Hollingsworth v. Perry

Summary

Alliance Defending Freedom and its allies became the sole defenders of Proposition 8, California’s constitutional amendment defining marriage as a union between one man and one woman, when state officials refused to do so. Both a federal district judge and a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that the man-woman definition of marriage, approved by more than 7 million California voters, violated the U.S. Constitution. And they did so despite the fact that diverse cultures and faiths have used the same definition for centuries.

Alliance Defending Freedom and its allies asked the U.S. Supreme Court to grant review. The Supreme Court took the case, but declined to decide whether Proposition 8 is constitutional because it concluded that it lacked authority to rule on that question in that case. The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling scrapped the Ninth Circuit’s opinion, but left the district court’s ruling in place.

To protect man-woman marriage as a central building block of society, Alliance Defending Freedom joined this effort. Men and women bring different but equally important gifts to family life, and children need both a mother and a father. Preserving marriage as a union of a man and a woman recognizes this basic fact. Alliance Defending Freedom continues to defend state laws like Proposition 8 that preserve the man-woman definition of marriage.

What's at stake

Affirming marriage as the union of one man and one woman.
Promoting the importance of both mothers and fathers.
Protecting the voters’ rights to direct social policy concerning marriage and family.