Miami Court Rules for Same-Sex Marriage

"... Treating homosexuals as inferiors, undeserving of the fundamental right to marry the individual that they love, deprives them of basic human dignity. Accordingly, it is held that article I, section 27 of Florida’s Constitution, and those parts of sections 741.04(1) and 741.212, Florida Statutes, prohibiting same-sex couples from marrying in Florida violate the due process protections of the Fourteenth Amendment. These unconstitutional laws are thus void and unenforceable. Furthermore, as shown below, they also violate the federal constitutional guarantee of equal protection...

In 1776, our Nation’s Founders went to war in pursuit of a then-novel, yet noble, goal: the creation of a government that recognizes its people are “endowed . . . with certain inalienable rights” and that all are equal in the eyes of the law. THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE, para. 2 (U.S. 1776). Unfortunately, history shows that prejudice corrupted the implementation of these ideals and that the corrective wheels of justice turn at a glacial pace. Slavery, for instance, plagued this nation from the time of its birth, and it took a bloody civil war, nearly one hundred years later, to break free from this malady. Segregation, though, took slavery’s place, and it was not until the 1960s that we rid ourselves of this similarly horrible disease. Women too, had to fight for equality, and it was not until 1920 that they were first able to vote. Nevertheless, like race, it was not until the social unrest of the 1960s that gender equality had any meaning. The Native Americans also faced rampant discrimination until the 1960s and 1970s as well.

Notably absent from this protracted march towards social justice was any progress for the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community until quite recently. However, as evidenced by the avalanche of court decisions unanimously favoring marriage equality, the dam that was denying justice on this front has been broken. The Court, nonetheless, recognizes that its decision today is divisive and will cause some Floridians great discomfort. This decision, though, “is not made in defiance of the great people of [Florida] or the [Florida] Legislature, but in compliance with the United States Constitution and Supreme Court precedent. Without a rational relation to a legitimate governmental purpose, state-imposed inequality can find no refuge in our United States Constitution...

The recognition that the right to marry encompasses categories of people not traditionally considered to be accorded that right has been slow in coming, but it has become increasingly obvious that it is not constitutionally permissible to deny same-sex couples the right to marry. The flood of cases that have come out since Windsor amply demonstrates this truth as not one court has found a same-sex marriage ban to be constitutional. As case after case has come out, unified in their well-reasoned constitutional condemnation of the deprivation of one class of person’s right to marry, the answer to the question of whether it is constitutionally permissible to deprive same-sex couples of the right to marry has become increasingly obvious: Of course it is not. Preventing couples from marrying solely on the basis of their sexual orientation serves no governmental interest. It serves only to hurt, to discriminate, to deprive same-sex couples and their families of equal dignity, to label and treat them as second-class citizens, and to deem them unworthy of participation in one of the fundamental institutions of our society.

The journey of our Nation towards becoming “a more perfect Union” does not stop at any particular generation; it is instead a fluid process through every generation. U.S. CONST. pmbl. The Court, therefore, foresees a day when the term “same-sex marriage” is viewed in the same absurd vein as “separate but equal” and is thus forsaken and supplanted by ordinary “marriage.”...

Florida’s same-sex marriage bans violate the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the United States Constitution, and they also offend basic human dignity. The Plaintiff’s Motion for Summary Judgment is therefore GRANTED...” 

Judge Sarah Zabel, Circuit Court of the Eleventh Judicial Circuit in and for Miami-Dade County, Florida, July 25, 2014.
     

     click here to read entire decision (not quite primary source)