Court Opinion

ID: 8413232
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2022-11-02 20:13:13.571246+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T16:48:02.058301
License: Public Domain

MARTHA CRAIG DAUGHTREY, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
“The great tides and currents which engulf the rest of men do not turn aside in their course to pass the judges hy.”
Benjamin Cardozo, The Nature of the Judicial Process (1921)
The author of the majority opinion has drafted what would make an engrossing TED Talk or, possibly, an introductory lecture in Political Philosophy. But as an appellate court decision, it wholly fails to grapple with the relevant constitutional question in this appeal: whether a state’s constitutional prohibition of same-sex marriage violates equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment. Instead, the majority sets up a false premise — that the question before us is “who should decide?”- — -and leads us through a largely irrelevant discourse on democracy and federalism. In point of fact, the real issue before us concerns what is at stake in these six -cases for the individual plaintiffs and their children, and what should be done about it. Because I reject the majority’s resolution of these questions based on its invocation of vox populi and its reverence for “proceeding with caution” (otherwise known as the “wait and see” approach), I dissent.
In the main, the majority treats both the issues and the litigants here as mere abstractions. Instead of recognizing the plaintiffs as persons, suffering actual harm as a result of being denied the right to marry where they reside or the right to have their valid marriages recognized there, my colleagues view the plaintiffs as social activists who have somehow stumbled into federal court, inadvisably, when they should be out campaigning to win “the hearts and minds” of Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee voters to their cause. But these plaintiffs are not political zealots trying to push reform on their fellow citizens; they are committed same-sex couples, many of them heading up de facto families, who want to achieve equal status — de jure status, if you will — with their married neighbors, friends, and coworkers, to be accepted as contributing members of their social and religious communities, and to be welcomed as fully legitimate parents at their children’s schools. They seek to do this by virtue of exercising a civil right that most of us take for granted — the right *422to marry.1
Readers who are familiar with the Supreme Court’s recent opinion in United States v. Windsor, — U.S. -, 133 S.Ct. 2675, 186 L.Ed.2d 808 (2013), and its progeny in the circuit courts, particularly the Seventh Circuit’s opinion in Baskin v. Bogan, 766 F.3d 648, 654 (7th Cir.2014) (“Formally these cases are about discrimination against the small homosexual minority in the United States. But at a deeper level, ... they are about the welfare of American children.”), must have said to themselves' at various points in the majority opinion, “But what about the children?” I did, and I could not find the answer in the opinion. For although my colleagues in the majority pay lip service to marriage as an institution conceived for the purpose of providing a stable family unit “within which children may flourish,” they ignore the destabilizing effect of its absence in the homes of tens of thousands of same-sex parents throughout the four states of the Sixth Circuit.
Indeed, with the exception of Ohio, the defendants in each of these cases — the proponents of their respective “defense of marriage” amendments — spent virtually their entire oral arguments professing what has come to be known as the “irresponsible procreation” theory: that limiting marriage and its benefits to opposite-sex couples is rational, even necessary, to provide for “unintended offspring” by channeling their biological procreators into the bonds of matrimony. When we asked counsel why that goal required the simultaneous exclusion of same-sex couples from marrying, we were told that permitting same-sex marriage might denigrate the institution of marriage in the eyes of opposite-sex couples who conceive out of wedlock, causing subsequent abandonment of the unintended offspring by one or both biological parents. We also were informed that because same-sex couples cannot themselves produce wanted or unwanted offspring, and because they must therefore look to non-biological means of parenting that require planning and expense, stability in a family unit headed by same-sex parents is assured without the benefit of formal matrimony. But, as the court in Baskin pointed out, many “abandoned children [born out of wedlock to biological parents] are adopted by homosexual couples, and those children would be better off both emotionally and economically if their adoptive parents were married.” Id. How ironic that irresponsible, unmarried, opposite-sex couples in the Sixth Circuit who produce unwanted offspring must be “channeled” into marriage and thus rewarded with its many psychological and financial benefits, while same-sex couples who become model parents are punished for their responsible behavior by being denied the right to marry. As an obviously exasperated Judge Posner responded after puzzling over this same paradox in Baskin, “Go figure.” Id. at 662.
In addressing the “irresponsible procreation” argument that has been referenced by virtually every state defendant in litigation similar to this case, the Baskin court noted that estimates put the number of American children being raised by same-sex parents at over 200,000. Id. at *423663. “Unintentional offspring are the children most likely to be put up for adoption,” id. at 662, and because statistics show that same-sex couples are many times more likely to adopt than opposite-sex couples, “same-sex marriage improves the prospects of unintended children by increasing the number and resources of prospective adopters.” Id. at 663. Moreover, “[i]f marriage is better for children who are being brought up by their biological parents, it must be better for children who are being brought up by their adoptive parents.” Id. at 664.
The concern for the welfare of children that echoes throughout the Baskin opinion can be traced in part to the earlier opinion in Windsor, in which the Supreme Court struck down, as unconstitutional on equal-protection grounds, section 3 of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which defined the term “marriage” for federal purposes as “meanfing] only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife,” and the term “spouse” as “refer[ring] only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife.” Id. at 2683 (citing 1 U.S.C. § 7). Although DOMA did not affect the prerogative of the states to regulate marriage within their respective jurisdictions, it did deprive same-sex couples whose marriages were considered valid under state law of myriad federal benefits. As Justice Kennedy, writing for the majority, pointed out:
DOMA’s principal effect is to identify a subset of state-sanctioned marriages and make them unequal. The principal purpose is to impose inequality, not for other reasons like governmental efficiency.... The differentiation demeans the [same-sex] couple, whose moral and sexual choices the Constitution protects, see Lawrence [v. Texas], 539 U.S. 558, 123 S.Ct. 2472, 156 L.Ed.2d 508 [(2003)], and whose relationship the State has sought to dignify. And it humiliates tens of thousands of children now being raised by same-sex couples. The law in question makes it even more difficult for the children to understand the integrity and closeness of their own family and its concord with other families in their community and in their daily lives.
