Judge strikes down Nebraska gay marriage ban

GOP senator sees ‘threat’
Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, an advocate of a federal constitutional amendment to define marriage, reacted to Bataillon’s ruling by noting that, when the Senate debated the proposed federal marriage amendment last year, “opponents claimed that no state laws were threatened, that no judge had ever ruled against state marriage laws. They claimed that the states and their voter-approved laws defending marriage were under no threat. After today’s ruling, they can no longer make that claim.”

Matt Daniels, president of Alliance for Marriage (AFM), a group that has urged Congress to approve a federal constitutional amendment limiting marriage to heterosexuals, said the debate over marriage “is going to come down to a race between AFM’s marriage protection amendment and the federal courts.”

He predicted that "all of these state marriage amendments are going to be struck down in federal court, they are all going to go the way of Nebraska. The folks filing these lawsuits are taking this to the level of the Constitution, and we have to meet them at that level if the values of most Americans — and the common-sense understanding of marriage as the union of male and female — are going to be protected under our laws.”

More limited interpretation
But Amy Miller of the Nebraska American Civil Liberties Union had a far more limited interpretation of the ruling.

“This decision doesn't mean that gay people can marry, get a civil union or a domestic partnership, but it guarantees gay people the right to lobby their state lawmakers for those protections," she said.

Evan Wolfson, executive director of Freedom to Marry, a group that advocates legal recognition of marriages between gay couples, praised Thursday’s ruling.

“The court was right to do what courts are supposed to do — guarantee each of us our right to equal justice under law and equal citizenship in our country and home state,” Wolfson said.

“Government has no business putting obstacles in the path of people seeking to care for one another under law, and the court correctly found that Nebraska's sweeping anti-gay constitutional amendment offended basic American values of fairness, equality, family protection and access to the government,” he added.

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