LGBT Rights and State Courts
- 1992- Colorado became the first state to abolish offered civil-rights protection for homosexuals by amending its constitution
- 1998- Maine became the first state to repeal its existing gay-rights statutes
- 1999- Vermont Supreme Court grants the same rights and protections that married heterosexuals have to homosexual partners.
- 1999- Antisodomy laws of 32 states were repealed
- 1999- 11 states had laws to protect homosexuals from discrimination
- 2000- Vermont Supreme Court backed civil unions between homosexual couples
- 2003- Massachusetts Highest Court rules that homosexuals do have the right to marry according to the constitution.
- 2003- Antisodomy Laws in all states were overturned.
- May 2004- Massachusetts begins issuing licenses for same sex marriages
- 2006- New Jersey’s Supreme Court extends civil rights to homosexuals and allows civil unions
- 2008- California and Connecticut Supreme Courts abolished their states’ bans on same-sex marriages
- 2009 - Iowa Supreme Court unanimously legalized same-sex marriage in Varnum v. Brien
Read more about this topic: LGBT Movements In The United States
Famous quotes containing the words rights, state and/or courts:
“Individuality is the aim of political liberty. By leaving to the citizen as much freedom of action and of being, as comports with order and the rights of others, the institutions render him truly a freeman. He is left to pursue his means of happiness in his own manner.”
—James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851)
“An alliance is like a chain. It is not made stronger by adding weak links to it. A great power like the United States gains no advantage and it loses prestige by offering, indeed peddling, its alliances to all and sundry. An alliance should be hard diplomatic currency, valuable and hard to get, and not inflationary paper from the mimeograph machine in the State Department.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“And about her courts were seen
Liveried angels robed in green,
Wearing, by St Patrick’s bounty,
Emeralds big as half the county.”
—Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864)