Just one month after the landmark Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage in 2015, Ryan T. Anderson, a researcher at the Heritage Foundation, turned to the anti-abortion playbook.
“Everything the pro-life movement did needs to be done again, now on this new frontier of marriage,” Anderson wrote in Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom. Following the Supreme Court’s ruling that legalized abortion, Anderson says, “Courageous pro-lifers put their hand to the plow, and today we reap the fruits … More state laws have been enacted protecting unborn babies in the past decade than the previous 30 years combined.”
Three years later, the strategy is in effect and working. By using the same tactics that eroded access to abortion after Roe v. Wade in 1973, Republicans are stockpiling state laws that make married life for gay couples more difficult and unequal.
Kansas Republican Gov. Jeff Colyer signed a law this month that allows taxpayer-funded adoption agencies to reject applicants, including gay couples and divorcees, based on their religious objections. A week before, Oklahoma Republican Gov. Mary Fallin signed a nearly identical law.
These new laws are reminiscent of a November 2015 law passed in Michigan, which Kristy and Dana Dumont sued over in federal court last fall because a publicly funded Catholic adoption agency allegedly refused to serve them for being gay. The couple’s first court hearing is in July.
Unlike Indiana’s religious freedom law, which became a national flashpoint in 2014 and was effectively rescinded due to the backlash, these narrower, targeted bills wind up on the books with little brouhaha. The encroachment has been largely overshadowed by the political hurricane of the Trump administration. The tailored religious objection measures don’t attempt to repeal the right of gay couples to marry, but rather, they create a creeping body of law that says gay couples can be denied the accessories of marriage that society deems crucial to recognizing a union: adopting kids, wedding cakes, couples counseling, health care services.
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