Marriage-equality ventured into Texas on Wednesday as U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia issued a preliminary injunction against the state's amendment banning same-sex unions.
Judge Garcia's opinion sounds a lot like recent rulings out of Virginia and Kentucky and Ohio and Utah, which characterized bans on same-sex marriage as discriminatory and counter to the Fourteenth Amendment.
"The important federalism concerns at issue here are nevertheless insufficient to save a state-law prohibition that denies the Plaintiffs their rights to due process and equal protection under the law, Judge Robert J. Shelby wrote in December when he struck down Utah's same-sex marriage ban.
Likewise, Judge Garcia wrote: "These Texas laws deny Plaintiffs access to the institution of marriage and its numerous rights, privileges, and responsibilities for the sole reason that Plaintiffs wish to be married to a person of the same sex. The Court finds this denial violates Plaintiffs' equal protection and due process rights under the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution."
(Judge Garcia suspended his ruling until a higher court can hear the case.)
These decisions flow naturally and logically from last spring's Windsor decision, in which the Supreme Court struck down the core provision of the Defense of Marriage Act. They are no longer surprising (which isn't to say they are no longer important or meaningful).
Of course it's not only judges who are coming around quickly to marriage equality. It was only nine years ago, in 2005, that Texas voters approved the ban with an overwhelming 76 percent majority. Less than a decade later it's conceivable that roughly the same population would reject it. A 2013 poll commissioned by Equality Texas found that 52 percent of Texas voters supported recognizing same-sex marriages from other states. A slim plurality of 47.9 percent supported marriage equality in their own state.
Granted, 47.9 percent isn't what you'd call a mandate, but the pace of progress is remarkable, and can't be attributed entirely to demographic shifts (meaning that younger, more tolerant Texans are crowding out the older traditionalists). Despite what social science tells us about confirmation bias and what conventional wisdom tells us about old dogs and new tricks, people are realizing that there is no good reason to deny gay couples the right to marry, and changing their minds.
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