ATLANTA — The Supreme Court of Georgia today reversed a trial judge’s ruling in May that declared unlawful an amendment to the state constitution defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman. According to the Alliance Defense Fund, the real winners are the 76 percent of voters in Georgia who passed the amendment to protect marriage.
“When the courts respect sound public policy decisions made by the people and their elected representatives, such as upholding the sanctity of marriage, freedom reigns,” said ADF Senior Legal Counsel Mike Johnson. “Today’s victory is one for the citizens who showed up at the ballot box to take a stand on this important public policy issue.”
The state trial court judge threw out the constitutional amendment on a technicality known as the “single subject rule,” which stipulates that a proposed amendment must not address more than one object at a time. But that rule was wrongfully applied to this constitutional amendment, according to ADF.
“Georgia’s Amendment One has one purpose: to protect marriage from attack,” said Johnson, who successfully helped defend Louisiana’s Defense of Marriage Amendment from the same legal challenge that Georgia’s Amendment One faced. “The people of Georgia voted ‘yes’ to the single subject of protecting marriage from all contemporary threats, and they deserved to have their vote respected and upheld. Thankfully, their state Supreme Court justices unanimously agreed.”
ADF filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case,
Perdue v. O’Kelley, on behalf of the Georgia Baptist Convention and fourteen state lawmakers, in which they urged the Georgia Supreme Court to find in favor of the amendment.
A copy of today’s decision can be read at
www.telladf.org/UserDocs/GeorgiaDecision.pdf.
For more information on the battle to protect marriage, visit
www.domawatch.org.
ADF is a legal alliance defending the right to hear and speak the Truth through strategy, training, funding, and litigation.
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