Vox Sentences: Marriage equality finally becomes a national reality

Marriage, equalized

Arielle Cronig (left) and Elaine Cleary embrace outside of the Supreme Court after the ruling in favor of same-sex marriage. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

• The Supreme Court has struck down all state bans on same-sex marriage, making it legal nationwide.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• You can read the full opinion and dissents here.

  [Vox / Tez Clark and German Lopez]

• The majority opinion — written by Anthony Kennedy and joined by the court's four liberals — ends on a surprisingly beautiful, poignant note: "[Same-sex couples] ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right."

  [Vox / Sarah Kliff]

• Kennedy's reasoning: marriage is a fundamental right which under the Due Process Clause cannot be denied without good reason (the Court has held this view at least since 1978's Zablocki v. Redhail), and denying it to same-sex couples is unconstitutional under both that clause and the Equal Protection Clause.

  [Washington Post / Ilya Somin]

• All four of the court's conservatives filed dissents, of which the most venomous was Antonin Scalia's, wherein he lambasted the ruling as a "judicial putsch" carried out by coastal elites on the bench and commenting, "One would think Freedom of Intimacy is abridged rather than expanded by marriage. Ask the nearest hippie."

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• Sure enough, Huffington Post reporters "went to look for the first hippie we could find, per Scalia's instructions." He was outside the White House protesting nuclear weapons.

  [Huffington Post / Ryan Grim and Arthur Delaney]

• Scalia was right about one big thing: the Supreme Court is, de facto, creating public policy for the whole nation through a non-democratic process. Whether you love this ruling or hate it, it's not unreasonable to worry about that.

  [Vox / Ezra Klein]

• Samuel Alito's dissent argues against marriage equality on the grounds that it silences opponents by putting them at risk of "being labeled as bigots," which is identical logic to Catharine MacKinnon's radical feminist argument for banning sexist speech.

  [Balkinization / Jack Balkin]

• Clarence Thomas's dissent disputed Kennedy's judgment that marriage bans are an affront to LGB Americans' dignity on the grounds that the government can't take dignity away. In the process, he argues that slavery was just fine for human dignity. So there's that.

  [Vox / Jenée Desmond-Harris]

• State and localities can drag their feet, but for the most part, the ruling is effective immediately, and couples in affected states are already marrying.

  [Vox / Libby Nelson]

• 21 countries now have marriage equality, of which the US is by far the biggest. Brazil is in second place.

  [Vox / Zack Beauchamp and Javier Zarracina]

• Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush issued statements opposing the verdict but stating it must be respected; Ted Cruz, by contrast, called for a constitutional convention to counter it, and Scott Walker called for a constitutional amendment.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• Andrew Sullivan reflects on the victory, 26 after writing the New Republic cover story that catalyzed the marriage equality movement: "I never believed this would happen in my lifetime … I never for a millisecond thought I would live to be married myself. Or that it would be possible for everyone, everyone in America. But it has come to pass. All of it. In one fell, final swoop."

  [Andrew Sullivan]

• You can read his original 1989 essay here.

  [New Republic / Andrew Sullivan]

• Freddie deBoer makes the case that legalized polygamy should come next; the argument against letting consenting adults form households as they wish is remarkably weak.

  [Politico / Freddie deBoer]

• Want to learn more about the Court's marriage ruling? Check out German Lopez's very comprehensive explainer.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

Funeral

(Win McNamee/Getty Images)

• President Obama delivered an extremely moving, poignant eulogy at the funeral of slain South Carolina State Senator Clementa Pinckney, who was killed in the Emanuel AME church shooting of June 17. Read it here.

  [Vox / Ezra Klein]

• You can also watch it here, which is worth it for his emotional delivery.

  [White House]

• He spoke on the role of the black church: "Over the course of centuries, black churches served as 'hush harbors' where slaves could worship in safety; praise houses where their free descendants could gather and shout hallelujah; rest stops for the weary along the Underground Railroad; bunkers for the foot soldiers of the Civil Rights Movement."

• "We do not know whether the killer of Reverend Pinckney and eight others knew all of this history. But he surely sensed the meaning of his violent act. … An act that he presumed would deepen divisions that trace back to our nation's original sin. Oh, but God works in mysterious ways. …The alleged killer could have never anticipated the way the families of the fallen would respond when they saw him in court — in the midst of unspeakable grief, with words of forgiveness. He couldn't imagine that."

• And on guns and criminal justice reform: "None of us can or should expect a transformation in race relations overnight … None of us should believe that a handful of gun safety measures will prevent every tragedy … But it would be a betrayal of everything Reverend Pinckney stood for, I believe, if we allowed ourselves to slip into a comfortable silence again."

