Legal recognition of queer lives, same-sex marriage equality, the decriminalization of homosexuality, and job protections: Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s impact on the lives of LGBTQ+ Americans is incalculable, as is the potential impact of her death on Friday.
Ginsburg fundamentally expanded access to the American promise of liberty and equality for all — a promise that has never been fully achieved — and her legacy is particularly meaningful for the countless LGBTQ+ Americans whose lives she touched. In every Supreme Court case that directly touched on queer issues, Ginsburg joined the majority in ruling in favor of equality.
It wasn’t long after her 1993 appointment that she had her first opportunity to weigh in on issues of fundamental important to queer people, with Romer v. Evans in 1996. That case stemmed from a dispute in Colorado, where voters had passed a state constitutional amendment that prohibited the recognition of queer people as a protected class.
After a lengthy litigation process, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Amendment, with Ginsburg joining a ruling declaring that “the amendment seems inexplicable by anything but animus toward the class that it affects; it lacks a rational relationship to legitimate state interests.”
Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Rehnquist dissented, with Scalia arguing that it was “rational” to withhold protections for queer people because their behavior was criminal.
But that homosexuality was criminalized would not remain the case for much longer, thanks in part to Ginsburg. In 2003, the court overturned sodomy bans in the case Lawrence v. Texas. Ginsburg once again joined the majority in finding that the criminalization of homosexuality was unconstitutional.
This was a particularly complex decision, because the court had upheld criminalization nearly 20 years earlier. But the majority, with which Ginsburg joined, found that the earlier ruling “demeans the lives of homosexual persons,” and that it “was not correct when it was decided, and it is not correct today.”
A decade later, Ginsburg again joined a majority in ruling in favor of equal rights in the cases Windsor v. U.S. and Hollingsworth v. Perry. Those 2013 cases concerned laws around marriage equality; Hollingsworth focused on California’s Proposition 8, while Windsor addressed the federal ban on recognizing marriage, known as the Defense of Marriage Act.
