The decision written by U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves in striking down Mississippi’s House Bill 1523 was eloquent, persuasive, and powerful. The ruling itself was predictable and in keeping with the prevailing federal judicial winds.
In many ways, Reeves’ argument is a roadmap for appellate judges to find the path Mississippi lawmakers took to craft a state law that worked around the realities of the prior Supreme Court ruling legalizing gay marriage.
The Obergefell decision created an impassable legal roadblock for Mississippians seeking to block or bypass the federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage by denying marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Reeves reiterated that legal reality in his decision blocking the new law.
So the majority of the Mississippi Legislature enacted HB 1523 and the federal courts have struck it down. The appellate process may or may not continue, but let’s assume for the sake of argument that it will.
A reasonable reading of the judicial tea leaves would suggest that Reeves has written a decision that is pretty safe from judicial review — particularly at the level of the Supreme Court. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is conservative, yes, but recent high court decisions make the probability of overturning Reeves’ ruling highly unlikely.
Admittedly, I’m not a fan of HB 1523 and I believe Judge Reeves’ decision was the right one. This law always struck me as a solution in search of a problem that was bad public policy and simply unnecessary. The law seemed to me far more rooted in politics than in anything else.
In the wake of the federal court decision striking down HB 1523, what next? The Reeves decision is no magic wand that immediately retires either the political or legal components of the issue — to say nothing of the religious components.
People of faith with the “deeply-held religious beliefs” regarding what they consider the sanctity of marriage and strong ideas about the definition of marriage aren’t going anywhere.
The Human Rights Campaign and other proponents of LGBT rights are likewise in this fight for the long haul. They, too, have strong organizational roots.
Depending on the side of the philosophical fence one comes down on, the landscape after this ruling has either been one that is at best celebratory and at worst a political victory lap, or it has been one of finger-pointing, the blame game and varying degrees of political threats and saber rattling. None of that is particularly productive as the state tries to move forward from this juncture.
Social media has in many ways been a disservice to this debate. Because of the penchant many have for angry, irrational rants, the real issues in HB 1523 often were lost in the heated political shuffle.
This debate was always about real discrimination as opposed to the fear of potential discrimination. It was always about the concepts of freedom of religion, which must leave the constitutional door open for freedom from religion.