Id. at 2694.
Looking more closely at the situation of just one of the same-sex couples from the six cases before us brings Justice Kennedy’s words on paper to life. Two of the Michigan plaintiffs, April DeBoer and Jayne Rowse, are unmarried, same-sex partners who have lived as' a couple for eight years in a home they own together. They are both trained and employed as nurses, DeBoer in a hospital neonatal department and Rowse in an emergency department at another hospital. Together they are rearing three children but, due to existing provisions in Michigan’s adoption laws, DeBoer and Rowse are prohibited from adopting the children as joint parents because they are unmarried. Instead, Rowse alone adopted two children, who are identified in the record as N and J. DeBoer adopted the third child, who is identified as R.
- All three children had difficult starts in life, and two of them are now characterized as “special needs” children. N was born on January 25, 2009, to a biological mother who was homeless, had psychological impairments, was unable to care for N, and subsequently surrendered her legal rights to N. The plaintiffs volunteered to care for the boy and brought him into their home following his birth. In November 2009, Rowse completed the necessary steps to adopt N legally.
* Rowse also legally adopted J after the boy’s foster care agency asked Rowse and DeBoer initially to serve as foster parents and legal guardians for him, despite the *424uphill climb the baby faced. According to the plaintiffs’ amended complaint:
J was born on November 9, 2009, at Hutzel Hospital, premature at 25 weeks, to a drug addicted prostitute. Upon birth, he weighed 1 pound, 9 ounces and tested positive for marijuana, cocaine, opiates and methadone. His birth mother abandoned him immediately after delivery. J remained in the hospital in the NICU for four months with myriad different health complications, and was not expected to live. If he survived, he was not expected to be able to walk, speak or function on a normal level in any capacity.... With Rowse and DeBoer’s constant care and medical attention, many of J’s physical conditions have resolved.
The third adopted child, R, was born on February 1, 2010, to a 19-year-old girl who received no prenatal care and who gave birth at her mother’s home before bringing the infant to the hospital where plaintiff DeBoer worked. R continues to experience issues related to her lack of prenatal care, including delayed gross motor skills. She is in a physical-therapy program to address these problems.
Both DeBoer and Rowse share in the responsibilities of raising the two four-year-olds and the five-year-old. The plaintiffs even have gone so far as to “coordinate their work schedules so that at least one parent is generally home with the children” to attend to their medical needs and perform other parental duties. Given the close-knit, loving environment shared by the plaintiffs and the children, DeBoer wishes to adopt N and J legally as a second parent, and Rowse wishes to adopt R legally as her second parent.
Although Michigan statutes allow married couples and single persons to adopt, those laws preclude unmarried couples from adopting each other’s children. As a result, DeBoer and Rowse filed suit in federal district court challenging the Michigan adoption statute, Michigan Compiled Laws § 710.24, on federal equal-protection grounds. They later amended their complaint to include a challenge to the so-called Michigan Marriage Amendment, see Mich. Const, art. I, § 25, added to the Michigan state constitution in 2004, after the district court suggested that the plaintiffs’ “injury was not traceable to the defendants’ enforcement of section [710.24]” but, rather, flowed from the fact that the plaintiffs “were not married, and any legal form of same-sex union is prohibited” in Michigan. The case went to trial on the narrow legal issue of whether the amendment could survive rational basis review, i.e., whether it proscribes conduct in a manner that is rationally related to any conceivable legitimate governmental purpose.
The bench trial lasted for eight days and consisted of testimony from sociologists, economists, law professors, a psychologist, a historian, a demographer, and a county clerk. Included in the plaintiffs’ presentation of evidence were statistics regarding the number of children in foster care or awaiting adoption, as well as testimony regarding the difficulties facing same-sex partners attempting to retain parental influence over children adopted in Michigan. Gary Gates, a demographer, and Vivek Sankaran, the director of both the Child Advocacy Law Clinic and the Child Welfare Appellate Clinic at the University of Michigan Law School, together offered testimony painting a grim picture of the plight of foster children and orphans in the state of Michigan. For example, Sankaran noted that just under 14,000 foster children reside in Michigan, with approximately 3,500 of those being legal orphans. Nevertheless, same-sex couples in the state are not permitted to adopt such children as a couple. Even though one.person *425can legally adopt a child, should anything happen to that adoptive parent, there is no provision in Michigan’s legal framework that would “ensure that the children would necessarily remain with the surviving nonlegal parent,” even if that parent went through the arduous, time-consuming, expensive adoption-approval process. Thus, although the State of Michigan would save money by moving children from foster care or state care into adoptive families, and although same-sex couples in Michigan are almost three times more likely than opposite-sex couples to be raising an adopted child and twice as likely to be fostering a child, there remains a legal disincentive for same-sex couples to adopt children there.
David Brodzinsky, a developmental and clinical psychologist, for-many years on the faculty at Rutgers University, reiterated the testimony that Michigan’s ban on adoptions by same-sex couples increases the potential risks to children awaiting adoptions. The remainder of his testimony was devoted to a systematic, statistic-based debunking of studies intimating that children raised in gay or lesbian families, ipso facto, are less well-adjusted than children raised by heterosexual couples. Brodzinsky conceded that marriage brings societal legitimatization and stability to children but noted that he found no statistically significant differences in general characteristics or in development between children raised in same-sex households and children raised in opposite-sex households, and that the psychological well-being, educational development, and peer relationships were the same in children raised in gay, lesbian, or heterosexual homes.
