Republican-led states across the country have passed resolutions asking the Supreme Court to overturn marriage equality, but the LGBTQ+ community saw a recent victory in South Dakota, where an anti-marriage equality resolution has effectively been put to rest.

The state’s House Judiciary Committee voted 9-4 to send the proposed resolution to the 41st Legislative Day, which refers to the day following the last day of the legislative session, more or less signifying the resolution’s defeat.

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North Dakota Republicans pass resolution demanding Supreme Court overturn marriage rights
The Republican behind the measure said that it’s “based on the laws of nature.”

House Concurrent Resolution 6012 states that “marriage as an institution has been recognized as the union of one man and one woman for more than 2,000 years and within common law, the basis of the United States’ Anglo-American legal tradition, for more than eight hundred years.” It argues the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges “arbitrarily and unjustly rejected this definition of marriage in favor of a novel, flawed interpretation of key clauses within the Constitution of the United States and our nation’s legal and cultural precedents.”

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Despite the blatant anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment in the text, the lawmaker who proposed the bill, Republican state Rep. Tony Randolph, has reportedly claimed it’s just about protecting states’ rights and not about discriminating against LGBTQ+ people.

“Obergefell sets a dangerous precedent that erodes religious liberty and other constitutional protections,” Randolph said during the hearing, according to South Dakota news station KELO-TV. “It is our duty to reaffirm the principle that law should be made by the people, not imposed by a judicial decree.”

But many Republican committee members didn’t see it that way.

“There was nothing in this that requires the Catholic Church to perform [homosexual] marriages,” Reisch said. “When it comes to what the state does as far as the marriage license, I look at it as a civil contract between two people, two people that are joining into a household, and that does not affect me, does not affect my life, and I just cannot vote for [it].”

Republican Rep. Matt Roby said, regardless of concerns he has over marriage equality, this resolution symbolized nothing but hate.

“If the court decides to overturn it, and so be it, we’ll be able to have the actual policy discussion about what is right and wrong in South Dakota,” Roby said. “This resolution, it simply provides the message to these people in South Dakota that they are second-class citizens and, and because of the bad messaging, I am going to oppose this.”

The resolution is part of a new trend in which Republican-led states are upping their efforts to overturn marriage equality. In four other states – Idaho, Michigan, Montana, and North Dakota — Republican lawmakers have introduced resolutions calling for the Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell. Those measures have been passed by at least one chamber of the state legislature in Idaho and North Dakota.

In the four other states – Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas – Republican legislators have introduced bills to privilege heterosexual marriages, with some of the states referring to a new institution called “covenant marriage,” which would be limited to heterosexual couples. The point there, according to the sponsor of one such bill in Oklahoma, is to create inequality in marriage rights and to invite a legal challenge that could be taken to the Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell.

Two justices on the Supreme Court have openly stated that they want to overturn Obergefell, and the Court has moved to the right since 2015. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Anthony Kennedy, and Stephen Breyer were all in the Obergefell majority, but all three have either retired or passed away in the last 10 years. Only one was replaced by a Democratic president. It is not clear if there are the five votes needed to protect marriage equality on the Court if it were to take up a test case.

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