USA protects same-sex marriages by law

Created: 08/12/2022, 18:16

The US Congress passed legislation protecting same-sex marriages by a bipartisan majority.

© J. Scott Applewhite/AP/dpa

Same-sex marriages have been legal in the United States since 2015.

That was decided by the Supreme Court.

A law has now been passed to keep it that way.

There is an urgent reason for this.

Washington - The US Congress passed legislation protecting same-sex marriages with a bipartisan majority.

The House of Representatives voted 258 votes Thursday in favor of the bill, which would include federal legislation protecting same-sex marriage.

169 MPs voted against - all dissenting votes came from the Republicans.

The Senate had previously approved it.

Now US President Joe Biden has yet to sign the text.

For Biden and his Democrats, the law is a great success.

It also protects marriage between people of different ethnicities - for example between blacks and whites.

Same-sex marriage was legalized in the United States by a 2015 Supreme Court decision.

It declared unconstitutional a 1996 law that established marriage as a covenant between a man and a woman.

However, concerns arose this year when the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court reversed the Supreme Court's abortion-rights ruling dating back to the 1970s.

One of the judges, arch-conservative lawyer Clarence Thomas, placed the decision on same-sex marriages in a series of judgments that the court must reconsider.

From the point of view of civil rights activists, the law that has now been passed has a catch: it does not force any US state to allow same-sex couples to marry.

But it does require states to recognize all marriages legally contracted elsewhere.

It also protects same-sex marriages that already exist if the Supreme Court, which now has a majority of conservative judges, overturns its 2015 ruling.

dpa