Background: Carmine Caruso holds a rainbow flag during a rally in supports of same sex marriage in front of the Ada County courthouse in Boise, Idaho, on Friday, May 16, 2014 (AP Photo/The Idaho Statesman, Kyle Green). Inset: Idaho Republican Rep. Heather Scott introduces a cannibalism bill on Feb. 8, 2024 (KTVB/YouTube).
Idaho’s Republican-dominated state House of Representatives voted 46-24 Monday to pass a resolution to reject same-sex marriage, despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 landmark ruling in Obergefell v Hodges.
The measure is known as House Joint Memorial 1 and its statement of purpose reads as follows:
This memorial expresses the Idaho Legislature’s commitment to restoring the definition of marriage as a union between one man and one woman, urging the Supreme Court to reconsider the Obergefell v. Hodges decision and return authority over marriage laws to the states and their citizens.
The bill has overtly religious references in its text. According to the bill, the framers believed that “all humans are created in the image of God,” and that the Obergefell decision “undermines this vision by declaring that citizens must seek dignity from the state.”
“Obergefell relies on the dangerous fiction of treating the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution as a font of substantive rights, a doctrine that strays from the full meaning of the Constitution and exalts judges at the expense of the people from whom they derive their authority,” continues the bill’s text.
Further, it noted, Obergefell “causes collateral damage to other aspects of our constitutional order.” It goes on to say that requiring states to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples “in complete contravention of their own state constitutions and the will of their voters” is unconstitutional. According to the bill, marriage has been recognized as a “union of one man and one woman for more than two thousand years,” and Obergefell “arbitrarily and unjustly” changed that definition to one that is “novel” and “flawed.”
Obergefell was a landmark 2015 decision in which the Supreme Court ruled that the fundamental right to marry is guaranteed to same-sex couples by the Constitution. The 5-4 decision was penned by now-retired Justice Anthony Kennedy. The four dissenting justices were Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Samuel Alito, and Justice Clarence Thomas — who are still on the Court — and the late Justice Antonin Scalia.
The Idaho House of Representatives is heavily dominated by Republicans, who hold 61 seats to Democrats’ nine. All nine Democrats and 15 Republicans voted against the measure.
In Idaho, memorials are essentially formal letters from the legislature and do not carry the force of law. House Joint Memorial 1 will next move to a committee of the Idaho Senate for consideration.
The resolution was sponsored by Rep. Heather Scott, a Republican, who said her proposal was about state sovereignty. She argued that marriage, like wolf-hunting and marijuana use, should be left to state democratic process rather than to the Supreme Court.
Scott is the same Idaho lawmaker who introduced an anti-cannibalism bill last February after watching a clip from a decade-old prank show and mistakenly believing a contestant was eating human flesh.
Scott is also the elected official who referred to Idaho Republican Gov. Brad Little as “Little Hitler” in an interview during the 2020 pandemic. Scott said that designating some businesses as “non-essential” during the early days of COVID-19 was “no different than Nazi Germany” putting non-essential workers on a train to concentration camps.
