Justice Anthony Kennedy
Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement today (Wednesday, June 27).
Kennedy wrote the landmark LGBT rights Lawrence v. Texas, Windsor and Obergefell decisions. Those three decisions were each handed down on June 26 in 2003, 2013 and 2015 respectively.
Although considered a conservative who voted with the conservative block in most cases, Kennedy’s vote in these three decisions changed the lives of LGBT people. Lawrence overturned the Texas sodomy law in 2003. The case involved two Houston men who were arrested in one of the men’s home when a neighbor called the police on them.
Windsor was basically a tax case. When Edie Windsor’s wife died, she owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in inheritance tax because the federal government didn’t recognize her marriage. Had she been married to a man, she would have owed nothing. Kennedy’s decision overturned part of the Defense of Marriage Act.
Jim Obergefell married his husband who had ALS. A few weeks after they married, his husband died. He asked the state of Ohio to recognize the marriage for estate purposes only. The state refused. Obergefell sued and won. In that decision, Kennedy and the liberal block of justices granted marriage equality nationwide.
Kennedy also wrote the narrow Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling. In it, there was no decision on whether a business has the right to discriminate, but he sided with the conservatives and found for the baker because the state had been critical of the baker’s religious beliefs.
Chuck Smith, CEO of Equality Texas wrote:
“The retirement of United States Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy marks the end of an era in the fight for equality for gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, transgender and queer Americans. No Supreme Court justice has had a greater impact on equality for LGBTQ Texans and Americans than Justice Kennedy. His opinion in Lawrence v. Texas ended decades of criminalization of intimate relationships where the government never belonged. In his landmark opinion, he said, ‘Later generations saw that laws once thought necessary and proper serve only to oppress.’
“On this day, we are recommitting to ensuring that the movement for equality continues to move forward on the foundation that the honorable justice built for LGBTQ people.”
Log Cabin Republicans President Gregory T. Angelo issued the following statement:
“No Supreme Court justice in history has done more to advance gay rights than Justice Kennedy. This is not something that is up for debate; in his 30 years on the bench of the nation’s highest judicial body, Justice Kennedy did not simply author the most pro-gay decisions of a Supreme Court justice — he authored all of them. Justice Kennedy will likewise leave a legacy as a staunch supporter of religious liberty, as his discerning opinion in this term’s Masterpiece Cakeshop case showed. Log Cabin Republicans congratulates Justice Kennedy for the thoughtful sympathy he displayed to the LGBT community throughout his career, and for his decades of service to the United States of America.”
