American Bar Association Endorses Marriage Equality

If recent marriage equality victories in California andMassachusetts federal courts weren't enough to convince you that the winds of justice are shifting in our favor, consider this: the American Bar Association (ABA) has just adopted a resolution in favor of marriage equality.

At its annual meeting this week, the ABA's policy-making House of Delegates endorsed a measure that said the organization "urges state, territorial, and tribal governments to eliminate all of their legal barriers to civil marriage between two persons of the same sex who are otherwise eligible to marry."

ABA President Carolyn Lamm issued a statement before the vote explaining, "We know that marriage equality impacts issues in families’ lives -- taxation, succession, custody of children, breakup and others. As the nation's largest organization of lawyers, we in fact need to consider these issues because it impacts the lives of the public."

Even before the measure passed, however, the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), a conservative legal advocacy group, told the Christian Post that the ABA does not speak for all lawyers on the matter. It claimed that three-quarters of all U.S. lawyers do not even belong to the ABA and that many do not support marriage equality. (According to statistics from the ABA, that is a slight exaggeration. One third of lawyers -- about 400,000 out of roughly 1.2 million active attorneys -- belong to the ABA, leaving only two thirds outside it.)

The ABA, however, is still the largest professional organization for lawyers in the country -- and the largest voluntary professional association in the world. It accredits law schools and provides continuing education and other programs to aid lawyers in their professional development. Among its goals are also to "Eliminate bias in the legal profession and the justice system" and "Work for just laws, including human rights, and a fair legal process." The marriage resolution, though lacking the force of law, is at the very least a sign that a key portion of the legal profession feels that marriage equality helps meet these goals.

If the ADF wants to complain, however, then maybe it should have at least shown up at the conference. The ABA held a panel discussion before the vote on the measure, which included three of the leading attorneys who fought for marriage equality in California, Massachusetts, and Vermont. The panel organizer said attorneys from the other side were invited, but they did not accept.

The initial report and recommendation for the resolution is worth a read, if you're the type who also took time to read the full Prop 8 ruling. Although shorter (19 pages vs. 136), it is as comprehensive in laying out the arguments for equality. It asserts that the lack of marriage for same-sex couples "offends our constitutional commitments to liberty and equality." It invokes many historic civil rights rulings, including Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court ruling that struck down prohibitions on interracial marriage, and Brown v. Board of Ed., which desegregated public schools:

Asserting that separate systems for classes of citizens can satisfy constitutional equality guarantees as long as identical legal rights are conferred invokes the long-repudiated reasoning in Plessy v. Ferguson. In that case, the Court upheld separate railway cars for African-Americans. . . . However, as our constitutional tradition and history has made clear, only full marriage equality comports with our constitutional standards that separate is not equal. See Brown v. Board of Ed."

(Thanks to Nan Hunter.)

This is not the first time the ABA has adopted a policy in support of LGBT rights. Over the past 20 years, it has supported adoption and second-parent adoption rights for same-sex couples, statutes to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in child custody and other areas, and repeal of Section 3 of DOMA (which prohibits federal recognition of same-sex marriages). It also opposed a federal constitutional amendment that would prohibit states from recognizing same-sex marriages.

The ABA also announced this week that the lead attorneys for the plaintiffs in the Prop 8 case, Ted Olson and David Boies, will co-chair a new ABA task force on the preservation of the justice system. Boies also gave the keynote speech at the conference (Olson had been invited, but could not attend) and talked of the rule of law as "the essential guardian of liberty, equality and the protection of individual rights that Thomas Jefferson wrote about in the Declaration of Independence."

And in a nod to social justice in another area, the ABA also adopted a resolution honoring To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, the classic novel about a white lawyer defending a black man accused of rape in 1930's Alabama. The book celebrates its 50th anniversary this month.

Lawyers may be the butt of more jokes than perhaps any other profession, but it seems many of them also understand what true justice is all about.

Photo credit: Walknboston

by Dana Rudolph http://gayrights.change.org