Such findings led Brodzinsky to conclude that the gender of a parent is far less important than the quality of the parenting offered and that family processes and resources are far better predictors of child adjustment than the family structure. He testified that those studies presuming to show that children raised in gay and lesbian families exhibited more adjustment problems and decreased educational achievement were seriously flawed, simply because they relied on statistics concerning children who had come from families experiencing a prior traumatic breakup of a failed heterosexual relationship. In fact, when focusing upon children of lesbian families created through donor insemination, Brodzinsky found no differences in comparison with children from donor insemination in heterosexual families or in comparison with children conceived naturally in heterosexual families. According to Brodzinsky, such a finding was not surprising given the fact that all such children experienced no family disruption in their past. For the same reason, few differences were noted in studies of children adopted at a very early age by same-sex couples and children naturally born into heterosexual families.
Nancy Cott, a professor of history at Harvard University, the director of graduate studies there, and the author of Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation, also testified on behalf of the plaintiffs. She explained how the concept of marriage and the roles of the marriage partners have changed over time. As summarized by Cott, the wife’s identity is no longer subsumed into that of her husband, interracial marriages are legal now that the antiquated, racist concept of preserving the purity of the white race has fallen into its rightful place of dishonor, and traditional gender-assigned roles are no longer standard. Cott also testified that solemnizing marriages between same-sex partners would create tangible benefits for Michigan citizens because spouses .would then be allowed to inherit without taxation and would be able to receive retirement, Social Security, and veteran’s benefits upon the death of an eligible *426spouse. Moreover, statistics make clear that heterosexual marriages have not suffered or decreased in number as a result of states permitting same-sex marriages. In fact, to the contrary, Cott noted that there exists some evidence that many young people now refuse to enter into heterosexual marriages until their gay or lesbian Mends can also enjoy the legitimacy of state-backed marriages.
Michael Rosenfeld, a Stanford University sociologist, testified about studies he had undertaken that confirmed the hypothesis that legitimation of same-sex relationships promotes their stability. Specifically, Rosenfeld’s research established that although same-sex couples living in states without recognition of their commitments to each other did have a higher break-up rate than heterosexual married couples, the break-up rates of opposite-sex married couples and same-sex couples in recognized civil unions were virtually identical. Similarly, the break-up rates of same-sex couples not living in a state-recognized relationship approximated the break-up rate of heterosexual couples cohabiting without marriage.
Rosenfeld also criticized the methodology of studies advanced by the defendants that disagreed with his conclusions. According to Rosenfeld, those critical studies failed to take into account the stability or lack of stability of the various groups examined. For example, he testified that one such study compared children who had experienced no adverse family transitions with children who had lived through many such traumatic family changes. Not surprisingly, children from broken homes with lower-income-earning parents who had less education and lived in urban areas performed more poorly in school than other children. According to Rosenfeld, arguments to the contrary that failed to control for such differences, taken to their extreme, would lead to the conclusion that only high-income individuals of Asian descent who earned advanced degrees and lived in suburban areas should be allowed to marry.
To counteract the testimony offered by the plaintiffs’ witnesses, the defendants presented as witnesses the authors or coauthors of three studies that disagreed with the conclusions reached by the plaintiffs’ experts. All three studies, however, were given little credence by the district court because of inherent flaws in the methods used or the intent of the authors. For example, the New Family Structures Study reported by Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin, admittedly relied upon interviews of children from gay or lesbian families who were products of broken heterosexual unions in order to support a conclusion that living with such gay or lesbian families adversely affected the development of the children. Regnerus conceded, moreover, that his own department took the highly unusual step of issuing the following statement on the university website in response to the release of the study:
[Dr. Regnerus’s opinions] do not reflect the views of the sociology department of the University of Texas at Austin. Nor do they reflect the views of the American Sociological Association which takes the position that the conclusions he draws from his study of gay parenting are fundamentally flawed on conceptual and methodological grounds and that the findings from Dr. Regnerus’[s] work have been cited inappropriately in efforts to diminish the civil rights and legitimacy of LBGTQ partners and their families.
In fact, the record before the district court reflected clearly that Regnerus’s study had been funded by the Witherspoon Institute, a conservative “think "tank” opposed to *427same-sex marriage, in order to vindicate “the traditional understanding of marriage.”
Douglas Allen, the co-author of another study with Catherine Pakaluk and Joe Price, testified that children raised by same-sex couples graduated from high school at a significantly lower rate than did children raised by heterosexual married couples. On cross-examination, however, Allen conceded that “many of those children who ... were living in same-sex households had previously lived in an opposite sex household where their parents had divorced,' broken up, some kind of separation or transition.” Furthermore, Allen provided evidence of the bias inherent in his study by admitting that he believed that engaging in homosexual acts “means eternal separation from God, in other words[,] going to hell.”
The final study advanced by the defendants was conducted by Loren Marks, a professor in human ecology at Louisiana State University, in what was admittedly an effort to counteract the “groupthink” portrayed by perceived “liberal psychologists.” But although Marks criticized what he perceived to be “a pronounced liberal lean on social issues” by many psychologists, he revealed his own bias by acknowledging that he was a lay clergyman in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS) and that the LDS directive “for a couple to be married by God’s authority in God’s house, the holy temple, and then to have children per the teaching that God’s commandment for his children to multiply and replenish the earth remains in force.” Presented with the admitted biases and methodological shortcomings prevalent in the studies performed by the defendant’s experts, the district court found those witnesses “largely unbelievable” and not credible. DeBoer v. Snyder, 973 F.Supp.2d 757, 768 (E.D.Mich.2014). Proceeding to a legal analysis of the core issue in the litigation, the district court then concluded that the proscriptions of the marriage amendment are not rationally related to any legitimate state interest. Addressing the defendants’ three asserted rational .bases for the amendment,2 the district court found each such proffered justification without merit.
