Marriage

Marriage The Supreme Court has affirmed the right of the states to prescribe most of the conditions of marriage. Before the twentieth century, the most contentious issue was comity. The Court generally held that states had to recognize the legitimacy of marriage entered into in other states. However, with Reynolds v. United States (1879), in which the justices refused to recognize polygamy as protected by the First Amendment, the Court began to create a national standard of marital rights.

Beginning in the 1960s, the Court limited state marital regulation significantly by protecting rights of individuals to wed. Justice William O. Douglas declared in dicta in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) that marriage was a “noble” and “sacred” relationship, into whose privacy the state could not intrude without compelling reasons. In Loving v. Virginia (1967), the Court affirmed that marriage was a fundamental right and accordingly invalidated a state ban on interracial marriage. Zablocki v. Redhail (1978) voided a Wisconsin law prohibiting the remarriage of a noncustodial parent who failed to pay court‐ordered child support. All these challenged restrictions violated the right to wed that the Court found implicitly guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. However, most kinds of state regulation of marriage have survived judicial scrutiny.

Tensions between individual choice and state regulation continue to dominate the law. The Court has recently refused to recognize marital status and related rights of individuals involved in homosexual unions (see Homosexuality) or other cohabitation arrangements because, the Court maintains, such nontraditional unions do not serve the same social ends as matrimony. As the twenty‐first century began, same‐sex marriage became the most contentious issue in marriage law. The 2003 Massachusetts ruling upholding the legality of such marriages clashes directly with federal and state laws defining matrimony as the union of a man and a woman. The conflict raises anew fundamental questions about the limits of state family law autonomy and the obligations of domestic relations comity. These will have to be decided by the Court.

Michael Grossberg