Justice Kennedy: The Linchpin of the Transformation of Civil Rights for the LGBTQ Community
The jurisprudence that Justice Anthony Kennedy developed over three decades on the Supreme Court is nigh-impossible to pigeonhole ideologically. But one thing is crystal clear. He was personally and deeply committed to the proposition that gay and lesbian Americans deserve full equality. He was the author of the four most important decisions of the Supreme Court moving the country in that direction — Romer v. Evans (1996), Lawrence v. Texas (2003), United States v. Windsor (2013), and of course Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), which mandated that all states provide full access to marriage for same-sex couples. In the first two of those cases, he found an ally in Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, and the court struck down state laws that discriminated against gay people by a margin of 6-3. With O’Connor’s departure, Kennedy was the deciding vote in Windsor and Obergefell. Without Kennedy on the court in recent years, we would still be living in a country in which many states refused to grant marriage rights to gay couples.