• The speech culminated with an impromptu rendition of "Amazing Grace," started by the president and joined by the hundreds of mourners present.

  [Vox / Libby Nelson]

• I don't really have a lot more to add to his words, but it's an immensely powerful piece of rhetoric, and I urge you to watch it.

  [White House]

A day of terror

A Kuwaiti man reacts to the attack on the Imam Sadiq Mosque. (Jaber Abdulkhaleq/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

• Three terrorist attacks took place in France, Tunisia, and Kuwait today.

  [NYT / Ben Hubbard]

• A gunman at a beach resort in Tunisia killed at least 27 before being shot to death, a suicide bombing at a mosque in Kuwait City killed at least 13, and a man was decapitated near Lyon as his attacker tried unsuccessfully to blow up an American-owned industrial chemical plant.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• A Saudi faction of ISIS has claimed responsibility for the Kuwait attack; the mosque was Shia-affiliated, and the attack seemed intended to provoke Sunni-Shia conflict. Responsibility for the other two attacks is unknown, but the suspect in the French attack had flags with Arabic writing when he was arrested.

• The suspect was formerly under investigation for religious radicalization by French authorities.

  [The Guardian / Kareem Shaheen]

• This was the second mass attack in Tunisia this year, after Islamist gunmen killed 21 at a Tunis museum in March.

  [Politico EU / Nicholas Vinocur and Jan Cienski]

Misc.

• Get ready: there's yet another challenge to Obamacare coming through the courts. It's a long-shot, but then again, so was the last one.

  [Slate / Jordan Weissmann]

• Oh man — it appears terrorism deaths in US are finally outnumbering deaths from TVs and furniture falling on people.

  [Council on Foreign Relations / Micah Zenko]

• 33 years ago, a 27-year-old Chinese-American named Vincent Chin was beaten to death by two autoworkers who were enraged by Japan's growing auto industry, and mistook his race. They got three years' probation for the murder.

  [NYT / Frank Wu]

• In praise of Mr. Robot, the first TV show to really get hackers and their personalities right.

  [Slate / David Auerbach]

• How Amelia Bedeila explains the Supreme Court's Obamacare ruling yesterday.

  [LA Times / Nicholas Bagley]

Verbatim

• "This is my 11th New York Times best-seller. I write them myself! I research them myself! I’m the female Bob Woodward!"

  [Ann Coulter to NY Mag / Annie Lowrey]

• "D’Souza’s racism makes sense if we view it as part of his long effort to succeed in a right-wing milieu that is both anti-Indian and anti-black. Within that context, D’Souza has given saliency to anti-black racism to compensate for a potentially embarrassing background as a Mumbai-born immigrant."

  [New Republic / Jeet Heer]

• "Here’s the paradox: Every day, we see more unapologetically self-assured female role models, yet women’s extreme prostration seems only to have increased."

  [NYT / Sloane Crosley]

• "I don’t want to close the computer, because I don’t want to close my eyes. If I close them, I see her burning."

  [Lisa Daugherty to BuzzFeed / Katie JM Baker]

• "The path to the missing works involved a cast of characters that could have come out of the board game Clue: the diminutive Ms. Sauer, a bag of art books always at her side; a private detective in Amsterdam who traces looted and stolen art; a fictitious Texan millionaire; a Belgian middleman; and a group of aging Germans still so intrigued by Hitler that at least one of them kept a Nazi-era tank on his rambling property, together with a long-lost statue, or its copy, depicting a Wehrmacht soldier as a hero."

  [NYT / Alison Smale and Jesse Coburn]

Video of the day

• The march of marriage equality

  [YouTube]

Will you support Vox’s explanatory journalism?

Most news outlets make their money through advertising or subscriptions. But when it comes to what we’re trying to do at Vox, there are a couple of big issues with relying on ads and subscriptions to keep the lights on:

First, advertising dollars go up and down with the economy. We often only know a few months out what our advertising revenue will be, which makes it hard to plan ahead.

Second, we’re not in the subscriptions business. Vox is here to help everyone understand the complex issues shaping the world — not just the people who can afford to pay for a subscription. We believe that’s an important part of building a more equal society. And we can’t do that if we have a paywall.

So even though advertising is still our biggest source of revenue, we also seek grants and reader support. (And no matter how our work is funded, we have strict guidelines on editorial independence.)

If you also believe that everyone deserves access to trusted high-quality information, will you make a gift to Vox today? Any amount helps.

One-Time Monthly Annual

$5/month

$10/month

$25/month

$50/month

Other

$

Yes, I'll give $5/month

Yes, I'll give $5/month

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via