Washington, DC – On news this morning that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit issued its ruling in Kitchen v. Herbert, striking down Utah’s ban on marriage equality, Constitutional Accountability Center released the following reaction:

CAC Vice President Judith E. Schaeffer said, “Today’s ruling by the 10th Circuit is another in a long line of recent holdings by courts across the country that our Constitution requires marriage equality, eloquently describing our ‘commitment as Americans to the principles of liberty, due process of law, and equal protection of the laws’ in the text and history of our Nation’s charter. 

“Indeed, the majority on today’s panel— a judge appointed by a Democratic president and one by a Republican president—once again proves that strong arguments rooted in the Constitution’s text and history can unite judges from across the ideological spectrum,” Schaeffer continued.

“Ironically, on the same day that a unanimous Supreme Court applied the privacy principles of the Fourth Amendment to cell phones – a technology that the Framers could not possibly have imagined and that of course is not mentioned in the Constitution – Judge Paul Kelly, in dissent from today’s 10th Circuit ruling, noted that the Constitution ‘does not speak to the issue of same-gender marriage,’ and then proceeded to misconstrue the equal protection principles of the Fourteenth Amendment as failing to protect same-sex couples from marriage discrimination.”

“Judge Kelly is wrong,” Schaeffer said, “and his Tenth Circuit colleagues were correct in holding that the Fourteenth Amendment ‘extends the guarantees of due process and equal protection to every person in every State of the Union.’ That includes gay men and lesbians in the state of Utah.”

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Resources:

CAC’s “friend of the court” brief, together with the Cato Institute, in Kitchen v. Herbert: http://theusconstitution.org/sites/default/files/briefs/CAC-Amicus-Kitchen-v-Herbert.pdf

“Who Will be the First?,” Judith E. Schaeffer, May 22, 2014: http://theusconstitution.org/text-history/2682/who-will-be-first

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Constitutional Accountability Center (www.theusconstitution.org) is a think tank, public interest law firm, and action center dedicated to fulfilling the progressive promise of the Constitution’s text and history.

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