Maryland Court of Appeals Says No Gay Marriage
Today, in a 4-3 decision, the Maryland Court of Appeals upheld a law that marriage in Maryland is a union between a man and a woman. The case was filed in 2004 by the ACLU on behalf of ten plaintiffs against court clerks who denied their same sex applications for marriage licenses.
In January of this year, Judge M. Brooke Murdock of the Baltimore Circuit Court ruled in their favor and found that the law defining marriage as a union between one man and one woman violated the state constitution which affords equal protection under the law.
Under Murdock’s ruling Maryland would have joined Massachusetts as the only state where gay marriage is legal. But the state appealed and Murdock’s ruling was stayed during the appeal so it never took effect. Same-sex marriage was legal for less than 24 hours last month in Iowa but the case was reversed. Ten other jurisdictions have spousal rights in some form for same-sex couples — California, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oregon, Vermont and Washington.
The Court of Appeals ruled that the state’s 1973 ban on gay marriage does not discriminate on the basis of gender and does not deny any fundamental rights guaranteed by the state constitution. The court also found that the state has a legitimate interest in promoting opposite-sex marriage.
Judge Glenn T. Harrell Jr. writing for the majority, said that denying same-sex couples the right to marry does not discriminate based on gender because the state law applies equally to men and women. The court said that Maryland’s Equal Rights Amendment, ratified in 1972, bans discrimination based on gender, but not on sexual orientation.
The court said that the state has an interest in promoting procreation and that the General Assembly “has not acted wholly unreasonably in granting recognition to the only relationship capable of bearing children traditionally within the marital unit.”
Gay rights activists vowed to fight on by introducing legislation. As the Court said, “Our opinion should by no means be read to imply that the General Assembly may not grant and recognize for homosexual persons civil unions or the right to marry a person of the same sex.”
Read more:
The Baltimore Sun
USA Today
Reuters
Associated Press
The 244 page decision (PDF)
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