Supreme Court Ruling Makes Same-Sex Marriage a Right Nationwide

In a long-sought victory for the gay rights movement, the Supreme Court ruled by a 5-to-4 vote on Friday that the Constitution guarantees a right to same-sex marriage.

“No longer may this liberty be denied,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority in the historic decision. “No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were.”

Marriage is a “keystone of our social order,” Justice Kennedy said, adding that the plaintiffs in the case were seeking “equal dignity in the eyes of the law.”

The decision, which was the culmination of decades of litigation and activism, set off jubilation and tearful embraces across the country, the first same-sex marriages in several states, and resistance — or at least stalling — in others. It came against the backdrop of fast-moving changes in public opinion, with polls indicating that most Americans now approve of the unions.

The court’s four more liberal justices joined Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion. Each member of the court’s conservative wing filed a separate dissent, in tones ranging from resigned dismay to bitter scorn.In dissent, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said the Constitution had nothing to say on the subject of same-sex marriage.

“If you are among the many Americans — of whatever sexual orientation — who favor expanding same-sex marriage, by all means celebrate today’s decision,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. “Celebrate the achievement of a desired goal. Celebrate the opportunity for a new expression of commitment to a partner. Celebrate the availability of new benefits. But do not celebrate the Constitution. It had nothing to do with it.”

In a second dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia mocked the soaring language of Justice Kennedy, who has become the nation’s most important judicial champion of gay rights.

“The opinion is couched in a style that is as pretentious as its content is egotistic,” Justice Scalia wrote of his colleague’s work. “Of course the opinion’s showy profundities are often profoundly incoherent.”

As Justice Kennedy finished announcing his opinion from the bench on Friday, several lawyers seated in the bar section of the court’s gallery wiped away tears, while others grinned and exchanged embraces.

Justice John Paul Stevens, who retired in 2010, was on hand for the decision, and many of the justices’ clerks took seats in the chamber, which was nearly full as the ruling was announced. The decision made same-sex marriage a reality in the 13 states that had continued to ban it.

Outside the Supreme Court, the police allowed hundreds of people waving rainbow flags and holding signs to advance onto the court plaza as those present for the decision streamed down the steps. “Love has won,” the crowd chanted as courtroom witnesses threw up their arms in victory.

In remarks in the Rose Garden, President Obama welcomed the decision, saying it “affirms what millions of Americans already believe in their hearts.”

“Today,” he said, “we can say, in no uncertain terms, that we have made our union a little more perfect.”

Justice Kennedy was the author of all three of the Supreme Court’s previous gay rights landmarks. The latest decision came exactly two years after his majority opinion in United States v. Windsor, which struck down a federal law denying benefits to married same-sex couples, and exactly 12 years after his majority opinion in Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down laws making gay sex a crime.

In all of those decisions, Justice Kennedy embraced a vision of a living Constitution, one that evolves with societal changes.

“The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times,” he wrote on Friday. “The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions, and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning.”

This drew a withering response from Justice Scalia, a proponent of reading the Constitution according to the original understanding of those who adopted it. His dissent was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas.

“They have discovered in the Fourteenth Amendment,” Justice Scalia wrote of the majority, “a ‘fundamental right’ overlooked by every person alive at the time of ratification, and almost everyone else in the time since.”

“These justices know,” Justice Scalia said, “that limiting marriage to one man and one woman is contrary to reason; they know that an institution as old as government itself, and accepted by every nation in history until 15 years ago, cannot possibly be supported by anything other than ignorance or bigotry.”

Justice Kennedy rooted the ruling in a fundamental right to marriage. Of special importance to couples, he said, is raising children.

“Without the recognition, stability and predictability marriage offers,” he wrote, “their children suffer the stigma of knowing their families are somehow lesser. They also suffer the significant material costs of being raised by unmarried parents, relegated through no fault of their own to a more difficult and uncertain family life. The marriage laws at issue here thus harm and humiliate the children of same-sex couples.”

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined the majority opinion.

In dissent, Chief Justice Roberts said the majority opinion was “an act of will, not legal judgment.”

“The court invalidates the marriage laws of more than half the states and orders the transformation of a social institution that has formed the basis of human society for millennia, for the Kalahari Bushmen and the Han Chinese, the Carthaginians and the Aztecs,” he wrote. “Just who do we think we are?”

WHO: American

WHAT: some people try to make same-sex marriage legal, and finally success

WHEN: June 26, 2015

WHERE: the USA

WHY: not given

HOW: through the vote that the Constitution guarantees a right to same-sex marriage

KEYWORDS:

1. profound (adj.) 意義深遠的/淵博的

2. fidelity (n.) 忠誠

3. plaintiff (n.) 原告/起訴人

4. dignity (n.) 尊嚴/高貴/自尊

5. culmination (n.) 頂點/高潮

6. dissent (n.) 異議

7. dismay (n.) 沮喪/氣餒

8. mock (v.) 嘲弄/嘲笑

9. dimension (n.) 範圍

10. bigotry (n.) 盲從

REFERENCE:

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/27/us/supreme-court-same-sex-marriage.html?_r=0

In Long-Overdue Speech, Dissident Says Nobel Opened Her Heart

When she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, while under house arrest in Myanmar, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi said Saturday, she realized that the Burmese “were not going to be forgotten.”

When the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded her the prize, she said in her Nobel lecture here on Saturday, 21 years later, it was recognition that “the oppressed and the isolated in Burma were also a part of the world, they were recognizing the oneness of humanity.” But “it did not seem quite real, because in a sense I did not feel myself to be quite real at that time,” she said. “The Nobel Peace Prize opened up a door in my heart.”

