WASHINGTON, D.C. – For them, it was a fight that began on a tarmac in Baltimore, when Cincinnati resident Jim Obergefell said “I do” to the man he had loved for 20 years.
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It’s a fight that on Tuesday will see the U.S. Supreme Court consider whether states have the right to prohibit same-sex marriage. The cases to come before the court are from Ohio, Kentucky, Michigan, and Tennessee, where marriage bans have been upheld by the federal appeals court in Cincinnati.
“It hasn’t quite hit me that my personal life, John’s and my marriage, the fight we started at a very personal level is going to affect millions of people,” Obergefell said this month. “And the fact that it’s going to have an effect coast to coast — that is slowly but surely sinking in.”
Two years ago, Obergefell and his husband, John Arthur, filed a lawsuit challenging Ohio’s ban on same-sex marriage, months before Arthur died of Lou Gehrig’s disease.
On Tuesday, Obergefell, still a grieving widower, will be the named plaintiff in the cluster of six cases. At issue is whether the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment requires states to recognize same-sex marriages performed in their own states or in other states.
By scheduling three hours for arguments instead of the customary one hour, the justices are signaling the importance of the cases. Should the justices strike down the Ohio ban, they would bring to an end a legal dispute that once starkly divided Americans.
Just two years ago in United States v. Windsor, the court invalidated a 1996 federal law defining marriage as between a man and a woman. Although the justices have never ruled on whether states could ban same-sex marriage, a growing number of legal experts say that it would be difficult for the justices to uphold Ohio’s ban after they struck down the federal law.
“There is a very powerful argument to be made that Windsor is the crossing of the Rubicon on marriage recognition,” said Marc Spindelman, a law professor at Ohio State University.