The Ultimate Association: Same-Sex Marriage and the Battle Against Jim Crow’s Other Cousin

02/04/09 ADF Alliance Alert:

The Ultimate Association: Same-Sex Marriage and the Battle Against Jim Crow’s Other Cousin
Bryan K. Fair, 63 U. Miami L. Rev. 269 (2008)

(An excerpt is below. To view the full text, please use Westlaw, Lexis, a law library or alternative source.)

Twentieth-century American legal history is notable for a series of equal-rights struggles and partial, majestic triumphs. Since the 1950s, activists have insisted that the nation confront its formal policies of white supremacy and their legacies. Since the 1960s, women have demanded an end to unequal protection before the law and broader rights to control their bodies and the social, economic, and political conditions of their lives. And, since the 1970s, equality advocates have compelled Congress and the federal courts to address their disabled clients’ inferior status under the law. Although each of these landmark battles endures, with much work yet to be done to eliminate cumulative privilege for some Americans and cumulative disadvantage for others, those unfinished revolutions will likely await the resolution of the battle over the civil rights of American citizens who are also gay individuals or couples. And at stake is more than simply a license to marry. Like its predecessors, this epic battle is about again asserting the constitutional entitlement to equal dignity of all American citizens.