Special section The Freedom To Marry: Rites & Rights

Welcome and introduction

Welcome to The Freedom To Marry: Rites & Rights, hosted by Legal Marriage Alliance of Washington. I’m Ken Molsberry and I’ll be your guide through this history of marriage equality in the United States.

What will you find here?

The focus of this site is: the kinds of couples who are allowed to marry in the United States and how they got that right.

• We’re going to be looking at the history of how the legal concepts of marriage have changed and developed over the last six decades. That is the period during which most of the precedents were established that bear on the question of who is allowed to marry.
  
  
• We’ll see how, during that time, the concept of marriage as a fundamental civil right has stayed constant.
  
  
• We’ll look at how the laws and the court cases have confirmed and reinforced that right, a right that derives from the guarantees of freedom, privacy, and equality found in state and federal constitutions.
  
  
• We’ll see how the reasons put forward for allowing same-sex couples to marry follow well-established legal precedents.
  
  
• And we’ll see how the work for the right of same-sex couples to marry is not new. If one hadn’t been following the movement, one might think that the recent controversy is just a sudden push. But we’ll see that it’s the result of a long, steady development.

You’ll also find…

The Reading Room

More than just a presentation of history, however, this site also provides ready access to the important court rulings and other documents that brought about change in the rights of couples to legally marry. These documents are located in The Reading Room, which you can visit by clicking on the case name links you'll find throughout the site.

The court rulings are generally easy to read and are a fascinating insight into the reasoning the judges used to grant – or in some cases, deny – the right of legal marriage to different kinds of people. Some of the rulings will impress you with their eloquence and clarity, expressing in beautiful language the legal and social factors that comprise the institution of marriage. Other rulings will infuriate and aggravate, coming from positions of racism, bigotry or short-sightedness. But I encourage you to read them nonetheless. Each one is a piece of the civics of America.

And unlike magazine essays that likewise impress or aggravate, these rulings have the force of law. They directly impact the lives of real couples – not only those who appeared in court in front of the judges who wrote these decisions, and not only those who were their contemporaries, but those who followed them as well.

What you won’t find here

This site is not intended to be an exhaustive history of marriage equality. There was a great deal of progress in this country prior to the mid-1900s (when this history begins), largely concerning the role and rights of women in marriage. In the early years of our nation, married women were chattel: the legal property of, and subjugated to, their husbands. They had few rights, no separate property, and not even a legal identity separate from their husbands.

Even during the period covered by this site, there were developments that this site does not touch on – the government's role in regulating the use of contraception in the marital relationship, for instance. Those who claim that marriage has not changed are either unaware of or deliberately disregard its history and how much it has changed, for the better, even within the last two centuries.

And except for brief mentions, this site does not provide in-depth coverage of developments in the other countries that have granted marriage to same-sex couples.

About the author, Ken Molsberry

The author and his husband [then-fiancé] at a rally in 2004.

This is my picture, taken by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper at a rally on the day Massachusetts started marrying same-sex couples. I’m the one on the left, holding hands with my then-fiancé, now husband, Chris.

We’ve been in a committed relationship since 1993 and were one of 4,000 same-sex couples married by The City And County Of San Francisco in February 2004. We’re also one of the 4,000 couples forcibly divorced by the California Supreme Court six months later. We legally married (again) in California in 2008.

We believe that marriage for same-sex couples harms no one and instead helps the couples, their government and their society, and we seek the right of all same-sex couples to legally marry.

I’m not a lawyer and have no training in the law. While this material has been reviewed by lawyers specializing in these issues, any errors are mine. I welcome corrections, suggestions and questions via email.

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