Principally, the court determined that the amendment is in no way related to the asserted state interest in ensuring an optimal environment for child-rearing. The testimony adduced at trial clearly refuted the proposition that, all things being equal, same-sex couples are less able to provide for the welfare and development of children. Indeed, marriage, whether between same-sex or opposite-sex partners, increases stability within the family unit. By permitting same-sex couples' to marry, that stability would not be threatened by the death of one of the parents. Even more damning to the defendants’ position, however, is the fact that the State of Michigan allows heterosexual couples to marry evén if the couple does not wish to have children, even if the couple does not have sufficient resources or education to care for children, even if the parents are pedophiles or child abusers, and even if the parents are drug addicts.
Furthermore, the district court found no reason to believe that the amendment fur*428thers the asserted state interests in “proceeding with caution” before “altering the traditional definition of marriage” or in “upholding tradition and morality.” As recognized by the district court, there is no legitimate justification for delay when constitutional rights are at issue, and even adherence to religious views or tradition cannot serve to strip citizens of their right to the guarantee of equal protection under the law.
Finally, and relatedly, the district court acknowledged that the regulation of marriage traditionally has been seen as part of a state’s police power but concluded that this fact cannot serve as an excuse to ignore the constitutional rights of individual citizens. Were it otherwise, the court observed, the prohibition in Virginia and in many other states against miscegenation still would be in effect today. Because the district court found that “regardless of whoever finds favor in the eyes of the most recent majority, the guarantee of equal protection must prevail,” the court held the amendment and its implementing statutes “unconstitutional because they violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.” Id. at 775.
If I were in the majority here, I would have no difficulty in affirming the district court’s opinion in DeBoer. The record is rich with evidence that, as a pragmatic matter, completely refutes the state’s effort to defend the ban against same-sex marriage that is inherent in the marriage amendment. Moreover, the district court did a masterful job of supporting its legal conclusions. Upholding the decision would also control the resolution of the other five cases that were consolidated for purposes of this appeal.
Is a thorough explication of the legal basis for such a result appropriate? It is, of course. Is it necessary? In my judgment, it is not, given the excellent — even eloquent — opinion in DeBoer and in the opinions that have come from four other circuits in the last few months that have addressed the same issues involved here: Kitchen v. Herbert, 755 F.3d 1193 (10th Cir.2014) (holding Utah statutes and state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment); Bostic v. Schaefer, 760 F.3d 352 (4th Cir.2014) (same, Virginia); Baskin v. Bogan, 766 F.3d 648 (7th Cir.2014) (same, Indiana statute and Wisconsin state constitutional amendment); and Latta v. Otter, Nos. 14-35420, 14-35421, 12-17668, 771 F.3d 456, 2014 WL 4977682 (9th Cir. Oct. 7, 2014) (same, Idaho and Nevada statutes and state constitutional amendments).3
Kitchen was decided primarily on the basis of substantive due process, based on the Tenth Circuit’s determination that under. Supreme Court precedents, the right to marry includes the right to marry the person of one’s choice. The court located the source of that right in Supreme Court opinions such as Maynard v. Hill, 125 U.S. 190, 205, 8 S.Ct. 723, 31 L.Ed. 654 (1888) (recognizing marriage as “the most important relation in life”); Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390, 399, 43 S.Ct. 625, 67 L.Ed. 1042 (1923) (holding that the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment includes the freedom “to marry, establish a home and bring up children”); Loving, 388 *429U.S. at 12, 87 S.Ct. 1817 (“The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.”); Zablocki, 434 U.S. at 384, 98 S.Ct. 673 (recognizing that “the right to marry is of fundamental importance for all individuals”); and Turner v. Safley, 482 U.S. 78, 95-96, 107 S.Ct. 2254, 96 L.Ed.2d 64 (1987) (in the context of a prison inmate’s right to marry, “[such] marriages are expressions of emotional support and public commitment!,] ... elements [that] are important and significant aspects of the marital relationship” even in situations in which procreation is not possible). Kitchen, 755 F.3d at 1209-11. The Tenth Circuit also found that the Utah laws violated equal protection, applying strict scrutiny because the classification in question impinged on a fundamental right. In doing so, the court rejected the state’s reliance on various justifications offered to establish a compelling state interest in denying marriage to same-sex couples, finding “an insufficient causal connection” between the prohibition on same-sex marriage and the state’s “articulated goals,” which included a purported interest in fostering biological reproduction, encouraging optimal childrearing, and maintaining gendered parenting styles. Id. at 1222. The court also rejected the state’s prediction that legalizing same-sex marriage would result in social discord, citing Watson v. City of Memphis, 373 U.S. 526, 535, 83 S.Ct. 1314, 10 L.Ed.2d 529 (1963) (rejecting, “community confusion and turmoil” as a reason to delay desegregation of public parks). Id. at 1227.
