Gay marriage is made legal in every US state

GAY marriage has been declared legal across the US in a historic but hotly contested decision by America’s Supreme Court.

The judges voted by a 5-4 majority decision that people who are gay or lesbian have the same constitutional right to marry as other couples.

The watershed ruling followed decades of campaigning by the gay rights movement and means the 14 states with bans on samesex marriage will no longer be allowed to enforce them.

In at least two states that had banned gay unions, there were reports of county clerks performing same- sex marriages within half an hour of the Supreme Court’s most controversial civil rights decision for decades.

Yesterday the five judges who backed the decision wrote in a statement: ‘No union is more profound than marriage – for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice and family.’

They went on to say that gay marriage supporters had asked for ‘equal dignity in the eyes of the law,’ and insisted: ‘The Constitution grants them that right.’ However the judges who voted against the decision claimed it had nothing to do with the Constitution – and simply reflected judges’ personal feelings about same-sex unions.

Supreme Court chief justice John Roberts insisted there was no constitutional right to gay marriage. ‘If you are among the many Americans – of whatever sexual orientation – who favour expanding same- sex marriage, by all means celebrate,’ he said, adding: ‘But it had nothing to do with the Constitution.’

Justice Antonin Scalia, who also voted against the decision, called it a ‘threat to American democracy’ and some legal experts warned that claiming there is a fundamental right to marry could open the way to legalised polygamy and incest.

Christian conservatives have threatened to fight the ‘tyranny’ of the court’s decision. And many Americans questioned whether the creators of a nearly 230-yearold document could ever have had gay marriage in mind.

Republican presidential contender Mike Huckabee promised to fight the decision, saying: ‘I will not acquiesce to an imperial court any more than our founders acquiesced to an imperial British monarch. We must resist and reject this judicial tyranny.’

But President Barack Obama said America should be ‘proud’ of the ruling, and remarked that ‘justice sometimes arrives as a thunderbolt’. He added: ‘When all Americans are treated as equal, we are all more free.’

There are an estimated 390,000 married same-sex couples in the US. Another 70,000 couples who live in states that have not allowed them to wed would do so in the next three years if it is legal, according to research by the University of California.

The Supreme Court’s ruling was prompted by the case of Jim Obergefell, a gay man from Ohio who was not recognised as the legal widower of his late husband, John Arthur. Yesterday Mr Obergefell said his ambition was to see gay marriage become more accepted within his lifetime.

‘Equal dignity in the eyes of the law’