We are pleased that our marriage is one that will be legally recognized by the State of Illinois and the United States Federal Government.  Yet we recognize that same sex marriage is only the latest in a long line of court decisions that have continually moved our judicial system in the direction of equality for a wide range of marginalized people. 

 

Here is a brief history of the evolution of marriage laws in the US:

 

• 1664 Maryland seeks to stanch potential interracial marriages by threatening enslavement for white women who married black men.
   

• 1691 Virginia enacts a law stating that if a white person (bond or free) marries a person of color (Negro, mulatto, or Indian), the couple will be banished from the colony. Banishment means almost certain death in the woods.
   

• 1724 Article VIII of the Louisiana Black Code forbids marriages between slaves without the consent of the slave master.
   

• 1725 By now, most other American colonies follow Maryland and Virginia’s lead and have banned interracial marriage. In all, forty-one states eventually enact bans.
   

• 1769: American colonies base their laws on the English common law, which said, “By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in the law. The very being and legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated into that of her husband under whose wing and protection she performs everything.”
   

• 1830 In Mississippi, married women are granted the right to own property in their own name, instead of being owned exclusively by the husband.
   

• 1900 By now, every state had passed legislation modeled after New York’s Married Women’s Property Act (1848), granting married women some control over their property and earnings.
   

• 1933 Married women are granted the right to citizenship independent of their husbands.
   

• 1967 The Supreme Court overturns laws prohibiting interracial couples from marrying in Loving v. Virginia.
   

• 1975 Married women are allowed to have credit in their own name.
   

• 1981 Kirchberg v. Feenstra overturns state laws designating a husband “head and master” with unilateral control of property owned jointly with his wife.
   

• 2000 Alabama becomes the last state in the US to remove the ban on interracial marriage in its state constitution.
   

• 2014 On March 4, several Illinois counties begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples after an opinion issued by the State Attorney General. This is a few months ahead of a law scheduled to take effect statewide on June 1.
   

• 2015 On June 26, the Supreme Court rules in Obergefell v. Hodges that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution requires a State to license a marriage between two people of the same sex and to recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex when their marriage was lawfully licensed and performed out-of-State, legalizing same-sex marriage in the United States.