U.S.|Before Same-Sex Marriage Was U.S. Law, They Said ‘I Do’ in Massachusetts

On Thursday, 10 years will have passed since the U.S. Supreme Court established same-sex marriage as a right guaranteed under the Constitution.

But many of the tens of thousands of American L.G.B.T.Q. couples who have wed in the decade since might never have exchanged vows if it hadn’t been for seven couples who sued the State of Massachusetts in 2001 after they were denied marriage licenses.

The state’s high court ruled in their favor in November 2003, and six months later, hundreds of gay couples descended on churches and synagogues and town halls across Massachusetts to make their unions official. As they did so, they were helping to set in motion a period of profound change.

By the time the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges on June 26, 2015, that the Constitution guarantees a right to same-sex marriage, 37 states and the District of Columbia already allowed it and public opinion was moving swiftly toward acceptance.

Today, though, the picture is more complicated. Last month, a Gallup survey found that while 68 percent of Americans support same-sex marriage, approval among Republicans had slipped to 41 percent after peaking at 55 percent in 2021 and 2022. And the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling that a right to abortion could not be found in the Constitution raised fears among many supporters of same-sex marriage that the court could overturn the Obergefell decision on similar grounds.

Those who said “I do” in Massachusetts on May 17, 2004, were among the first same-sex couples to be legally married in the United States. (The marriages of thousands of couples who were issued marriage licenses in San Francisco earlier that year were later voided by the California Supreme Court.)