Updates: Last News

Back in 2016, after Donald Trump was elected President, we wrote an update for the community responding to people’s fears that their marriages were under threat. Today, we’re seeing the same concerns again. So here’s a short update on our original post.

The short answer is that there is still no realistic reason to fear that existing marriages of same-sex couples will be invalidated. The law remains as strong as it was in 2016 that if a marriage is valid when entered, it cannot be invalidated by any later change in the law. People who are already married still should not be concerned that their marriages can be taken away. 

What about folks who aren’t currently married but may want to in the future? There are still several reasons to think that the Supreme Court is unlikely to revisit its 2015 decision guaranteeing the fundamental right to marry for all couples nationwide, at least not anytime soon.

One reason for this is that Chief Justice Roberts, who originally voted against the freedom to marry, later voted to uphold that right in a 2017 case that NCLR took to the Supreme Court. In that case, we represented two couples who sued the State of Arkansas after it refused to list same-sex spouses as parents on their children’s birth certificates. Although he had originally declined to support the freedom to marry, Chief Justice Roberts joined five other Justices in ruling that the Supreme Court meant what it said in its 2015 decision, and that states must grant same-sex married couples all the same legal rights as other married couples.

While we don’t know how the justices who have been appointed since 2017 would respond to a similar case, if their approach is like the Chief Justice’s in the 2017 case, the freedom to marry will continue to be guaranteed nationally. Of course, even if the Supreme Court were to reverse its marriage equality decision, that would not invalidate existing marriages or change anything in the many states that have adopted the freedom to marry

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