BOISE, ID – A North Idaho state legislator is bringing back a request for the nation’s high court to overturn its 2015 landmark decision that legalized gay marriage nationwide.
Rep. Tony Wisniewski, R-Post Falls, on Monday introduced a joint memorial that would call on the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse its decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which found that all states must recognize marriages between same-sex couples. Joint memorials don’t create new laws, but serve as a joint request from the Idaho Legislature.
“The government did not create families or marriage, but they have to recognize that the family is the fundamental building block of society,” Wisniewski said in a committee hearing. “The strengths that these two complementary natures of a father and a mother give strength, direction and stability to the family and therefore to society as a whole.”
The House State Affairs Committee approved the legislation’s introduction in a mixed voice vote. This action clears the way for it to return to the committee for a full public hearing later.
The Idaho House of Representatives very early in last year’s session approved a very similar memorial in a 46-24 vote, the Idaho Capital Sun previously reported. That memorial did not advance in the Senate.
The U.S. Supreme Court in November had an opportunity to revisit the Obergefell decision amid a challenge to it from former Kentucky clerk Kim Davis who refused to issue same-sex marriage licenses, but the high court declined to take up the case.
In 2006, Idaho voters approved an amendment to the state Constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman. However, in 2014, a federal judge ruled that the amendment was unconstitutional, legalizing gay marriage in Idaho a year before it was legalized nationwide.
During Monday’s meeting, Rep. Heather Scott, R-Blanchard, made a motion to introduce the bill with the elimination of a sentence that said marriage had been defined as between one man and one woman as “the basis of the United States’ Anglo-American legal tradition, for more than 800 years.” The committee approved its introduction with this change.
The change came after Rep. Monica Church, D-Boise, expressed concern that support for “Anglo-American legal tradition,” included the idea that marriage was “fundamentally about tying a woman to a man because she has no rights as a human-being.”
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