The Fourth Circuit in Bostic also applied strict scrutiny to strike down Virginia’s same-sex-marriage prohibitions as infringing on a fundamental right, citing Loving and observing that “[o]ver the decades, the Supreme Court has demonstrated that the right to marry is an expansive liberty interest that may stretch to accommodate changing societal norms.” 760 F.3d at 376. In a thoughtful opinion, the court analyzed each of the state’s proffered interests: maintaining control of the “definition of marriage,” adhering to the “tradition of opposite-sex marriage,” “protecting the institution of marriage,” “encouraging responsible procreation,” and “promoting the optimal childrearing environment.” Id. at 378. In each instance, the court found that there was no link between the state’s purported “compelling interest” and the exclusion of same-sex couples “from participating fully in our society, which is precisely the type of segregation that the Fourteenth Amendment cannot countenance.” Id. at 384. As to the state’s interest in federalism, the court pointed to the long-recognized principle that “[s]tate laws defining and regulating marriage, of course, must respect the constitutional rights of persons,” id. at 379 (quoting Windsor, 133 S.Ct. at 2691), and highlighted Windsor’s reiteration of “Loving’s admonition that the states must exercise their authority without trampling constitutional guarantees.” Id. Addressing the state’s contention that marriage under state law should be confined to opposite-sex couples because unintended pregnancies cannot result from same-sex unions, the court noted that “[b]ecause same-sex couples and infertile opposite-sex couples are similarly situated, the Equal Protection Clause counsels against treating these groups differently.” Id. at 381-82 (citing City of Cleburne v. Cleburne Living Ctr., 473 U.S. 432, 439, 105 S.Ct. 3249, 87 L.Ed.2d 313 (1985)).
The Seventh Circuit’s Baskin opinion is firmly grounded in equal-protection analysis. The court proceeded from the premise that “[discrimination by a state or the federal government against a minority, when based on an immutable characteristic *430of the members of that minority (most familiarly skin color and gender), and occurring against an historical background of discrimination against the persons who have that characteristic, makes the discriminatory law or policy constitutionally suspect.” 766 F.3d at 654. But the court also found that “discrimination against same-sex couples is irrational, and therefore unconstitutional even if the discrimination is not subjected to heightened scrutiny.” Id. at 656. This conclusion was based on the court’s rejection of “the only rationale that the states put forth with any conviction — that same-sex couples and their children don’t need marriage because same-sex couples can’t produce children, intended or unintended,” an argument “so full of holes that it cannot be taken seriously.” Id. (emphasis in original). The court therefore found it unnecessary to engage in “the more complex analysis found in more closely balanced equal-protection cases” or under the “due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” Id. at 656-57.
The Ninth Circuit’s opinion in Latta also focuses on equal-protection principles in finding that Idaho’s and Nevada’s statutes and constitutional amendments prohibiting same-sex marriage violate the Fourteenth Amendment. Because the Ninth Circuit had recently held in SmithKline Beecham Corp. v. Abbott Labs., 740 F.3d 471, 481 (9th Cir.2014), that classifications based on sexual orientation are subject to heightened scrutiny, a conclusion the court drew from its reading of Windsor to require assessment more rigorous than rational-basis review, the path to finding an equal-protection violation was less than arduous. As did the Tenth Circuit in Kitchen, the court in Latta found it “wholly illogical” to think that same.-sex marriage would affect opposite-sex couples’ choices with regard to procreation. Latta, 771 F.3d at 469, 2014 WL 4977682, at *5 (citing Kitchen, 755 F.3d at 1223).
These four cases from our sister circuits provide a rich mine of responses to every rationale raised by the defendants in the Sixth Circuit cases as a basis for excluding same-sex couples from contracting valid marriages. Indeed, it would seem unnecessary for this court to do more than cite those cases in affirming the district courts’ decisions in the six cases now before us. Because the correct result is so obvious, one is tempted to speculate that the majority has purposefully taken the contrary position to create the circuit split regarding the legality of same-sex marriage that could prompt a grant of certiorari by the Supreme Court and an end to the uncertainty of status and the interstate chaos that the current discrepancy in state laws threatens. Perhaps that is the case, but it does not relieve the dissenting member of the panel from the obligation of a rejoinder.
If ever there was a legal “dead letter” emanating from the Supreme Court, Baker v. Nelson, 409 U.S. 810, 93 S.Ct. 37, 34 L.Ed.2d 65 (1972), is a prime candidate. It lacks only a stake through its heart. Nevertheless, the majority posits that we are bound by. the Court’s aging one-line order denying review of an appeal from the Minnesota Supreme Court “for want of a substantial federal question.” As the majority notes, the question concerned the state’s refusal to issue a marriage license to a same-sex couple, but the decision came at a point in time when sodomy was legal in' only one state in the country, Illinois, which had repealed its anti-sodomy statute in 1962. The Minnesota statute criminalizing same-sex intimate relations was not struck down until 2001, almost .30 years after Baker was *431announced.4 The Minnesota Supreme • Court’s denial of relief to a same-sex couple in 1971 and the United States Supreme Court’s conclusion that there was no substantial federal question involved in the appeal thus is unsurprising. As the majority notes — not facetiously, one hopes — “that was then; this is now.”
At the same time, the majority argues that we are bound by the eleven words in the order, despite the Supreme Court silence on the matter in the 42 years since it was issued. There was no recognition of Baker in Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620, 116 S.Ct. 1620, 134 L.Ed.2d 855 (1996), nor in Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558, 123 S.Ct. 2472, 156- L.Ed.2d 508 (2003), and not in Windsor, despite the fact that the dissenting judge in the Second Circuit’s opinion in Windsor made the same argument that the majority makes in this case. See Windsor v. United States, 699 F.3d 169, 189, 192-95 (2d Cir.2012) (Straub, J., dissenting in part and concurring in part). And although the argument was vigorously pressed by the DOMA proponents in their Supreme Court brief in Windsor,5 neither Justice Kennedy in his opinion for the court nor any of the four dissenting judges in their three separate opinions mentioned Baker. In addition, the order was not cited in the three orders of October 6, 2014, denying certiorari in Kitchen, Bostic, and Baskin. If this string of cases — Romer, Lawrence, Windsor, Kitchen, Bostic, and Baskin — does not represent the Court’s overruling of Baker sub silentio, it certainly creates the “doctrinal development” that frees the lower courts from the strictures of a summary disposition by the Supreme Court. See Hicks v. Miranda, 422 U.S. 332, 344, 95 S.Ct. 2281, 45 L.Ed.2d 223 (1975) (internal quotation marks and citation omitted).

