LEGALIZE IT
Whitewood v. Wolf
By Kate Paine It has been a momentous year for marriage equality in our country. The U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark June 2013 decisions overturning the Defense of Marriage Act and upholding the ruling on Proposition 8’s unconstitutionality opened the proverbial floodgates, ushering in a sea of change for same-sex marriage more quickly than anyone could have imagined. Even more unexpectedly, the changing tides have flowed to states long viewed as bastions of social conservatism. 102
E qu al Maga z i n e. o rg
When I first wrote about Whitewood v. Wolf (formerly known as Whitewood v. Corbett) – the July 2013 case filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania in a Harrisburg federal court – for the August 2013 issue of Equal Magazine, same-sex marriage was legal in twelve states (plus Washington, D.C.): California, Connecticut, Delaware, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Maryland, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont. Since that time, another four states have legalized marriage for same-sex couples (New Jersey, Hawaii, Illinois, and New Mexico),
bringing the number of jurisdictions actually performing same-sex marriage at the time of publication to seventeen – nearly one-third of all states in the U.S. In the past four months, federal judges in five additional states (Utah, Oklahoma, Virginia, Texas, and Michigan) have declared unconstitutional their states’ laws forbidding same-sex marriage. However, same-sex marriage in those states has been placed on hold (apart from a limited number of marriages performed in Utah and Michigan), pending the outcome of those cases on appeal to the federal Circuit Courts. Judges in four other states (Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Oregon) were also active in pushing