Souter leaves gay rights legacy on Supreme Court

<National gay groups had opposed his confirmation, ACT UP protesters disrupted his confirmation hearing, and Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) voted against him, predicting he would "solidify a 5 to 4 anti-civil rights, anti-privacy majority."

And yet, within two years, Souter, a former New Hampshire attorney general, had emerged as a ray of hope for gay civil rights advocates.

"Justice Souter emerged as a thoughtful and dependable vote for gay equality and inclusion," said Evan Wolfson, head of the national Freedom to Marry group and, for many years, a key attorney for Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund.

Souter was the first justice to refer to LGB people as "gay, lesbian, and bisexual," instead of "homosexuals." He did so in writing the 1995 opinion in Hurley v. GLIB – a case in which a gay Irish group challenged the right of a St. Patrick's Day Parade organizer in Boston to exclude it from participating as a contingent. Souter, for a unanimous court, said the parade organizers had a First Amendment right to exclude the gay contingent even though a Massachusetts public accommodations law prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation. But gay legal activists were struck by the tone of respect Souter demonstrated for gays in the opinion. The opinion said that laws prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation are "well within" the state's power "to enact when a legislature has reason to believe that a given group is the target of discrimination. ..." The opinion also characterized as fact that "some Irish are gay, lesbian, or bisexual" and that openly gay marchers "suggest their view that people of their sexual orientation have as much claim to unqualified social acceptance as heterosexuals.">


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