LGBT Rights: Supreme Court Amicus Brief on Marriage Equality

Supreme Court of the United States

Dennis Hollingsworth, et. al., v. Kristin M. Perry, et al.,

BRIEF OF INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS ADVOCATES AS IN SUPPORT OF RESPONDENTS

Summary of Argument:

This Court has an opportunity to either solidify or reverse an established and accelerating international trend toward equal marriage rights for same-sex couples. Same-sex marriage ceremonies are legally performed in fourteen countries—including this one—and are recognized in several others. Bills embracing marriage equality are pending and likely to pass in the United Kingdom, France, New Zealand, Colombia, and Uruguay, among others. And international legal authorities are enhancing protections against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, including for same-sex couples’ rights to found families. This emerging recognition for same-sex marriages is no fad, but is the inevitable consequence of the spread of a universalist vision of human rights. The weight of global opinion holds that it is only a matter of time before marriage equality is regarded as a universal human right, on par with other antidiscrimination norms.

This international trend supports respondents. This Court has long considered international precedent — and especially recent international precedent from Western democracies—when considering questions that implicate global values such as morality and fairness. It should do so here. While some nations have reached marriage equality by the courts and others have done so legislatively, the unifying feature of all of these decisions is a reliance on principles that are either synonymous with or analogous to U.S. due process and equal protection norms. With increasing frequency, the leaders and people of advanced nations the world over are recognizing that the denial of equal marriage constitutes the denial of a fundamental right. More broadly, the established consensus in the international community is that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation rests on par with discrimination on the basis of other immutable characteristics, like race. This consensus weighs in favor of heightened scrutiny and a decision recognizing the constitutional dimension of marriage equality.