New Hampshire Legalizes Same-Sex Marriage
On this day, the Governor of New Hampshire signed a law legalizing same-sex marriage. In May 2007, the legislature had passed a law making civil unions legal in the state.
In early January 2011, all civil unions became marriages unless they had been dissolved, annulled, or already converted into marriage.
The political and legal climate regarding same-sex marriages changed dramatically in the 2000s, as an increasing number of states legalized same-sex marriages and federal courts began declaring unconstitutional state prohibitions on such marriages.
The Supreme Court declared a major provision of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) unconstitutional on June 26, 2013 in the case of Windsor v. United States, ruling that the federal government had to recognize legal same sex marriages. In the year following the Windsor decision, a number of federal courts declared state prohibitions of same-sex marriage to be unconstitutional, and another major Supreme Court case on this issue seemed inevitable.
On June 26, 2015, in Obergefell v. Hudson, the Supreme Court declared that same-sex marriage was constitutional in the entire United States under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Learn more at a timeline of same-sex marriage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_same-sex_marriage
Learn more: Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney, Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America (1999)
Learn more about same-sex marriage issues: http://www.lambdalegal.org/issues/marriage-relationships-and-family-protections
Read about the history of the GLBT revolution: Lillian Faderman, The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle (2015)