She said the prize “had made me real once again; it had drawn me back into the wider human community,” and it had given the oppressed people of Burma, now Myanmar, and its dispersed refugees, new hope. “To be forgotten,” Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi added, “is to die a little.” In a quiet, throaty voice on Saturday she asked the world not to forget other prisoners of conscience, both in Myanmar and around the world, other refugees, others in need, who may be suffering twice over, she said, from oppression and from the larger world’s “compassion fatigue.”

It was a remarkable moment for the slight Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, who turns 67 next week and is now a member of Parliament and the leader of Myanmar’s opposition. She dressed in shades of purple and lavender, her hair adorned with flowers. It is a gesture she makes in honor of her father, Gen. Aung San, an independence hero of Burma, who was assassinated in 1947, when she was 2, but whom she remembers threading flowers through her hair.


The audience in Oslo’s City Hall, which included the Norwegian royal family, listened raptly, applauding often, standing to clap when Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi entered the hall and when she finished her speech, which was at the same time modest, personal and touching, an appeal to find practical ways to reduce the inextinguishable suffering of the world. “Suffering degrades, embitters and enrages,” she said. “War is not the only arena where peace is done to death.”

Absolute peace is an unattainable goal, she said. “But it is one towards which we must continue to journey, our eyes fixed on it as a traveler in a desert fixes his eyes on the one guiding star that will lead him to salvation.”

She had thought much on the Buddhist idea of “dukkha,” or suffering, in her long years of isolation and house arrest, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi said. “If suffering were an unavoidable part of our existence, we should try to alleviate it as far as possible in practical, earthly ways.”

One crucial avenue, she said, was simple kindness. “Of the sweets of adversity, and let me say that those are not numerous, I have found the sweetest, the most precious of all, is the lesson I learned on the value of kindness,” she said, with a rare shred of humor. “Every kindness I received, small or big, convinced me that there could never be enough of it in the world.” Kindness, she said, “can change the lives of people.”

Her comments on Myanmar were careful but considered. She called for national reconciliation and cease-fire agreements between the government and “ethnic nationality forces,” which she said she hoped would “lead to political settlements founded on the aspirations of the peoples, and the spirit of the nation.”

“In my own country,” she said, “hostilities have not ceased in the far north,” and “to the west, communal violence” has flared in the days before she left Myanmar. She spoke of the Burmese concept of peace, which she defined as “the happiness arising from the cessation of factors that militate against the harmonious and the wholesome.” The term, nyein-chan, translates literally, she said, as “the beneficial coolness that comes when a fire is extinguished.”

She had never thought of winning prizes, she said. “The prize we were working for was a free, secure and just society,” she said. “The honor lay in our endeavor.”

Her endurance against dictatorship and steadfastness to her principles has brought comparisons to Nelson Mandela. Her life has also been one of personal sacrifice.

For her country, and for the legacy of her father, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi could be said to have given up her family: her beloved husband, Michael Aris, a professor of Tibetan and Himalayan Studies at Oxford, and her two children, Alexander and Kim, who grew up largely without her. Myanmar’s former military government persistently refused to grant them visas to visit her, even when Mr. Aris grew ill with prostate cancer, apparently in the hope that she would leave Myanmar herself to visit them.

She refused to do so, fearing with reason that the government would not allow her back into the country. After Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s initial house arrest in 1989, Mr. Aris was allowed to visit only five times, the last time during Christmas in 1995. Hedied in March 1999, on his 53rd birthday; to the end, he supported her decision to remain in Myanmar.

She had returned to Myanmar from Britain in March 1988 to nurse her ill mother, Daw Khin Kyi, and became caught up in the swirling protests against years of eccentric autocracy and military rule. In January 1989, just after her mother’s funeral,she and her husband sat for a rare interview at her mother’s house in Rangoon, now Yangon, as their children ran about the rooms, with their faded colonial elegance.


“You know, when I married Michael,” she said, “I made him promise that if there was ever a time that I had to go back to my country, he would not stand in my way. And he promised.” Mr. Aris said: “That’s true. She made me promise.”

She said then that she understood how much her stature depended on her father’s aura. “I don’t pretend that I don’t owe my position in Burmese politics to my father, at least at the beginning,” she said. “It’s time to look at what people do.”

At another moment, she said: “Really, I’m doing this for my father. I’m quite happy they see me as my father’s daughter. My only concern is that I prove worthy of him.”

Once fate intervened, she chose the life she has lived, and there is little doubt that she has proved herself fierce, loyal and worthy, both to her father and to her people.

Thorbjorn Jagland, the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, praised her and thanked her “for your fearlessness, your tenacity and your strength.” He said: “Your life is a message to all of us.”

WHO: Aung San Suu Kyi

WHAT: Aung San Suu Kyi won The Nobel Peace Prize

WHEN: June 16,2012

WHERE: in Oslo's City Hall

WHY: not given

KEYWORDS:

1.  disperse (v.) 分開/傳布

2.  oppressed (adj.) 受壓迫的

3.  arena (n.) 競技場/舞台

4.  alleviate (v.) 減輕/緩解

5.  adversity (n.) 逆境/災難

6.  reconciliation (n.) 和解/緩和

7.  flare (n.) 閃耀

8.  sacrifice (n.) 犧牲/祭品

9.  legacy (n.) 遺產

10. elegance (n.) 優雅

PREFERENCE:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/world/asia/aung-san-suu-kyi-accepts-nobel-peace-prize.html