Department of State v Muñoz

Every year, there is at least one Supreme Court case that I wasn’t paying attention to, or didn’t think was that important, that absolutely floors me for its cruelty and misapplication of American law. This year, that case is Department of State v. Muñoz, an immigration case that the justices ruled on last week. While I had fully expected the court to use the case to continue its long-standing tradition of racist rulings against brown immigrants, I had not anticipated that it would also turn out to be a frontal attack by Republican justices on the right to marry, aimed squarely at gay and lesbian couples. Muñoz will be a case the conservatives cite in future opinions limiting same-sex marriages whenever they get around to taking away the rights recognized in Obergefell v. Hodges.

The case involves an American citizen, Sandra Muñoz, who has been trying to get a permanent residency card (more commonly known as a green card) for her husband, Luis Asencio-Cordero. Many people know that a noncitizen can obtain legal status in this country if they marry an American citizen (see Trump, Melania), but many white people don’t know that the process is not automatic. The government reserves the right to deny entry to spouses, and non-white people face that reality all the time.

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[Justice Amy Coney] Barrett wrote that the right to marry is a fundamental right, but the right to live with one’s spouse is not.

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Separating out the right to marry from the right to live with your spouse (a spouse you have literal children with) is trash on its face, but it’s also dripping with hypocrisy coming from Barrett. I doubt that she would apply her own logic to her own family. Barrett, famously, has adopted children from other parts of the world (and renamed them). I somehow don’t think she would recognize a right to adopt as “distinct” from a right to live with the children she’s adopted.

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Before the right to cohabitation is taken away, there is a hearing, or a trial,where the government has to explain why it is taking away the right, and people subject to those government proceedings have a right to appeal.

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(This all happened under the Barack Obama administration by the way, proving once again that cruelty towards immigrants is a bipartisan position, it’s just that the Democrats tend to avoid using racial slurs when carrying out the same racist policies).

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To understand why Barrett and the conservatives (including Gorsuch) signed on to this expansive and extremist decision, you have to understand the antipathy they all hold toward gay and lesbian marriages. Decoupling the right to marry from the right to cohabitate is how the conservatives are going to vitiate same-sex unions.

  Eile Mystal

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...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.