Definition of Marriage

The majority’s “original meaning” analysis strings together a number of case citations but can tell us little about the Fourteenth Amendment, except to assure us that “the people who adopted the Fourteenth Amendment [never] understood it to require the States to change the definition of marriage.” The quick answer is that they undoubtedly did not understand that it would also require school desegregation in 1955 or the end of miscegenation laws across the country, beginning in California in 1948 and culminating in the Loving decision in 1967. Despite a civil war, the end of slavery, and ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, extensive litigation has been necessary to achieve even a modicum of constitutional protection from discrimination based on race, and it has occurred primarily by judicial decree, not by the democratic election process to which the majority suggests we should defer regarding discrimination based on sexual orientation.
Moreover, the majority’s view of marriage as “a social institution defined by relationships between men and women” is wisely described in the plural. There is not now and never has been a universally accepted definition of marriage. In early Judeo-Christian law and throughout the West in the Middle Ages, marriage was a religious obligation, not a civil status. Historically, it has been pursued primarily as a political or economic arrangement. Even today, polygynous marriages outnumber monogamous ones — the practice is *432widespread in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, especially in countries following Islamic law, which also recognizes temporary marriages in some parts of the world. In Asia and the Middle East, many marriages are still arranged and some are even coerced.
Although some of the older statutes regarding marriage cited by the majority do speak of the union of “a man and a woman,” the picture hardly ends there. When Justice Alito noted in Windsor that the opponents of DOMA were “implicitly ask[ing] us to endorse [a more expansive definition of marriage and] to reject the traditional view,” Windsor, 133 S.Ct. at 2718 (Alito, J., dissenting), he may have been unfamiliar with all that the “traditional view” entailed, especially for women who were subjected to coverture as a result of Anglo-American common law. Fourteenth Amendment cases decided by the Supreme Court in the years since 1971 that “invalidat[ed] various laws and policies that categorized by sex have been part of a transformation that has altered the very institution at the heart of this case, marriage.” Latta, 771 F.3d at 48, 2014 WL 4977682, at *20 (Berzon, J., concurring).
Historically, marriage was a profoundly unequal institution, one that imposed distinctly different rights and obligations on men and women. The law of coverture, for example, deemed the “the husband and wife ... one person,” such that “the very being or legal existence of the woman [was] suspended ... or at least [was] incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband” during the marriage. 1 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England 441 (3d rev. ed.1884). Under the principles of coverture, “a married woman [was] incapable, without her husband’s consent, of making contracts ... binding on her or him.” Bradwell v. Illinois, 83 U.S. 130, 141 [16 Wall. 130, 21 L.Ed. 442] (1872) (Bradley, J., concurring). She could not sue or be sued without her husband’s consent. See, e.g., Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation 11-12 (2000). Married women also could not serve as the legal guardians of their children. Frontiero v. Richardson, 411 U.S. 677, 685 [93 S.Ct. 1764, 36 L.Ed.2d 583] (1973) (plurality op.).
Marriage laws further dictated economically disparate roles for husband and wife. In many respects, the marital contract was primarily understood as an' economic arrangement between spouses, whether or not the couple had or would have children. “Coverture expressed the legal essence of marriage as reciprocal: a husband was bound to support his wife, and in exchange she gave over her property and labor.” Cott, Public Vows, at 54. That is why “married women traditionally were denied the legal capacity to hold or convey property....” Frontiero, 411 U.S. at 685 [93 S.Ct. 1764]. Notably, husbands owed their wives support even if there were no children of the marriage. See, e.g., Hendrik Hartog, Man and Wife in America: A History 156 (2000).
There was also a significant disparity between the rights of husbands and wives with regard to physical intimacy. At common law, “a woman was the sexual property of her husband; that is, she had a duty to have intercourse with him.” John D’Emilio & Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America 79 (3d ed.2012). Quite literally, a wife was legally “the possession of her husband, ... [her] husband’s property.” Hartog, Man and Wife in America, at 137. Accordingly, a husband could sue his wife’s lover in tort for “entic[ingl” her or *433“alienat[ing]” her affections and thereby interfering with his property rights in her body and her labor. Id. A husband’s possessory interest in his wife was undoubtedly also driven by the fact that, historically, marriage was the only legal site for licit sex; sex outside of marriage was almost universally criminalized. See, e.g., Ariela R. Dubler, Immoral Purposes: Marriage and the Genus of Illicit Sex, 115 Yale L.J. 756, 763-64 (2006).
Notably, although sex was strongly presumed to be an essential part of marriage, the ability to procreate was generally not. See, e.g., Chester Vernier, American Family Laws: A Comparative Study of the Family Law of the Forty-Eight American States, Alaska, the District of Columbia, and Hawaii (to Jan. 1, 1931) (1931) I § 50, 239-46 (at time of survey, grounds for annulment typically included impotency, as well as incapacity due to minority or “non-age”; lack of understanding and insanity; force or duress; fraud; disease; and incest; but not inability to conceive); II § 68, at 38-39 (1932) (at time of survey, grounds for divorce included “impotence”; vast majority of states “generally held that impotence ... does not mean sterility but must be of such a nature as to render complete sexual intercourse practically impossible”; and only Pennsylvania “ma[d]e sterility a cause” for divorce). The common law also dictated that it was legally impossible for a man to rape his wife. Men could not be prosecuted for spousal rape. A husband’s “incapacity” to rape his wife was justified by the theory that “ ‘the marriage constitute^] a blanket consent to sexual intimacy which the woman [could] revoke only by dissolving the marital relationship.’ ” See, e.g., Jill Elaine Hasday, Contest and Consent: A Legal History of Marital Rape, 88 Calif. L. Rev 1373, 1376 n.9 (2000) (quoting Model Penal Code and Commentaries, § 213.1 cmt. 8(c), at 342 (Official Draft and Revised Comments 1980)).
