Emma Lazarus’ words immortalized on the Statue of Liberty welcome the “tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free” to the proverbial “golden door” to the country at nearby Ellis Island. As a culture, we have taken historical liberty with Lazarus’ poem and heavily romanticized our history of immigration. Our parents and grandparents — so the story goes — left their homelands with little more than a few dollars in their pockets and a dream of starting a life in the United States to escape tyranny, persecution and lack of economic opportunity abroad.
Yet the truth is that the golden door has not been open to all people seeking freedom. Since the first federal limits on immigration in 1875 formally ended the “Open Door Policy,” our immigration laws have had a history of singling out particular groups as excludable from our shores. Some of these laws, such as provisions excluding those who wish to do us harm, are perfectly warranted. But one group in particular, gay and lesbian individuals, has had to endure a long (and contemporary) history of prejudiced laws aimed at them. Only this month, following the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Windsor v. United States, 570 U.S. ___ (2013), have the final formalized vestiges of this discriminatory practice given way. While some elements of equality remain elusive, we can finally say that the golden door is open to same-sex couples.
