On June 26, the United States Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling that all gay couples nationwide have the constitutional right to marry in every state! And with marriage equality for all, that means that all 13 states that previously upheld bans on gay marriage have now been legally enforced to reverse them. It's been a little more than 11 years since Massachusetts became the first state to legalize gay marriage. And before today, 36 other states as well as the District of Columbia followed suit, striking down bans on same-sex marriage and awarding gay couples the same rights as heterosexual ones. So we've put together a comprehensive state-by-state list detailing the history of gay marriage in our country, some noteworthy facts about same-sex marriage in the US, plus a geographical history map of gay marriage states. Alabama is technically one of the states that allows gay marriage, but until the Supreme Court ruling, same-sex couples couldn't get hitched there.

Gay marriage



Timeline and History of Marriage Rights
Marriage occupies an oddly central place in the history of American civil liberties. Although conventional wisdom would suggest that marriage is barely a government issue at all, the financial benefits associated with the institution have given legislators the opportunity to insert themselves into relationships they condone and express their personal disapproval of relationships they do not. As a result, every American marriage includes the enthusiastic third-party participation of legislators who have, in a sense, married into their relationship and declared it superior to the relationships of others. Before same-sex marriage became the hot-button marriage controversy, laws banning interracial marriage dominated the national conversation, especially in the American South. One British colonial law in Maryland declared interracial marriages between White women and Black men to be a "disgrace," and established that any White women who participate in these unions shall be declared enslaved themselves, along with their children.


Timeline: Gay Marriage In Law, Pop Culture And The Courts
In second grade, California students will learn about families with two moms or two dads. Two years later, while studying how immigrants have shaped the Golden State, they will hear how New York native Harvey Milk became a pioneering gay politician in San Francisco. Allyson Chiu, who just finished 11th grade at Cupertino high school, said the revisions would make LGBT students more comfortable. She and seven others spoke in favor of how the guidelines address gay issues.

We first hear of out LGBTQ parents around the time of World War II, mostly in the context of cases that denied them child custody after divorce from different-sex, cisgender spouses. Several other states continued to ban unmarried couples, though, effectively stopping same-sex couples from adopting until marriage equality became federal law in In the s, too, female couples and single women increasingly began to start their families together through pregnancy. In , the Sperm Bank of California opened as the first fertility clinic in the country to serve this market although many queer people had been doing home inseminations for years before.