Arkansas could ban same-sex marriage if Obergefell is vacated
More than two dozen U.S. states have laws that would limit marriage equality if the Supreme Court overturned its legalization of gay marriage, yet it's not clear how that would play out in Arkansas
Why it matters: Today is the 10th anniversary of Obergefell v. Hodges, the case that legalized same-sex marriage, and access to marriage equality faces increasing opposition today.
Zoom in: Arkansas Lawmakers banned same-sex marriage in 1997, but a lawsuit was filed in 2013 and the ban was overturned by a district judge in 2014. That ruling was temporarily stayed while the state appealed the judge's decision.
The state Supreme Court dismissed the appeal in 2015 after the federal ruling, declaring it moot.
Both sides could resume legal arguments before state courts if the Supreme Court overturned the federal ruling.
By the numbers: Nationally, 32 states have constitutional and/or legislative bans on marriage equality — currently unenforceable because of the 2015 Supreme Court ruling.
This means about 60% of LGBTQ+ adults live in states where access to marriage equality would change if Obergefell were struck down, according to the Movement Advancement Project.
Driving the news: Republican lawmakers this year have backed ballot measures to undermine same-sex couples' right to marry.
Measures seeking to reverse the Obergefell decision have been introduced in Idaho, Michigan, Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota, NBC News reported in February.
In Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas, lawmakers have introduced bills that don't explicitly refer to the Supreme Court ruling but would create a category called "covenant marriage" for one man and one woman.
The other side: Ballot initiatives have cropped up in Idaho, Nebraska, Virginia and Arizona to let voters decide on marriage equality in 2026 elections — in response to anti-same-sex marriage efforts.
Context: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in 2022, in overturning Roe v. Wade, said the court"should reconsider" its opinions protecting same-sex relationships and same-sex marriage.
Thomas, one of the court's conservative justices, wrote in a concurring opinion that they should revisit other precedents decided under substantive due process to "correct the error."
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Boston Globe
38 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
Colleges face challenges as states attack tenure
At least 11 states, including seven since the start of this year, have imposed new levels of review for tenured faculty, made it easier to fire them or proposed banning tenure altogether. Almost all have Republican-controlled legislatures or have seen lawmakers question what is being taught on campuses. This comes at the same time as, but has gotten less attention than, the Trump administration's higher education funding cuts and investigations into colleges and universities. Advertisement 'It's the flip side of the same assault,' said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, or AFT, which Unlike nontenured faculty, who can be dismissed or not reappointed, tenured faculty have more protections — including from being demoted or fired for what they think or say. Advertisement Without tenure, 'If you pursue the truth in ways that are uncomfortable for donors, for students, for trustees, for the state legislature, then you'll lose your job,' said Mark Criley, senior program officer for academic freedom, tenure and governance at the faculty union the American Association of University Professors, or AAUP. Even before the second Trump administration and this wave of tenure challenges, 45 percent of faculty members said they Most backers of curtailing tenure say they're not doing it for ideological reasons. They say they're trying to lower costs for taxpayers and consumers by removing faculty whose productivity is low. The goal is 'getting rid of professors who are not pulling their weight,' said Nebraska state Sen. Loren Lippincott, a Republican and sponsor of a proposal to He hears stories 'of professors that have tenure bragging about how little they work, how little they put in or how few hours they show up to teach classes,' Lippincott said at In other states, however, curbs on tenure have been linked directly or indirectly to faculty political views. Advertisement An Ohio bill passed in late March will Over the governor's veto, the Republican-dominated Kentucky General Assembly in March passed a bill Sponsors said the measure will uphold performance standards, but Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, contended in his veto message that it After faculty at the University of Texas at Austin signed A legislative proposal in Texas the following year failed to eliminate tenure, but broadened Advertisement In Indiana, a measure added to This follows a law passed last year in Indiana requiring reviews of tenured faculty and Arkansas legislators passed a law in March allowing university administrators to call for There have been earlier attempts Advertisement Tenure The move was largely a response to firings around that time of university and college faculty for teaching the theory of evolution, said Reuben, the Harvard historian. 'Faculty had to be able to have the freedom to ask questions, and they could not be tied down to any sort of intellectual test imposed by church dogma or political parties,' Reuben said. Momentum for removing this protection comes against a backdrop of falling trust in colleges and universities and of the people who work at them. Only about a third of Americans have 'a great deal' or 'a lot' of Only a little more than a third of Republicans believe university professors Advertisement 'This level of attack couldn't gain the kind of momentum it has without the declining public support for higher education,' Reuben said. 'It couldn't have happened to this magnitude before, because there was a general sense that higher education was good for society.' In Hawai'i, it was a fiscally conservative Democrat, state Sen. Donna Mercado Kim, who pushed, beginning in 2022, for tenure to be banned for University of Hawai'i faculty who do research and other jobs besides teaching, such as providing student support. Although she did not respond to repeated requests for comment, Kim has written that the effort was a way to make sure taxpayer and student tuition money given to the university After hundreds of faculty protested, she agreed to a compromise under which the university has set up a task force to study its tenure procedures. 'To me, it's about the Senate wanting control over the university,' said Christian Fern, executive director of the University of Hawaii Professional Assembly, or UHPA, the faculty union. 'Being able to teach without political retribution — which rings really loudly right now — do you want to have a faculty member able to teach what they learned in their research, even if it's politically incorrect?' Fern asked. 'I think yes.' Karla Hayashi, president of the board of the UHPA and a former lecturer and English composition professor who now runs a tutoring center at the University of Hawai'i at Hilo, said she expects more attempts to weaken tenure. Hayashi sees them as an extension of political pressure that starts at the federal level. 