Concomitantly, dissolving the marital partnership via divorce was exceedingly difficult. Through the mid-twentieth century, divorce could be obtained only on a limited set of grounds, if at all. At the beginning of our nation’s history, several states did not permit full divorce except under the narrowest of circumstances; separation alone was the remedy, even if a woman could show “cruelty endangering life or limb.” Peter W. Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South 33 (1995); see also id. 32-33. In part, this policy dovetailed with the grim fact that, at English common law, and in several states through the beginning of the nineteenth century, “a husband’s prerogative to chastise his wife” — that is, to beat her short of permanent injury — was recognized as his marital right. Reva B. Siegel, “The Rule of Love”: Wife Beating as Prerogative and Privacy, 105 Yale L.J. 2117, 2125 (1996).
Id. at 487-88, 2014 WL 4977682, at *20-21.
Women were not the only class deprived of equal status in “traditional marriage.” Until the end of the Civil War in 1865, slaves were prohibited from contracting legal marriages and often resorted to “jumping the broomstick” to mark a monogamous conjugal relationship. Informal “slave marriage” was the rule until the end of the war, when Freedmen’s Bureaus began issuing marriage licenses to former slaves who could establish the existence of long-standing family relationships, despite the fact that family members were sometimes at great distances from one another. The ritual of jumping the broomstick, *434thought of in this country in terms of slave marriages, actually originated in England, where civil marriages were not available until enactment of the Marriage Act of 1837. Prior to that, the performance of valid marriages was the sole prerogative of the Church of England, unless the participants were Quakers or Jews. The majority’s admiration for “traditional marriage” thus seems misplaced, if not naive. The legal status has been through so many reforms that the marriage of same-sex couples constitutes merely the latest wave in a vast sea of change.

Rationalr-Basis Review.

The principal thrust of the majority’s rational-basis analysis is basically a reiteration of the same tired argument that the proponents of same-sex-marriage bans have raised in litigation across the country: marriage is about the regulation of “procreative urges” of men and women who therefore do not need the “government’s encouragement to have sex” but, instead, need encouragement to “create and maintain stable relationships within which children may flourish.” The majority contends that exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage must be considered rational based on “the biological reality that couples of the same sex do not have children in the same way as couples of opposite sexes and that couples of the same sex do not run the risk of unintended children.” As previously noted, however, this argument is one that an eminent jurist has described as being “so full of holes that it cannot be taken seriously.” Baskin, 766 F.3d at 656 (Posner, J.).
At least my colleagues are perceptive enough to acknowledge that “[g]ay couples, no less than straight couples, are capable of sharing such relationships ... [and] are capable of raising stable families.” The majority is even persuaded that the “quality of [same-sex] relationships, and the capacity to raise children within them, turns not on sexual orientation but on individual choices and individual commitment.” All of which, the majority surmises, “supports the policy argument made by many that marriage laws should be extended to gay. couples.” But this conclusion begs the question: why reverse the judgments of four federal district courts, in four different states, and in six different cases that would do just that?
There are apparently two answers; first, “let the people decide” and, second, “give it time.” The majority posits that “just as [same-sex marriage has been adopted in] nineteen states and the'District of- Columbia,” the change-agents in the Sixth Circuit should be “elected legislators, not life-tenured judges.” Of course, this argument fails to acknowledge the impracticalities involved in amending, re-amending, or un-amending a state constitution.6 More to the point, under our constitutional system, the courts are assigned the responsibility of determining individual rights under the Fourteenth Amendment, regardless of popular opinion or even a *435plebiscite. As the Supreme Court, has noted, “It is plain that the electorate as a whole, whether by referendum or otherwise, could not order [government] action violative of the Equal Protection Clause, and the [government] may not avoid the strictures of that Clause by deferring to the wishes or objections of some fraction of the body politic.” City of Cleburne, 473 U.S. at 448, 105 S.Ct. 3249 (internal citation omitted).
Moreover, as it turns out, legalization of same-sex marriage in the “nineteen states and the District of Columbia” mentioned by the majority was not uniformly the result of popular vote or legislative enactment. Nine states now permit same-sex marriage because of judicial decisions, both state and federal: Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, New Mexico, and Colorado (state supreme court decisions); New Jersey (state superior court decision not appealed by defendant); California (federal district court decision allowed to stand in ruling by United States Supreme Court); and Oregon and Pennsylvania (federal district court decisions not appealed by defendants). Despite the majority’s insistence that, as life-tenured judges, we should step aside and let the voters determine the future of the state constitutional provisions at issue here, those nine federal and state courts have seen no acceptable reason to do so.' In addition, another 16 states have been or soon will be added to the list, by virtue of the Supreme Court’s dénial of certiorari review in Kitchen, Bostic, and Baskin, and the Court’s order dissolving the stay in Latta. The result has been the issuance of hundreds — perhaps thousands — of marriage licenses in the wake of those orders. Moreover, the 35 states that are now positioned to recognize same-sex marriage are comparable to the 34 states that permitted interracial marriage when the Supreme Court decided Loving. If the majority in this case is waiting for a tipping point, it seems to have arrived.
