to celebrate the marriage of the 14th Amendment and marriage. Now, marriage is a symbol of your love, your commitment, and it's a legal bond. The government believes that marriage is so essential to our society that it gives married couples benefits and legal protections that keep families whole. Now, you might not know it, but marriage and the 14th have a long history together. Before the Civil War, enslaved people had no legal right to marry.
Without that legal recognition, they could be ripped apart from their spouses and children at any time. Only after emancipation and with the protections of 14 could formerly enslaved people finally legally marry. Oh, my... My darling, hungry for a slice of... So when same-sex marriage comes before the court in 2015, it's not just about love.
It's about being seen and accepted by the government as full and equal citizens. The present laws give the choice of being heterosexual and legal or homosexual and illegal. You remember how you felt when you first realized that you were a homosexual? Frightened. I didn't want to be different.
I didn't want to stand out. I wanted to have everything that everybody else had. Nothing more, nothing less. I would say the first time I started to know that I was different was probably when I was eight or nine years old.
I remember after the family was finished with these Sears or JCPenney catalogs, and they were thrown out, I would fish those catalogs out of the trash. And I did that because I wanted to cut out the pages of men's underwear. Now, I couldn't tell you why. I just knew I wanted those pages. They meant something to me.
But I also realized that I felt a sense of shame, like somehow I knew it was wrong to do that. And that sense of shame finally got the better of me. And I actually burned those pictures in a coffee can in the basement.
Starting in middle school, I sang in the choir, I did musicals, stereotypical gay things, I didn't play sports. Just one of those kids who checked a lot of those boxes of, oh, he must be gay. As I started to get older, the closet door creaked open a little bit, but I quickly slammed it shut because, you know, at that point I was still coming to terms with being gay. The discovery of one's sexual preference doesn't have to be a trauma. It's a trauma because it's such a traumatized society.
One never knows when the homosexual is about. He may appear normal, and it may be too late when you discover he is mentally ill. A sickness that was not visible like smallpox, but no less dangerous and contagious. A sickness of the mind.
If a man's sexuality is gone, then his possibility, his hope of loving, is also gone. The so-called straight person is no safer than I am, really. Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility. It's a journey which both people have got to make with each other. The first time I met John was a couple months before I came out and he was so comfortable in his skin as an out gay man that it scared me.
But I was still closeted, so, you know, that was just one of those moments when you meet a friend's friend. And we chatted for a bit, and that was it. At that point, I just wasn't ready to admit to anyone else that I was gay. Well, the second time John and I met, we started talking, and at some point John said, Well, Jim, you'd never go out with someone like me.
And I still don't know where I had the wit or the courage to respond the way that I did, but I said, Well, John, how do you know? You've never asked. But he didn't.
So that was meeting number two. The third time, I was back in Cincinnati for the holidays, and John was having a New Year's Eve party. So I went to the party at John's house, and we met for the third time, and I never left.
John and I would always joke that for us, it wasn't love at first sight, it was love at third sight. And I met Jim. And I really liked Jim, but the thing that made me love him the most was in John's entire life I had never seen him that happy. It really was just a happy life of living in Cincinnati and just being a couple and making friends.
Pretty darn boring. But at that point... Cincinnati was not a great place to be for the LGBTQ community, for any community that was different. When it comes to LGBTQ rights, Cincinnati in the 80s and 90s is a lot like Cincinnati in the 50s, or any other big city in the United States at that time.
The message to its LGBTQ citizens is, be quiet, stay hidden, or get out. America, you're at your best. America, you're at your best.
America, you're best in Cincinnati. I've been telling law students who want to be civil rights lawyers for 40 years, if you really want the work, go to the Midwest. When we moved to Cincinnati, it still had Klan rallies burning across on Fountain Square. A Cincinnati art gallery and its director went on trial in Cincinnati today for obscenity. The Mapplethorpe exhibit was an example of just where Cincinnati was at the time.
It was just too much for the city. We were in a very, very dark period. And I felt as a budding civil rights lawyer... I had a huge amount of work to do.
