On July 25, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled 6-1 in Ohio v. Carswell that the anti-gay-marriage amendment to the state constitution does not invalidate Ohio's domestic violence law as it applies to unmarried couples. This was welcome as far as it went, but the amendment remains in place, even if the force of its sweeping second sentence-which goes beyond marriage to prohibit any marriage-like legal status-was narrowed. This small victory was not quite dramatic enough to set the Cuyahoga River on fire.
Lambda Legal's James Madigan said of Carswell, "The court sent a strong message to those who would attempt to use the amendment to attack health insurance benefits for families, or the relationships between children and their same-sex parents: you can't get away with this." Equality Ohio's Lynne Bowman offered a more mixed assessment: "We applaud the Court for upholding Ohio's domestic violence laws. However, this ill-conceived amendment continues to make it hard for loving same-sex partners to care for each other and their families in this state."
The majority opinion by Chief Justice Thomas Moyer is not entirely convincing. He writes that the amendment's second sentence means that "the state cannot create or recognize a legal status for unmarried persons that bears all of the attributes of marriage-a marriage substitute." But that is not what the sentence says. It prohibits "a legal status for relationships of unmarried individuals that intends to approximate the design, qualities, significance or effect of marriage." As dissenting Justice Judith Lanzinger points out, the use of the disjunctive "or" means that unmarried couples are denied legal status for any one of the listed attributes of marriage, not just the list taken as a whole.
Moyer declares, "The state played no role in creating Carswell's relationship with the alleged victim. Carswell created that relationship." Lanzinger says this "misses the point. The General Assembly's classification of 'person living as a spouse' is a recognition by law of the relationship of unmarried and cohabiting individuals based solely on the similarity of that relationship to marriage."
Its shortcomings notwithstanding, Carswell effectively rebuffs the bait-and-switch tactics of cultural conservatives, who claimed a narrow purpose during the initiative campaign, then insisted on a broad interpretation after they won. Phil Burress, president of the Ohio group Citizens for Community Values (CCV), for instance, during the 2004 campaign dismissed the idea that the amendment would invalidate parts of the domestic violence law as "on its face absolutely absurd." After the amendment's passage, Burress' associate David Langdon filed legal briefs, including in Carswell, making that same "absurd" argument.
Groups like CCV insist that their intent is to protect marriage and not to harm gay people, yet they go far beyond marriage to deny same-sex couples any legal protection whatsoever. At long last, their mendacity and overreach are backfiring: By reading the Marriage Amendment narrowly to preserve protections against domestic violence for unmarried partners, Carswell sets a precedent for allowing other gay-friendly protections such as domestic partner benefits for state university employees.
Alternatively, had the Court upheld the conservatives' claim that the amendment invalidated the domestic violence law, it would have marked the amendment unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed in Lawrence v. Texas in 2003 that the state may not use traditional morality to draw distinctions in the criminal law between married and unmarried couples.
Marc Spindelman, an Ohio State University law professor and an expert in constitutional law and lesbian and gay rights, stated after the ruling, "The Court does not say so expressly, but it has effectively promised that the Marriage Amendment will be read in a way that's conditioned by reason, not inflamed by the passions of traditional morality. In this sense, Carswell may, in time, turn out to have been the beginning of the end of the Marriage Amendment itself."
Spindelman suggests that Carswell will be of greatest interest in the 13 states whose gay marriage bans are framed in a broad way like Ohio's: Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Wisconsin.
Spindelman told me, "There are upsides and downsides to this ruling. On the upside, the Court gave us more than most close observers thought we could get. On the downside, the Court left us with a legal version of Jenga [the wooden block tower building game], where we need to figure out what the definition of 'all' [the attributes of marriage] is so we stay within Carswell's terms."
Spindelman criticizes Lambda Legal for focusing only on narrowing the amendment's effect instead of disputing the constitutionality of a broader interpretation, or making an affirmative case for gay couples. "It is possible to challenge the Marriage Amendment at both the retail and the wholesale level. Lambda has exclusively pursued a retail approach-in popular parlance, death by a thousand paper cuts-and I see no good reason why. It was the women's domestic violence coalition brief that tried to craft an argument on behalf of lesbian and gay victims of domestic abuse-not the Lambda brief."
Differences over strategy aside, Spindelman is upbeat. He presciently warned in Legal Times last year that Carswell would "teach cultural conservatives a lesson the anti-domestic-violence movement has been teaching abusers for years: There's a price to pay for the moral hubris it takes to treat people as pawns in your own game." And so Carswell has.
3 Comments for “Marriage Aftershocks in Ohio”
posted by Randy on
Surprising. Usually Lambda Legal would have filed the finest brief. But Monday morning quaterbacking is always easy, so I’m not sure it was foolishness on their part.
posted by Richard J. Rosendall on
Oh, the criticism of Lambda should not be taken to mean that their brief was crappy. Not at all. It was actually quite thorough and impressive, given the approach they chose to take. Indeed, it was of much greater quality than Justice Moyer’s opinion, which tracks it closely. Here’s a link to their brief:
http://data.lambdalegal.org/pdf/legal/carswell/carswell-brief-supreme-court.pdf
Marc’s point is that they could have kept all of their existing argument and still argued in the alternative, as lawyers frequently do. It may be disconcerting for lay readers, but they are not a brief’s main target audience.
posted by Randy on
Thanks for the link. Yes, arguing in the alternative is quite common. But there is a theory amongst some attorneys that you argue your strongest position, and DON”T do the alternative, and somehow that makes for a stronger overall argument. And apparently, it worked, as the court closely followed the brief, as you say.
The question is whether the court would have gone further if pushed further, but that’s all speculation at this point.
So I guess that’s a judgment call that you have to decide at the time of the brief writing.