'If I take away your tenure, then you're dependent on doing what I want you to do to earn your living,' she said. Contrary to arguments from critics, tenure 'is not a job for life,' Criley, of the AAUP, said. 'It's a guarantee that you'll only be dismissed for cause when a case can be made that you're not fit for your professional duties — that you're negligent, incompetent or guilty of some sort of misconduct that violates professional ethics.' Not all faculty agree that tenure is fine the way it is. 'If your main goal is job security, I don't think you're going to be that adventuresome of a professor,' said Jim Wetherbe, a professor in the business department at Texas Tech University and a longtime Academic freedom at public universities is already protected by the First Amendment, Wetherbe has argued. But Weingarten, the AFT head, said the immediate worry is that what faculty can say or teach will be narrowed. 'The right wing keeps talking about free speech, free speech, free speech, and an attack on tenure is an attack on free speech,' she said. 'It's basically an attempt to create compliance.' This story about was produced by , a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our . Listen to our .
Yahoo
39 minutes ago
- Yahoo
What new research tells us about how Trump won in 2024
President Donald Trump's 2024 victory over former Vice President Kamala Harris was fueled by 'a voter coalition that was more racially and ethnically diverse than in 2020 or 2016,' as well by an advantage among voters who didn't turn out for the previous election, according to a report released Thursday by the Pew Research Center. Pew's analysis, which combines survey data from its in-house panel of poll-takers with information from voter records, contributes to a more clearly emerging picture of the 2024 electorate. It finds that about three-quarters of eligible voters in the U.S. made the same decision in 2024 that they did in 2020, whether that was voting for the Republican or the Democrat, choosing a third-party candidate or sitting out the election altogether. But one-quarter made a different choice – enough to return Trump to the White House. Trump held onto 85% of his 2020 voters, the report finds, while Harris retained a smaller 79% of former President Joe Biden's supporters. Compared to 2020, Trump won a higher share of the vote among Hispanic voters (48%, up from 36%), Asian voters (40%, up from 30%) and Black voters (15%, up from 8%). 'These shifts were largely the result of differences in which voters turned out in the 2020 and 2024 elections,' the authors of the Pew report conclude. 'As in the past, a relatively small share of voters switched which party's candidate they supported.' Fifteen percent of 2020 Biden supporters and 11% of 2020 Trump supporters didn't vote four years later, their analysis finds. Trump also won about 5% of Biden's 2020 supporters, while Harris took about 3% of voters who supported Trump in the previous election. And while most eligible voters who didn't cast a vote in 2020 stayed home again last year, those who did decide to vote in 2024 broke for Trump over Harris, 54% to 42%. Adding in people who were too young to vote in the last election, the margin is slightly narrower. Pew's analysis is based on the results of a survey conducted just after November's presidential election. Like all surveys, its results offer an estimate of voter behavior rather than an attempt at pinpoint precision. That's why different post-election analyses may diverge in some findings about the electorate, even when they converge around a general consensus. The new analysis, like a report last month from the Democratic-aligned data firm Catalist, incorporates fresh sources of data: information from commercial voters files that aggregate official state turnout records. Pew's analysis matches that voter file data with responses to their survey – and because its polls are conducted using a panel of respondents who answer multiple surveys over time, researchers there can often track specific individuals' voting patterns. Catalist's report similarly found that voters who turn out irregularly played a key role in Trump's victory. Since non-presidential elections typically see lower turnout, that could also have potential implications as the parties begin gearing up for the upcoming midterms. 'There's definitely some evidence that this shift in Democrats doing better among more consistent voters may have some downstream impacts,' said Hannah Hartig, a senior researcher at Pew Research – although she noted that, with a long way still to go until the next election, it's too early to know how that may play out. A few more takeaways from the Pew report: Trump also improved his numbers among male voters, who split for Trump by a 12-point margin in 2024 after dividing closely between the candidates in 2020. There was especially sharp movement among male voters younger than 50 – while they were about evenly split last year, that marked a swing from a 10-point preference for Biden in 2020. Both Pew and Catalist show Democrats losing more ground among male voters than female voters, while exit polling and post-election data from Votecast found that erosion across gender lines. Education remains a major fault line in American politics. College graduates who voted in 2024 broke for Harris by a 16-point margin in Pew's data, while those without degrees broke for Trump by 14 points – although both those findings represent an improvement for Trump from his 2020 numbers. That education gap persisted among both White and Hispanic voters, while Black voters didn't divide significantly along educational lines. Catalist's report found similar educational trends, but charted somewhat less of a divide among Latino voters, while exit polling and VoteCast had showed college graduates' preferences remaining more stable. Naturalized citizens of the U.S. made up about 9% of last year's electorate, according to Pew. And in 2024, they were closely divided, with 51% backing Harris and 47% backing Trump. By contrast, in 2020, this group broke heavily for Biden. The design of Pew's study also allowed them to check in with nonvoters: adults who were eligible to vote, but weren't a part of the 64% who actually turned out. In the past, this group typically leaned Democratic: asked whom they would have preferred if they had voted, 2020 nonvoters favored Biden over Trump by an 11-point margin. But in 2024, nonvoters were closely split, with 44% preferring Trump and 40% Harris. 'If somehow something magic had happened and everybody who's eligible to vote had actually showed up, not only would it not have helped the Democrats and Harris, it might have actually pushed Trump's margin up slightly,' said Scott Keeter, a senior survey advisor at Pew. The Pew Research Center surveyed 8,942 US adults in November 2024, using the nationally representative American Trends Panel, including 7,100 voters who were able to be matched against a voter file. Results among the full sample of validated voters have a margin of error of +/- 1.5 percentage points. More details on the survey methodology are available here.
