The Supreme Court ruled on Friday that the U.S.
Constitution provides same-sex couples the right to marry, handing a historic
triumph to the American gay rights movement.

The court ruled 5-4 that the Constitution’s guarantees of
due process and equal protection under the law mean that states cannot ban
same-sex marriages. With the landmark ruling, gay marriage becomes legal in all
50 states.

Immediately after the decision, same-sex couples in many
of states where gay marriage had been banned headed to county clerks’ offices
for marriage licenses as state officials issued statements saying they would
respect the ruling.

President Barack Obama, appearing in the White House Rose
Garden, hailed the ruling as a milestone in American justice that arrived
“like a thunderbolt.”

“This ruling is a victory for America,” said
Obama, the first sitting president to support gay marriage. “This decision
affirms what millions of Americans already believe in their hearts. When all
Americans are treated as equal, we are all more free.”

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing on behalf of the court,
said the hope of gay people intending to marry “is not to be condemned to
live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions.
They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them
that right.”

Kennedy, a conservative who often casts the deciding vote
in close cases, was joined in the majority by the court’s four liberal
justices.

Kennedy, appointed by Republican President Ronald Reagan
in 1988, has now authored all four of the court’s major gay rights rulings,
with the first coming in 1996. As with his 2013 opinion when the court struck
down a federal law that denied benefits to same-sex couples, Kennedy stressed
the dignity of marriage.

“Without the recognition, stability and
predictability marriage offers, their children suffer the stigma of knowing
their families are somehow lesser,” Kennedy wrote.

In a blistering dissenting opinion, conservative Justice
Antonin Scalia said the decision shows the court is a “threat to American
democracy.” The ruling “says that my ruler and the ruler of 320
million Americans coast-to-coast is a majority of the nine lawyers on the
Supreme Court,” Scalia added.

Conservative Chief Justice John Roberts read a summary of
his dissent from the bench, the first time he has done so in his 10 years on
the court. Roberts said although there are strong policy arguments in same-sex marriage,
it was not the court’s role to force states to change their marriage laws.

“Five lawyers have closed the debate and enacted
their own vision of marriage as a matter of constitutional law,” Roberts
wrote.

The dissenters raised concerns about the impact of the
case on people opposed to same-sex marriage on religious grounds.

Although the ruling only affects state laws and religious
institutions can still choose whether to marry same-sex couples, Roberts
predicted future legal conflicts.

“Hard questions arise when people of faith exercise
religion in ways that may be seen to conflict with the new right to same-sex
marriage,” Roberts said. Roberts gave as an example a religious college
that provides married student housing only to opposite-sex couples.

The ruling is the Supreme Court’s most important expansion
of marriage rights in the United States since its landmark 1967 ruling in the
case Loving v. Virginia that struck down state laws barring interracial
marriages.

There were 13 state bans in place, while another state,
Alabama, had contested a court ruling that lifted the ban there.

The ruling is the latest milestone in the gay rights
movement in recent years. In 2010, Obama signed a law allowing gays to serve
openly in the U.S. military. In 2013, the high court ruled unconstitutional a
1996 U.S. law that declared for the purposes of federal benefits marriage was
defined as between one man and one woman.

Reaction came swiftly. James Obergefell, the lead
plaintiff in the case, told a cheering crowd outside the Supreme Court,
“Today’s ruling from the Supreme Court affirms what millions across this
country already know to be true in our hearts – our love is equal, that the
four words etched onto the front of the Supreme Court – equal justice under law
– apply to us, too.”

Hundreds of gay rights supporters celebrated outside the
courthouse with whoops and cries of “U-S-A!” and “Love is
love” as the decision came down.—Reuters