November 2003: Goodridge v. Department Of Public Health

The Goodridge families

But in November comes the biggest breakthrough yet: the Goodridge case in Massachusetts, started in April 2001.

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court comes down 4-to-3 on the issue, just like in the Perez interracial case from 1948. It relies on just about every one of the precedent-setting cases: quoting from Skinner from 1942, Perez, Loving from ’67, Zablocki the deadbeat dad case from 1978, Turner the prisoner case from ’87, Romer (Colorado’s amendment case) and Baehr (from Hawaii) both in ’96, Baker the Vermont case from ’99, and the Lawrence sodomy case from five months before.

Goodridge doesn’t really break any new legal ground though, because everything that needs to be said has already been said. Distinguishing this decision from Hawaii, however, is that the advance in Hawaii was at the superior court level and was overturned at the supreme court level after the constitutional amendment. And the Goodridge court reaches its decision using the rational basis standard of equal protection analysis rather than the even-harder-to-prove strict scrutiny standard used in Hawaii, Alaska, and the Lawrence case.

Where Goodridge steps forward is in the remedy it requires. Remember that in Vermont, although the couples sued for marriage, the Vermont supreme court decided that marriage itself wasn’t required to make things right – that while opposite-sex couples deserve marriage, granting same-sex couples only the assortment of state-level rights and obligations that are part of marriage would be fine.

The Massachusetts court, however, distinguishes between the well-defined legal status of marriage, and the assortment of state-level rights and obligations that are merely part of it. It says,

[B]arring an individual from the protections, benefits, and obligations of civil marriage solely because that person would marry a person of the same sex violates the Massachusetts Constitution.

Nonetheless, it doesn’t immediately order the state to start granting marriage licenses. It gives the legislature 180 days “to take such action as it may deem appropriate”. Well what does that mean?

Timeline key: progress (green), no progress (red), pending court cases (purple),
events that are neutral, not directly related, or with both positive and negative effects (black)