I started representing low-income people with respect to public benefits. We did an employment project to try and help people get jobs. I wanted to make sure that the American dream was available to everyone. After a few years, I began to meet person after person who was fired simply because they were gay. I brought one case after another trying to figure out ways to get them equal protection under the existing law.
I lost every one of those cases. So we decided to start knocking on the door of the Cincinnati City Council. We brought all these clients in and they explained what it felt like to be fired for a status that you had no power over. And we were able to convince the council to pass a human rights ordinance.
This was huge. You can't fire somebody simply because they're gay. It was a great day and there was a lot of celebration.
But, right there on the wings of our celebration was the dark cloud of Citizens for Community Values. The 1964 Civil Rights Act identified persons based on, you know, something you could see, something you could identify. And for someone to come along and claim minority status based on behavior, think what that would do.
That just opens Pandora's box. These forces that were aligned against us proposed a charter amendment called Article 12. The actual wording of the proposed amendment is as follows. The city of Cincinnati may not enact any ordinance, regulation, rule, or policy which provides that homosexual orientation provides a person with a basis to have any claim of preferential treatment. Article 12 was passed by 64% of the vote, and that repealed the Cincinnati Human Rights Ordinance, and it barred the city from offering any protection of any kind for what they called homosexuals, bisexuals.
or lesbians forever. We officially became the most gay-unfriendly city in the nation. It was really devastating to have this pass and to know that our fellow citizens thought that we did not deserve protections of any sort.
They're up in arms because they're not getting certain privileges and rights. There's something wrong there with abnormality, and I don't think it's normal. There was just...
a lot of anger and discrimination towards the LGBTQ community. It makes you sick and stuff, saying, oh, he's gay or she's a lesbian and stuff. You know, it should be kept in your own home, definitely. In this environment, LGBTQ people were expected to be quiet and not raise a ruckus and just fit in.
If you look a certain way, if you act a certain way, you're okay. We were okay because we didn't wave our own personal pride flag. We fit into what the people in Cincinnati expected from two Caucasian young men. It was a frightful time to be gay in that city. We were the only city in America with a formal statement of hatred against gays.
How can this be legal in America? When we founded our government a second time, and that's what the 14th Amendment is, we said that all persons are entitled to equal protection under the law. So we sued to challenge the constitutionality of Article 12. Good evening. The gay rights battle in Cincinnati didn't end on election day.
A lot of legal experts think that this type of legislation may not stand up to the constitutional test. But there's a huge challenge in this case that we haven't talked about yet. And that is that in 1986, the U.S.
Supreme Court had decided Bowers v. Hardwick. Mr. Chief Justice, may it please the court, this case presents... question of whether or not there is a fundamental right to engage in consensual homosexual sodomy. Are we really debating consensual sexual activity here?
I'm just saying, if somebody tried to tell you that what you and your partner do in your bedroom is illegal, I mean, I bet you'd feel some kind of way about that. You know the moment in a romantic comedy when everything goes wrong? Girl spills latte all over guy. Or guy confesses his love to girl seconds before her wedding. For Michael Hardwick, his rom-com goes really wrong when a police officer walks in on private time between him and his boyfriend.
And in 1982 in Georgia, some private acts are punishable by up to 20 years of jail time. But although the charges were dropped, for Michael, his fight was just getting started. He sued the state of Georgia.
And eventually his case made it to the Supreme Court. Hardwick's lawyers argue that the 14th Amendment protects a person's right to privacy, which definitely includes a person's bedroom. Back to the 14th Amendment in Section 1, the argument was that a law that made it a crime to engage in sex deprived the individual of liberty without due process of law. It's about how you have this right to be able to make the choice about who you want to love.
Maybe it's not written down, but it's so important that we're just going to assume that it's in the Constitution. The court on a close 5 to 4 decision ruled that homosexual claims of a right to participate in sodomy were not protected by the Constitution. Justice White wondered if the court would be asked next to give the okay to adultery and incest.
The Supreme Court comes down and says that actually under the 14th Amendment these are not rights protected by the Constitution. I got shot at in Vietnam and I come back and they tell me the Constitution doesn't belong to me and I say bull. A lot of people likened it to Plessy or Dred Scott.
