Special Reports

Broadway Community Responds to Supreme Court Rulings on Proposition 8 and DOMA

Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Denis O’Hare, Audra McDonald, Gavin Creel, and many more react with joy at Supreme Court rulings affirming gay marriage.

Washington, DC
Today was the official end of session for the U.S. Supreme Court and, like a good Broadway show, the Supremes went out with a bang. In a 5-4 ruling on the case United States v. Windsor, the court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, the 1996 law that limited the federal government to only recognizing marriages between one man and one woman, regardless of state law.

The justices punted on Hollingsworth v. Perry, the case that examined California’s Proposition 8, a ballot initiative that halted same-sex marriages in that state. In another 5-4 decision, the court found that the “traditional marriage” activists who argued for the proposition in court did not have standing to defend the law after the state refused its right to appeal an earlier circuit court ruling striking it down. That means that the court defers to the earlier decision and gay marriages can resume in California.

The Broadway community is overwhelmingly in favor of gay marriage, with many artists actively involved in the fight for marriage equality: Jesse Tyler Ferguson (The Comedy of Errors) founded the Tie the Knot Foundation with his partner Justin Mikita to support LGBT rights organizations while Rory O’Malley (The Book of Mormon) and Gavin Creel (Hair) founded Broadway Impact to fight for marriage equality.

Leading members of the Broadway community took to Twitter to rejoice in this morning’s news: