ShmoopTube

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And here's your shmoop du jour brought to you by scrutiny on

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the bounty the new movie about a guy carefully examining a roll of paper [A man examines a roll of paper on a boat]

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towels it's already getting Oscar talk really...Classifications based on sexual

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orientation receive what and here are the potential answers [mumbling]

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Well who knew there were so many levels of scrutiny we're still only on [Man playing video game]

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level 1 but just because our mom won't let us play after lights out...Alright

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let's take a stab at this thing first of all under our good old friend the

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Fourteenth Amendment every person is entitled to equal protection under the

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law which basically means that we can't apply the same laws differently for

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different people yep, that's a rough one for bigots everywhere however equal [People protesting outside government building]

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protection can be not so equal depending on which class we belong to for example

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laws that discriminate based on race receives the highest level of scrutiny

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since race is considered a suspect class that's because Fourteenth Amendment was

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originally passed to protect freed slaves from discrimination under the law [Man rejecting a black man for a hotel room]

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so laws dealing with race are a big deal but what about classifications based on

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sexual orientation well this became one of the hottest topics in the judicial

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world in the 2010 we're talking Death Valley hot after a wave of cases ruling [Man surfboarding in the sea]

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same-sex marriage bans to be unconstitutional courts across the

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country were forced to look at the Fourteenth Amendment in a new way for [The Fourteenth Amendment in a chair wearing cucumber eye patches]

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example in 2012 the United States vs Windsor the Second Circuit Court of

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Appeals argued that parts of the Defense of Marriage Act were unconstitutional

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since it treated homosexual married couples different from heterosexual [Mand and woman kissing at a wedding]

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married couples in its ruling the circuit court argued that sexual

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orientation should in fact be a quasi suspect class meaning that laws [Two female figures on a wedding cake and a man climbing on the cake]

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discriminating based on sexual orientation would receive an

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intermediate level of scrutiny while the supreme court agreed with circuit

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court's ruling about the laws unfair treatment they didn't weigh in on

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whether or not sexual orientation belongs to any kind of suspect class so

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what's all this boil down to well if sexual orientation isn't considered a

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suspect class then classifications based on

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sexual orientation must receive a the lowest level of scrutiny of course now

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that the Supreme Court has ruled that Constitution guarantees a right to [A judges bangs their gavel]

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same-sex marriage there's a chance that sexual orientation could finally earn a

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seat at the front or at least in the middle of the suspect class pull up a

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chair there's always room for one more [Woman standing at the front of a classroom]

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