Supreme Court decision that puts them back in a second-class citizenship position. Equal justice under the law, and we're not getting equal rights. The court basically said there's no protection for gay people. They can be put in jail for gay sexual conduct.
This was one of the most disgraceful decisions in the 20th century. One of those arrested was Michael Hardwick of Atlanta, Georgia. Bowers was a huge roadblock for progress. Gave our government license to discriminate against gay people.
And so every time you raise the notion of equal rights for gay people, I'd have Bowers thrown in my face. And lo and behold, that's what happened in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. Mr. Gerhard Stein.
Since Bowers, every circuit court which has addressed the issue decreed that homosexuals are entitled to no special constitutional protection as a special class because it's pretty hard to identify in any individual homosexuality, is it not? How are we even going to identify who they are? I remember that exchange, and I remember the difficulty Judge Kennedy had with this point, as if... She wanted to know who they were.
Many homosexuals successfully conceal their orientation and because homosexuals are not identifiable on sight unless they choose to be identifiable by their conduct, they just can't constitute a special class. I actually have relived this part of the argument and I want a do-over. Because I want to turn to... I want to turn to the crowd.
There was a courtroom was packed. And I want to ask all the gays to stand up. They were all around her.
Then I thought, that's not fair. I mean we're still living under Bowers. Maybe just being identified is going to put them at risk. We had once zero protection for these people.
When you lose a case of this consequence, when you leave a city this defenseless, when you leave people this lonely, it's hard not to take it personally. Invisibility. Marginalized groups feel it all too often.
Black people's skin has traditionally made us so invisible to society that we have had to literally paint our existence onto the streets. Unlike the black community, the LGBTQ community's invisibility come from being forced to hide. They've had to live in the closet or face persecution, being arrested, fired, ostracized from their family, or worse. And because they've had to hide, society tells us they simply don't exist. Art by LGBTQ...
people is suppressed or coded, their identities are erased from history. As LGBTQ poet and essayist Adrienne Rich says, when someone describes the world and you are not in it, there's a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked in a mirror and saw nothing. Can you imagine that? Well, the sad thing is, too many people can. You know, amazingly enough, Cincinnati really started to change in the early 2000s.
Attitudes slowly but surely were improving towards the LGBTQ community. I think we were... increasing our numbers of people who were progressive and looking to make Cincinnati a better place.
But John and I, we were never what I would call activists. We didn't contribute to campaigns. We didn't campaign on anyone's behalf.
We didn't do any of that. You know, in some ways, I think we were a little divorced from reality in that we weren't as involved politically as perhaps we should have been. But in some ways, I think living openly as... an open gay couple is really a political act. Just being you, you help people learn that, oh, LGBTQ people really aren't that different than me.
Here I thought they were scary and horrible, but no, they're really just living their lives. And while it might be two men, their life really isn't that much different from my life. Some people feel like the LGBTQ movement happened fast.
Really fast. I get it. But whether some Americans realize it or not, it didn't just appear out of thin air.
Decades of effort went into the LGBTQ movement. By the early 2000s, Americans were seeing more LGBTQ characters on TV. I'm gay. The news began to share LGBTQ stories.
In people's personal lives, friends and family members started coming out. So if someone says the LGBTQ movement happened too fast, remember, for generations, LGBTQ activists have been fighting for recognition. And now we're all enjoying the fruits of their labor. Lawrence v. Texas. Okay.
So, 86, Bowers v. Hardwick. Court says that if states want to criminalize same-sex sexual conduct, be my guest. So...
Flash forward to Lawrence v. Texas. In Lawrence, you had two adults who had been arrested and charged with a crime because in private they were having sexual contact. And the state of Texas said that it had the power to criminalize that. The court in Lawrence is looking at a state statute very similar to the one that was at issue in Bowers v. Hardwick. And the question for the court now is, does this statute violate the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment?
In 2003, the Supreme Court has four liberal justices and five conservative justices. But one, Anthony Kennedy, sees the 14th just a little differently than his conservative peers. The petitioners are entitled to respect for their private lives.
