Massachusetts Legalizes Same-Sex Marriage: A New Era

Cambridge City Hall opened at midnight on May 17, 2004, and the first same-sex couples in American history received legally recognized marriage licenses. Massachusetts had become the first state to legalize same-sex marriage following the Supreme Judicial Court's ruling in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, which held that barring same-sex couples from civil marriage violated the state constitution's guarantees of individual liberty and equality. Couples who had waited decades for legal recognition lined up through the night. The Goodridge decision, written by Chief Justice Margaret Marshall, rejected every argument the state offered for restricting marriage to heterosexual couples. The court found that the state's interest in procreation, child-rearing, and conserving public resources did not justify excluding same-sex couples from the legal, financial, and social benefits of marriage. The 4-3 ruling gave the legislature 180 days to comply, during which opponents mounted furious efforts to pass a constitutional amendment overturning the decision. Governor Mitt Romney invoked a 1913 law originally designed to prevent interracial couples from evading their home states' marriage bans. The law barred Massachusetts from issuing marriage licenses to out-of-state residents whose marriages would be illegal in their home states. This effectively limited the immediate impact to Massachusetts residents, but couples from across the country traveled to the state anyway, and other states soon faced questions about recognizing Massachusetts marriages. The backlash was swift and nationwide. Eleven states passed constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage in the November 2004 elections. President George W. Bush endorsed a federal marriage amendment, though it failed in Congress. But the Massachusetts example demonstrated that same-sex marriage could function within existing legal frameworks without the social disruption opponents had predicted. Over the following decade, state after state followed Massachusetts's lead, and in 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court's Obergefell v. Hodges decision extended marriage equality nationwide.