The Hill
43 minutes ago
- The Hill
Key Medicaid provision in Trump's tax cut and spending bill is found to violate Senate rules
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate parliamentarian has advised that a Medicaid provider tax overhaul central to President Donald Trump's tax cut and spending bill does not adhere to the chamber's procedural rules, delivering a crucial blow as Republicans rush to finish the package this week. Guidance from the parliamentarian is rarely ignored and Republican leaders are now forced to consider difficult options. Republicans were counting on big cuts to Medicaid and other programs to offset trillions of dollars in Trump tax breaks, their top priority. Earlier, the Senate's chief arbiter of its often complicated rules had advised against some GOP provisions barring certain immigrants from health care programs. Republicans scrambled to respond, with some calling for challenging, or firing, the nonpartisan parliamentarian, who has been on the job since 2012. Democrats said the decisions would devastate GOP plans. Sen. Ron Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, said the Republican proposals would have meant $250 billion less for the health care program, 'massive Medicaid cuts that hurt kids, seniors, Americans with disabilities and working families.' The outcome is a setback as Senate Republicans hoped to get votes underway by week's end to meet Trump's Fourth of July deadline for passage. Trump is expected to host an event later Thursday at the White House with Americans the administration says would benefit from the bill as he hopes to energize Congress to wrap up its work on the bill. GOP leaders were already struggling to rally support for Medicaid changes that some senators said went too far and would have left millions without coverage. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has said more than 10.9 million more people would not have health care under the House-passed bill; Senate Republicans were proposing deeper cuts.. Republican leaders are relying on the Medicaid provider tax change along with other health care restrictions to save billions of dollars and offset the cost of trillions of dollars in tax cuts. Those tax breaks from Trump's first term would expire at the end of the year if Congress fails to act, meaning a tax increase for Americans. Several GOP senators said cutting the Medicaid provider tax change in particular would hurt rural hospitals that depend on the money. Hospital organizations have warned that it could lead to hospital closures. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., among those fighting the change, said he had spoken to Trump late Wednesday and that the president told him to revert back to an earlier proposal from the House. States impose the taxes as a way to help fund Medicaid, largely by boosting the reimbursements they receive from the federal government. Critics say the system is a type of 'laundering,' but almost every state except Alaska uses it to help provide the health care coverage. More than 80 millions people in the United States use the Medicaid program, alongside the Obama-era Affordable Care Act. Republicans want to scale Medicaid back to what they say is its original mission, providing care mainly to women and children, rather than a much larger group of people. The House-passed bill would freeze the provider taxes at current levels. The Senate proposal goes deeper by reducing the tax that some states are able to impose. Senate GOP leaders can strip or revise the provisions that are in violation of the chamber's rules. But if they move ahead, those measures could be challenged in a floor vote, requiring a 60-vote threshold to overcome objections. That would be a tall order in a Senate divided 53-47 and with Democrats unified against Trump's bill. One plan Republicans had been considering would have created a rural hospital fund with $15 billion to help defray any lost revenue to the hospitals and providers. Some GOP senators said that was too much; others, including Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, wanted at least $100 billion. The parliamentarian has worked around the clock since late last week to assess the legislation before votes that were expected as soon as Friday. Overnight Wednesday and Thursday, the parliamentarian advised against several provisions that would have blocked access for immigrants who are not citizens to Medicaid, Medicare and other health care programs, including one that would have cut money to states that allow some migrants into Medicaid. Earlier, proposals to cut food stamps were ruled in violation of Senate rules, as was a plan to gut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. ___ Associated Press writer Kevin Freking contributed to this report.