Their right to liberty under the Due Process Clause gives them the full right to engage in their conduct without intervention of the government. Justice Kennedy writing for the court does something really interesting and different, saying, you know, we have to sort of pay attention to the dignity of the individual. We conclude this case should be resolved by determining whether the petitioners were free as adults to engage in this private conduct in the exercise of their liberty under the due process clause of the 14th Amendment.
The court said, you can't outlaw people's intimate lives just because you disapprove of them. You have to show that it's hurting. Society in some way, there's no evidence that it is.
Gay people are just living like everybody else. Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code. The virus was not correct when it was decided, and it is not correct today. It ought not to remain binding precedent.
The virus versus Hardwick should be, and now is, overruled. This is one of those few times where the court actually overrides an earlier precedent. to go the other way. And for the first time, the court says that actually the right to choose your own partner is one of those fundamental rights protected by the Due Process Clause in the 14th Amendment.
But there was a disagreement within the court. Justice Scalia has filed a dissenting opinion in which the Chief Justice... Scalia read from the bench, which is something that justices do only when they're very, very unhappy.
with the results. Many Americans do not want homosexuals to be partners in their business, scoutmasters for their children, or boarders in their home. They view this as protecting themselves and their families against a lifestyle they believe to be immoral and destructive. So imbued is the court with the law profession's anti-anti-homosexual culture that it is seemingly unaware that the attitudes of that culture are not obviously mainstream.
He says the court had been captured by elitists. It had been captured by the homosexual agenda, and that it had no business getting involved in the culture war. Let me be clear that I have nothing against the system.
...homosexuals or any other group promoting their agenda through normal democratic means, but persuading one's fellow citizens is one thing, and imposing one's views in absence of democratic majority will is something else. Scalia did say in the years after Lawrence, if I can't make laws against behavior I consider immoral just because I consider it immoral, I can't run a legal system that makes any sense to me because law has to be based on social morality. Well, Lawrence, as it was written...
took that particular social disapproval off the table. So once it's established that those relationships are equal in respectability to those between partners of the opposite sex, then the next question becomes, OK, what's your reason for saying we can't get married? A brief history of gay marriage in the United States.
Two student activists, Richard Baker and James Michael McConnell, applied for a marriage license in Minnesota. They were denied by the clerk and by the courts. But then in Colorado, a different clerk, Clayla Rorex, whose name is as unique as her place in history, did the unthinkable. Her job.
One of the couples that Clayla legally married was Richard Adams, an American, and Tony Sullivan, an Australian, like me. G'day. But even now legally married, Tony was denied a green card. The federal government claimed that they'd failed to establish that a bona fide marital relationship can exist between two faggots.
And in response to that delightful letter, Tony and Richard filed the first lawsuit to seek federal recognition for same-sex marriage. They lost. And then the 90s happened.
President Clinton signs the Defense of Marriage Act, banning recognition of all same-sex marriage. Eventually he changed his mind. Granted, it was after he was out of office, so that's safe. Federally, Doma lived on under President Bush, but the states had a different opinion, leading the charge to legalize gay marriage. All marriages are now equal.
Despite the Defense of Marriage Act, courts in Massachusetts and Hawaii decide in favor of same-sex marriage cases. But there's a backlash. And in 2004, 13 states across the country Adopt same-sex marriage bans, including Oregon, Michigan, Kentucky, Utah, Louisiana, and Ohio. So in 2011 it was, our 18th year together as a couple, we had this tradition of getting rings for anniversaries.
And it really started when we were together just seven weeks. John gave me a diamond ring, because he knew at that point we were together for good. I would say within the first two years of our relationship, we talked about marriage. You know, we had friends who were having commitment ceremonies, but they weren't marriages. We wanted to get married, but we decided that for us, marriage has to be marriage.
It can't just be this symbolic gesture. We want it to mean something legally. We wanted a level of government to say, you guys matter.
You exist. We see you. But from a state level, we were being told, well, you can never get married, and even if you were married legally in another state and could show a marriage license, the state of Ohio could say, it means nothing to us. But John and I still were hopeful. January of 2011, I started to notice something different in the way John was walking.
It just sounded different. It was like one foot was slapping the floor harder than the other. It's such a minor thing, just this change in the sound of the way someone walks.
