WASHINGTON — In a new interview Wednesday, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg talks with Bloomberg about the outlook for legalizing same-sex marriage across the nation.
The 81-year-old justice discussed the public’s increasing acceptance of gays against the backdrop of resistance by Alabama officials to a federal court order that took effect Monday and made it the 37th gay-marriage state. With the high court set to rule on the issue by June, she said it “would not take a large adjustment” for Americans should the justices say that gay marriage is a constitutional right.
“The change in people’s attitudes on that issue has been enormous,” Ginsburg said. “In recent years, people have said, ‘This is the way I am.’ And others looked around, and we discovered it’s our next-door neighbor — we’re very fond of them. Or it’s our child’s best friend, or even our child. I think that as more and more people came out and said that ‘this is who I am,’ the rest of us recognized that they are one of us.”
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The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments in April in marriage equality cases from four states — Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky and Tennessee — whose same-sex marriage bans were upheld last year by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
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A nationwide decision on the constitutionality of state same-sex marriage bans could come by June.
Same-sex marriage is legal in all by 13 states.