The second contention is that we should “wait and see” what the fallout is in the states where same-sex marriage is now legal. The majority points primarily to Massachusetts, where same-sex couples have had the benefit of marriage for “only” ten years — not enough time, the majority insists, to know what the effect on society will be. But in the absence of hard evidence that the sky has actually fallen in, the “states as laboratories of democracy” metaphor and its pitch for restraint has little or no resonance in the fast-changing scene with regard to same-sex marriage. Yet, whenever the expansion of a constitutional right is proposed, “proceed with caution” seems to be the universal mantra of the opponents. The same argument was made by the State of Virginia in Loving. And, in Frontiero v. Richardson, 411 U.S. 677, 93 S.Ct. 1764, 36 L.Ed.2d 583 (1973), the government asked the Court to postpone applying heightened scrutiny to allegations of gender discrimination in a statute denying equal benefits to women until the Equal Rights Amendment could be ratified. If the Court had listened to the argument, we would, of course, still be waiting. One is reminded of the admonition in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963): “For years now I have heard the word “Wait”! ... [But h]uman progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability ... [and] time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation.”

Animus

Finally, there is a need to address briefly the subject of unconstitutional animus, which the majority opinion equates only with actual malice and hostility on the part of members of the electorate. But in many instances involving rational-basis re*436view, the Supreme Court has taken a more objective approach to the classification at issue, rather than a subjective one. Under such an analysis, it is not necessary for a court to divine individual malicious intent in order to find unconstitutional animus. Instead, the Supreme Court has instructed that an exclusionary law violates the Equal Protection Clause when it is based not upon relevant facts, but instead upon only a general, ephemeral distrust of, or discomfort with, a particular group, for example, when legislation is justified by the bare desire to exclude an unpopular group from a social institution or arrangement. In City of Cleburne, for example, the Court struck down a zoning regulation that was justified simply by the “negative attitude” of property owners in the community toward individuals with intellectual disabilities, not necessarily by actual malice toward an unpopular minority. In doing so, the Court held that “the City may not avoid the strictures of the [Equal Protection] Clause by deferring to the wishes or objections of some fraction of the-body politic,” 473 U.S. at 448, 105 S.Ct. 3249, and cited Palmore v. Sidoti, 466 U.S. 429, 433, 104 S.Ct. 1879, 80 L.Ed.2d 421 (1984), for the proposition that “[p]rivate biases may be outside the reach of the law, but the law cannot, directly or indirectly, give them effect.” In any event, as the majority here concedes, we as' a country have such a long history of prejudice based on sexual orientation that it seems hypocritical to deny the existence of unconstitutional animus in the rational-basis analysis of the cases before us.
■ To my mind, the soundest description of this analysis is found in Justice Stevens’s separate opinion in City of Cleburne:
In every equal protection case, we have to ask certain basic questions. • What class is harmed by the legislation, and has it been subjected to a “tradition of disfavor” by our laws? What is the public purpose that is being served by the law? What is the characteristic of the disadvantaged class that justifies the disparate treatment? In most cases the answer to these questions will tell us whether the statute has a “rational basis.”
Id. at 453, 105 S.Ct. 3249 (Stevens, J., concurring) (footnotes omitted). I would apply just this analysis to the constitutional amendments and statutes at issue in these cases, confident that the result of the inquiry would be to affirm the district courts’ decisions in all six cases. I therefore dissent from the majority’s decision to overturn those judgments.
. Today, my colleagues seem to have fallen prey to the misguided notion that the-intent of the framers of the United States Constitution can be effectuated only by cleaving to the legislative will and ignoring and demonizing an independent judiciary. Of. course, the framers presciently recognized that two of the three co-equal branches of government were representative in nature and necessarily would be guided by self-interest and the pull of popular opinion. To restrain those natural, human impulses, the framers crafted Article III to ensure that rights, liberties, and duties need not be held hostage by popular whims.
More than 20 years ago, when I took my oath of office to serve as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, I solemnly swore to “administer justice without respect to persons,” to “do equal right to the poor and to the rich,” and to “faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me ... under the Constitution and laws of the United States.” See 28 U.S.C. § 453. If we in the judiciary do not have the authority, and indeed the responsibility, to right fundamental *437wrongs left excused by a majority of the electorate, our whole intricate, constitutional system of checks and balances, as well as the oaths to which we swore, prove to be nothing but shams.

. In the district court, the state did not advance an "unintended pregnancy” argument, nor was that claim included in the state’s brief on appeal, although counsel did mention it during oral argument. In terms of "optimal environment,” the state emphasized the need for children to have "both a mom and a dad,” because "men and women are different,” and to have a "biological connection to their parents.”

. On October 6, the Supreme Court denied certiorari and lifted stays in Kitchen, Bostic, and Baskin, putting into effect the district court injunctions entered in each of those three cases. A stay of the mandate in the Idaho case in Latta also has been vacated, and the appeal in the Nevada case is not being pursued. As a result, marriage licenses are currently being issued to same-sex couples throughout most — if not all — of the Fourth, Seventh, Ninth, and Tenth Circuits.

. See Doe v. Ventura, No. 01-489, 2001 WL 543734 (D.Ct. of Hennepin Cnty. May 15, 2001) (unreported).

. See United States v. Windsor, Brief on the Merits for Respondent the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group of the U.S. House of Representatives, No. 12-307, 2013 WL 267026 at 16-19, 25-26 (Jan. 22, 2013).

. In Tennessee, for example, a proposed amendment must first be approved by a simple majority of both houses. In the succeeding legislative' session, which can occur as long as a year or more later, the same proposed amendment must then be approved "by two-thirds of all the members elected to each house.” Tenn. Const, art. XI, § 3. The proposed amendment is then presented "to the people at the next general election in which a Governor is to be chosen,” id.., which can occur as long as three years or more later. If a majority of all citizens voting in the gubernatorial election also approve of the proposed amendment, it is considered ratified. The procedure for amending the constitution by convention can take equally long and is, if anything, more complicated. In Michigan, a constitutional convention, one of three methods of amendment, ,can be called no more often than every 16 years. See Mich. Const, art. XII, § 3.