And it wasn't going away, and I finally convinced him, you know, something's up here, you really should go see the doctor. Jim, I said, call me when you get the test results. And he said he would, and I didn't hear from him. So I called him, and...
Jim just started crying. He said, I'm so sorry to tell you this over the phone. I'm sorry to tell you, but it is ALS.
And I just felt like somebody hit me in the chest with a baseball bat. He was diagnosed with ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease. That was the start of it.
Left foot moved into his left hand, and then his right side started to join in. As John got sicker and sicker... Jim would just sit there and look at him and love him.
He was with him every second. So our days were filled with watching TV. Holding hands, knowing the end was coming, but not knowing exactly when.
So on June 26, 2013, I was working at the dining table, and John called me from his room and said, Jim, come in. So I went into his room, and he was watching the news. The Supreme Court has just struck down the Federal Defense of Marriage Act. Oh my God. If you're married, you get a different level of benefits, usually higher.
And you might get some tax breaks, like Edie Windsor. Without recognition of her marriage, she ended up having a $300,000 tax bill. If her marriage had been recognized, there'd be no tax.
So she had a lot at stake financially. When my beautiful Thea died, I was overcome with grief. In the midst of my grief, I realized that the federal government was treating us as strangers.
This gets up to the Supreme Court. court and the Defense of Marriage Act was struck down. So I read this and I thought, this is huge and I would like to give this marriage argument a real shot.
I'm standing next to John's bed holding his hand. I leaned over, hugged and kissed John and said, let's get married. The phone rang and it was Jim and he said, what are you doing next week?
And I said, why? What's happened? You know, here we are living six blocks from our county courthouse.
In a perfect world, I could have just taken John those six blocks in his wheelchair to get her marriage license, but not in Ohio. That really left us one choice and that was a chartered medical jet. So we settled on Maryland.
It was a quiet flight, few words. Landed a PWI and we parked on the tarmac. Today is a momentous day, not only in the lives of two of the most loving and special men I have ever known, also in the lives of all who know, love and respect them.
And in the larger sense, for those Americans who have waited to be recognized as equal under the law. And in matters of the heart. It was a very short service, but I remember at the beginning of it, I said, would you two please take hands?
And I looked and I realized that they had never not been holding each other's hands. Put it on upside down. We got to do something we never thought we'd be able to do.
Take each other's hands and say, I thee wed. With the respect of the law of our great land, I now pronounce you... Husband and husband, forever intertwined partners, may love and goodwill be with you forever. Let us all rejoice.
I feel like the luckiest guy. Just happy. That's all I can say. It was a happy occasion.
It was truly a happy occasion. And I've never been prouder to be an American than I was that day. For John to take that ride, for him to do that, was just the culmination of who they were, what they were as a couple, and what they meant to each other.
By being able to make those promises and commitments public and legal, Everything changed. I think John and I used the word husband a few thousand times every day. Would you like something to drink, husband? Is the volume okay, husband?
I love you, husband. I was at a picnic, and we're talking about the issues of the day, including... the Windsor decision and somebody says, well, I have really good friends.
They were so excited by the Windsor decision that they flew to the airport in Baltimore and got married right there in the tarmac. And she says, it's all gonna be in the paper on Sunday. It's a Friday night. But I said, well. That is exciting.
I'm really happy for them. But, um, you know that they got a problem. So five days after we got married, Al came to our home. I brought one piece of paper with me.
I just brought a blank death certificate. And he said, now guys, I'm sure you haven't talked about this because why would you be thinking about a death certificate when you've just gotten married? But do you understand that when John dies, his last official record as a person will be wrong? Ohio will say he was unmarried, single, and Jim, your name won't be there as his surviving spouse.
And they were furious. I can admit it, it pissed me off. They wanted to know more.
I mean, what would it take? We can do a copycat case. We can walk in the shoes of Windsor and just frame it the same way they framed that case.
I can't guarantee a win. I can only guarantee my best efforts, but I'm liking the chances. John.
He thought it was the right thing to do. Even though we both understood it meant I would be stepping away from John to devote some time to courtrooms, to meetings. To us, it was clear we had to do this.
So John and I talked and very quickly said, yes, we're in. Count us in. Let's do what we can. So we filed like three days later. You have to understand that I'm a trial lawyer.
