Miss. Justices Call For Ignoring Supreme Court Same-Sex Marriage Decision
The Mississippi Supreme Court recently granted a same-sex couple’s divorce request, but two of the justices used the case as an opportunity to assert that the U.S. Supreme Court’s June ruling affirming marriage equality should be rejected by the state.
The case involved a lesbian couple, Lauren Czekala-Chatham and Dana Ann Melancon, who married in San Francisco in 2008. They later bought a house in Mississippi but separated in 2010. Melancon eventually moved to Arkansas, where she now resides….
…Justices Jess Dickinson and Josiah Coleman, however, wrote dissents in which they claimed that the U.S. Supreme Court had gone too far in Obergefell because it does not have the authority to require states to recognize marriage equality.
“When five members of the court hand down an order that four other members believe has ‘no basis in the Constitution,’ a substantial question is presented as to whether I have a duty to follow it,” Dickinson wrote. “And I believe we have a duty to address that question.”…
…Coleman wrote that any decision by a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court “is not necessarily true and should be subject to questioning.”
Americans United for Separation of Church and State
1/3/16
