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Update, 3/14: The Republican-dominated North Dakota Senate rejected House Concurrent Resolution 3013 on Thursday evening, killing the resolution by a vote of 16-31.
Legislators spent less than 10 minutes debating the resolution, as InForum reported. State Sen. Josh Boschee — one of only five Democrats in the North Dakota Senate — moved for a public roll call vote, but the motion did not receive enough support to carry, meaning each member’s individual vote on the resolution is not currently known.
Sen. Sean Cleary, a Republican, told his colleagues he was “disappointed” that the motion to vote publicly had failed. “We owe that to our constituents. The folks asking us to oppose this resolution aren’t asking for special treatment,” Cleary said. “They’re not asking us to change our beliefs on what we think marriage constitutes. They asked for something very American, and that’s equal treatment under the law.”
During the brief period of debate on the resolution, Boschee pushed Republicans to consider the rights of LGBTQ+ North Dakotans. “I understand that this puts us all in a tough spot, but I ask you to think about who’s put in the toughest position with this resolution: the people of North Dakota who are the subject of the resolution [...] the gay and lesbian North Dakotans who did not ask to be the subject of this conversation, but the conversation was brought to us,” Boschee said, per the Associated Press.
In a North Dakota News Cooperative poll of 500 North Dakotans two weeks ago, 56% said they supported leaving Obergefell v. Hodges in place, while 36% agreed with the House resolution.
Shortly after Thursday’s vote, Democratic Sen. Ryan Braunberger said that he would “take the win” despite frustrations with Republicans’ priorities. “Hopefully in the future, we don't have to do these frivolous things and can work on real issues, like making sure everybody can put food on their table,” Braunberger said. (Nearly 10% of North Dakotans live below the poverty line, according to current census data.)
Original article, 3/13: North Dakota lawmakers are poised to make their state the first to formally instruct the Supreme Court to overturn the 2015 Obergefelll v. Hodges decision, which legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, according to a new Associated Press report on the measure.
The state’s resolution, known as House Concurrent Resolution 3013, calls on the Court “to restore the definition of marriage to a union between one man and one woman.” Sponsored by Republican State Rep. Bill Tveit, the resolution passed the North Dakota House with a 52-40 vote in February. As of this writing, it still requires Senate approval before heading to the governor’s desk.
Cody Schuler, the advocacy manager of the ACLU of North Dakota, told the Associated Press that, if passed, the resolution would send a message that state lawmakers seek to define marriage through an arguably religious lens, which could infringe upon the U.S. Constitution’s Establishment Clause. “Marriage defined as ‘one man, one woman’ is a particular religious view,” Schuler said. “It is not held by all religions, all societies, or by nonreligious people, and so therefore it is dangerous to be making that kind of statement because it puts legislators on record as to how they might vote on a law.”
Idaho’s House of Representatives passed a similar nonbinding resolution in February demanding that the Supreme Court reverse its decision in Obergefell. If it receives approval in the state’s Senate, however, North Dakota’s resolution would be the first measure of its kind to clear both chambers of a state legislature.
Last month, NBC News reported that lawmakers in at least nine states had introduced measures targeting same-sex marriage rights. Five of these measures — which, apart from Idaho and North Dakota, have been introduced in Michigan, Montana, and South Dakota — call on the Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell. An additional four measures introduced in Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas, would create a category for marriage known as “covenant marriage,” which would only apply to marriages between a man and a woman.
According to the Associated Press, these resolutions are being pushed by the Massachusetts-based organization MassResistance, which GLAAD and the Southern Poverty Law Center have designated as an anti-LGBTQ+ hate group. The North Dakota Monitor reported that Democratic Senator Ryan Braunberger pointed out this classification of MassResistance during a March 12 committee hearing about House Concurrent Resolution 3013.
“I want my constituents to know that I disagree with this wholeheartedly,” Braunberger said. “This bill is coming from a place of hate.”
If House Concurrent Resolution 3013 is approved by North Dakota’s Senate, it will be passed onto the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court has taken an increasingly conservative tilt since 2015, with Donald Trump appointing three justices during his first term. At least two sitting justices — Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito — have indicated their interest in revisiting Obergefell after dissenting from the original decision. In an opinion released in 2020, Alito and Thomas wrote that the original Obergefell decision was a “cavalier treatment of religion” that privileged “novel constitutional right over the religious liberty interests protected by the First Amendment.”
When the Court overturned the pivotal 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion rights decision in the 2022 Dobbs case, Thomas said in his opinion that the court “should reconsider all of [its] substantive due process precedents,” including Obergefell.
Should Obergefell be overturned, marriage equality law would likely revert back to the states, but many questions would remain. Prior to 2015, same-sex marriage rights were a messy, location-dependent patchwork; in theory, however, the 2022 Respect for Marriage Act would still require states to recognize marriages performed in other states.
A 2024 Gallup poll found that American support for same-sex marriage being legal fell slightly from its record high 71% in Gallup’s 2022 and 2023 polls, coinciding with concerted right-wing anti-LGBTQ+ campaign efforts. However, more than two-thirds of Americans (69%) remain in support of marriage equality, and over half believe that LGBTQ+ relationships are “morally acceptable.”
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