TALLAHASSEE, Florida, April 1, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – In a final judgment censuring state officials for not accepting legal redefinition of marriage in the state, a federal judge declared Florida’s voter-approved marriage protection law unconstitutional last week.
U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle criticized Florida state officials’ failure to act in doing away with the Florida marriage law once he’d overturned it and lambasted them “for a history of resistance” against homosexual “marriage.”
After the Supreme Court Obergefell v. Hodges decision “one might have expected immediate, unequivocal acceptance,” Hinkle wrote in his 10-page summary judgment order Thursday. “Not so for the state of Florida.”
Same-sex partners Jim Brenner and Chuck Jones were first to sue over the marriage law, later asking another same-sex couple, Stephen Schlairat and Ozzie Russ, to join the lawsuit. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) then filed a challenge as well for eight couples and other plaintiffs, and the cases were consolidated.
Approved by Florida voters in 2008, Hinkle had struck the marriage protection law down in August 2014, his decision going into effect in January 2015.
State officials’ handling of birth certificates for children of same-sex couples was also part of what elicited Hinkle’s indignation in this most recent ruling.
An advocacy group and two female couples had sued the state to compel the Department of Health to list both “spouses” on birth certificates for children born into homosexual “marriages,” however Health Department officials maintain they cannot list both same-sex parents because state law mandates the names of the mother and the father be listed on the documents.
“The answer should be easy,” Hinkle wrote. “The statutory reference to 'husband' cannot prevent equal treatment of a same-sex spouse,” saying there are circumstances with opposite sex couples where a non-biological parent is listed.
Hinkle’s judgment further prohibited Florida’s surgeon general and the secretary of the Department of Management Services from taking any action to continue enforcing Florida’s marriage protection law.
Hinkle also criticized the state’s lawmakers for not taking up the birth certificate issue and for not overturning the marriage law during the recently ended legislative session.
“Here the Florida Legislature has refused to budge; the challenged statutes remain on the books,” he said. “That result is fully consistent with the defendants' approach to this case all along. There has been nothing voluntary about the defendants' change of tack.”
Democrats had filed two bills during the session to support homosexual “marriage” in Florida law, one to remove the definition of marriage as only between a man and a woman, and the other to spell out that same-sex couples could be listed as parents on birth certificates.
The bill redefining marriage failed to get a hearing in either chamber of the Republican-led legislature, and the birth certificate bill was not taken up by the Senate after garnering one favorable committee vote in the House.
Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi's office had argued that the case challenging Florida’s marriage protection law was essentially moot because of the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling.
“There is no need for anything further from this court,'' her office said in August 2015. “The United States Supreme Court has held that states must recognize same-sex marriage, and state officials will comply with the Supreme Court's decision.”
However Hinkle countered in his summary judgment last week that a case only becomes moot “if subsequent events made it absolutely clear that the allegedly wrongful behavior could not reasonably be expected to recur.”
“Given the state defendants' history of resistance to earlier orders, the breadth of state employment and vital-records requirements, and the state defendants' insistence that state provisions remain in force until explicitly struck down, it cannot be said that the state defendants have unambiguously terminated their illegal practices,” he wrote. “That the Legislature chose not to pass legislation to bring Florida law into compliance does not help the defendants.”
On the day Hinkle struck down the state’s marriage protection law in 2014, Bondi vowed to continue defending the law, saying it was part of the state constitution she was sworn to uphold.
Her office’s current position that no further defense of homosexual “marriage” was necessary in the wake of the Obergefell decision contrasts with that of numerous of her Democrat counterparts in other states, who took U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder up on his February 2014 green light for the nation’s attorneys general to ignore state bans on homosexual “marriage” more than a year before last June’s Supreme Court ruling redefining marriage.
Those then refusing to uphold their states’ marriage laws, all Democrats, included Virginia’s Mark Herring, Oregon’s Ellen Rosenblum, New Mexico’s Gary King and Pennsylvania’s Kathleen Kane.
Two Democrat attorneys general, Arkansas’ Dustin McDaniel and North Carolina’s Roy Cooper, said they would defend their state marriage laws in spite of their personal support for same-sex “marriage.”
Bondi’s office declined to comment on Hinkle’s ruling, but the ACLU of Florida’s LGBT rights staff attorney praised the judgment.
“Today’s decision decisively affirms the right of same-sex couples to equal treatment under the law,” Daniel Tilley said,. “This is a great decision that will strengthen Florida’s families.”
The state could appeal Hinkle’s ruling to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, nonetheless Tilley stated he hoped “the strong language that Judge Hinkle used makes this the end of the road.”