The marriage issue didn’t play a major role in the 2014 midterms, but activist courts overturning state laws and lawsuits threatening the rights of those who disagree with redefining marriage may very well make the issue a top one in 2016.
Since 1998 and across the early 2000s, millions of Americans voted at the state level to define marriage as the union of a man and woman and more than 38 states have such laws on their books today. Yet with state and district courts overturning those laws across the country and the Supreme Court punting on the issue earlier this fall, a number of questions increasingly come in to play:
Should the definition of marriage be decided state by state, and how does that then affect federal law dealing with marriage?
What happens if, as we’re seeing happen, the courts take the issue out of the hands of individual states and bans their right to define marriage in their state and also forces them to recognize the marriage laws of other states?
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