I solve problems. My client's problem... was that they weren't going to get an accurate death certificate. So that's all I need. Shouldn't be too big a deal.
We're not trying to do anything flashy, sexy, weird, unusual here in little old Ohio. We're just trying to apply the Supreme Court precedent. And that's what we were doing. Is that all that you were doing?
But it was a first step. Same-sex marriage is legal in Maryland. It's legal here.
So after we left court... A few hours later, I was back home with John, and Aunt Tutti was there. And the phone rang, and Jim hung up, and I'll never forget, he said, we won.
He said, it looks like we won. You know, it's something to see somebody celebrating the fact that his death certificate will be able to show that he's a married man. It was a good day.
One of the happiest moments towards the end of John's life, I'm confident of. John got to live for three months to the day after that decision. This one evening, I started reading one of his favorite books to him, Weave World by Clive Barker. And over the next couple of hours, he just got quieter and quieter. And he went to sleep.
And I still remember the last sentence I read. Lions. He'd come with lions.
It was a beautiful love story. That's all there is to it. It was a beautiful love story before the illness, and it was a fantastic love story afterwards. John died on October 22, 2013. And we applied for the death certificate. It came back with the right wording, and we got what we sought.
But Ohio kept saying, you know, when we win this case on appeal, we're going to change all this back. We're going to honor what the people voted for when they banned same-sex marriage. So this case is hardly over. Their fight is just getting started.
Case Obergefell v. Hodges goes all the way to the Supreme Court. They're joined by couples across America fighting to have their marriages recognized by their state or to have their state's same-sex marriage bans overturned. This is big.
This could be the 14th Amendment doing what it does best. Or will the Supreme Court deny this basic human right? In January of 2015, we got word that the Supreme Court said, yes, we will accept this case and it will now be known as Obergefell v. Hodges. And so the question was, does the 14th Amendment require states to permit same-sex couples to marry?
I needed to be in that courtroom to hear everything that was said. We got there like at 7 o'clock in the morning. The whole atmosphere.
There were the people that were there in support of gay rights. Then there were the people that were against it. It was really something to watch.
Once we got a The courtroom, we were seated over towards the side to the left of the bench. They only allow so many people in because it's not that big of a venue. The courtroom was smaller than I expected.
I don't know, I had this image of this enormous, grand courtroom. Then the justices come in. We'll hear argument this morning in case number 14-556 Obergefell versus Hodges and the consolidated cases.
One of my heroes is Ruth Bader Ginsburg and she's so small that when she sits behind the podium, only like from her neck up shows, but when she asks a question, there's no doubt that she's a very big presence. We have changed our idea about marriage. Marriage was a... Relationship of a dominant male to a subordinate female.
Would that be a choice that a state should be allowed to have? No. Cling to marriage the way it once was?
No, absolutely not. The justices are constantly stopping. I don't really think you answered my question. I'm sorry.
Both sides. Well, you don't know if this has anything to do with Article 4. It's a constant give and take, question and answer. It's called, Congress shall make no law respecting the freedom of religion. Yes, and I...
That's what leaves this question open. It's really amazing to watch. I was certainly there for the Obergefell argument, and I recall the lead counsel defending the laws against same-sex marriage. He is asked by Justice Kennedy, who's obviously everyone knows the important vote in this case, what about respect for the dignity of the couple? And...
The Solicitor General of Michigan says the state of Michigan has no interest in the dignity of couples. And people around, including me, I have to say, around the courtroom went, what? Case is submitted. So the oral arguments end and, well, you don't really know when the court's going to announce its decision.
So Jim was going to every decision day for two months. A few years ago, had anyone asked me, Jim, what's the 14th Amendment? I would have had no idea. My knowledge of the Constitution was pretty common.
Could rattle off some of the amendments, you know, or at least what they stood for, not necessarily the numbers. But I really didn't know the Constitution. And yet, that amendment underpins this decision.
Chief Justice says Justice Kennedy will read the first decision. Justice Kennedy has our opinion this morning in case 14-556 Obergefell versus Hodges. I startled in my chair and I took my friend's hands and thought okay here it comes. The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times.
