Q&a: What The Supreme Court's Gay Marriage Ruling Means

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — The decades-long debate about whether same-sex marriage should be allowed in the United States was settled when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled gay and lesbian couples can get married anywhere in the country. The Southern and Midwestern states must lift their bans and allow gay and lesbian couples to marry. The court gave the losing side roughly three weeks to ask for reconsideration, but some state officials and county clerks are opting to go ahead and begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. LGBT advocates and married gay couples celebrated in these states, expressing relief and joy that the movement's remarkable winning streak in the courts stretched to the end. Southern Baptists, Mormons and other conservative churches that believe God intended marriage to be a union only between a man and a woman said the ruling won't change their decisions not to allow same-sex marriages in their churches. Being able to get Social Security benefits, file taxes jointly and get divorced should be easy to implement, but gay and lesbian couples will likely find a bumpy road in being granted outright parentage of their children, said Douglas NeJaime, faculty director of the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law. Most states grant automatic parental rights to the biological birth mother and father. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority opinion, joined by the court's four more liberal justices, saying the stories of the people asking for the right to marry "reveal that they seek not to denigrate marriage but rather to live their lives, or honor their spouses' memory, joined by its bond." Nearly half of Americans favor laws allowing gay and lesbian couples to wed in their own states, while just over a third are opposed, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll in April. [...] a Pew Research Center poll conducted in May found that 57 percent of Americans support allowing gays and l

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