The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment did not presume To know the extent of freedoms in all of its dimensions. And so, they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning. Everyone knew the significance of what was happening.
No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage.
Their plea is that they do respect it. Respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their immutable nature dictates that same-sex marriage is their only real path to this profound commitment. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.
I remember looking out and seeing the faces of these people, some of them openly weeping like children, tears running down their cheeks. No one's heart-edged around something that profound. It was... One of the most amazing moments I've ever seen.
I will tell my children, I will tell my grandchildren, that I was there when the court said, the door is open, you can walk through, you are full members of society. My first thought was, John, I miss you. I wish you were here.
I wish you could know we won. I wish you could experience this. And that emotion, that feeling was quickly followed by a surprising realization. It was the first time in my life as an out gay man that I felt like an equal American. We want to go back now to the Supreme Court.
You see some of the interns running out with the decision. The interns, here comes our intern now with the decision. The court has just handed down its ruling.
Here it is. This is what it says. The 14th Amendment requires a state to license a marriage between two people of the same sex and...
So I sat in that courtroom between my friends knowing that word has gotten out to the crowd out front and that there's a party going on, people are celebrating and all I can think is come on wrap this up I want to go. Al and I are arm-in-arm and we're leading our group and the crowd just split before us. We would take a step and it would split further and people were crying and cheering, singing, celebrating.
You get out on the front steps and you've got all the protesters on both sides. You've got these amazing choirs singing and like a totally discordant thing because all the sound's happening at once and all the media's crowding around him. And Jim's talking to 25 microphones. I want to thank my legal team and especially Elgar Hartstein who stood by me every single step of the way.
And then he gets a call from the president. Yes it is Mr. President. I just wanted to say congratulations.
And while he's talking to the president. Vice President Biden goes to voicemail. Not only have you been a great example for people, but you're also gonna bring about a lasting change in this country.
Yeah, thank you. I mean, it's just one of those moments that you just can't do a do-over on that, and you don't want to. It was an amazing experience to walk through that crowd and to feel the love.
The day ends in Cincinnati with gay couples getting married and the celebration is kicked off. And so by the power conferred by the Supreme Court of the United States of America, we rejoice today in the power of love. You may seal your vows with a kiss.
And it continued the next day with Gay Pride Day. I mean, how many cases end with a parade through the center of the city and everybody going absolutely nuts? There were so many young people lining those streets and they were looking at Jim and just quietly moving their lips. Thank you.
Thank you. I am talking about hundreds of faces saying this is the way it should be. To go through this city that had changed so drastically, the most gay unfriendly city in the nation, to this wonderful welcoming place, I'll never forget that. John would just...
John would think this was the most hilarious thing. If you told him that his medical condition somehow had led to a historic sea change in... the United States legal system, he would probably give you that look.
You know, like, let me tell you, that kind of expression, but I can see him saying, see, Aunt Tootie, it really is all about love. That's what it's about, you know, explaining it to me. So I think that's what he would say. And I think he would be just incredibly proud. His marriage was part of it.
It was yet another lesson. Conscientious attempts to apply the Constitution's rules to our national life can produce extraordinary moments. This is the heart of the 14th Amendment. The original meaning of civil rights were the rights that you must have as a person in order to be fully present in society. By recognizing this concept of the basic civil rights, the basic rights of humanity, You know, we move forward over 150 years and we're still figuring out what that means.
So the 14th Amendment, while many years ago I couldn't have told you one thing about it, now I know the 14th Amendment and I understand how that amendment is such an important tool in ensuring that we are treated equally. It helps move us towards our American value of we the people. And living up to those commitments is one of the most meaningful things.
That's what drove me. I had to live up to my promises to John. I did this because I loved him, and love wins.
It certainly did that day. Marriage equality shows the 14th can be a beacon of inclusivity, a bridge to an America that... honors the love we have for each other.
Thanks in part to 14, the LGBTQ community has gone from being seen as a feared other to being treated as people, as living, breathing human beings who deserve equal rights. And in the same way, another group has been struggling for America to recognize their shared humanity. They too want 14 to be a bridge to the American dream, but instead they've hit a wall.