I don't know. I have no evidence either way.
You don't know? I know, I have the evidence:
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Bans against same-sex marriage are unconstitutional as a matter of law because they punish children in an effort to control the conduct of adults.
Punishing children for matters beyond their control is patently impermissible as a matter of Supreme Court precedent regarding the constitutional rights of children. In the first of these cases, ( Levy vs Louisiana –
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/fed...1/68/case.html ) the court considered a Louisiana law that forbade children born out of wedlock from receiving benefits upon the wrongful death of their mother. Louisiana argued that the law was a perfectly legitimate means of expressing moral disapproval of extramarital liaisons. The Supreme Court, however, determined that the law violated equal protection because it is fundamentally unfair and irrational for a state to deny important benefits to children merely to express moral disapproval of the conduct of adults—or to incentivize adults to behave in a particular way.
In a similar case decided several years later, ( Weber v. Aetna Cas. & Sur. Co. -
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/fed.../164/case.html ) the court addressed another Louisiana statute that intentionally disadvantaged children born out of wedlock. Specifically, the law at issue preferred “legitimate” children to “illegitimate” children in distributing worker’s compensation benefits upon the death of a parent. The court invalidated the statute, holding that, under the equal protection clause, both classes of children must be permitted to recover equally. “No child,” the court wrote, “is responsible for his birth and penalizing the illegitimate child is an ineffectual—as well as unjust—way of deterring the parent.”
In yet another case ( Plyler v. Doe -
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/fed.../202/case.html ) decided a decade later, the court relied on the same logic in holding that states could not constitutionally deny public education to undocumented immigrant children in an effort to discourage their parents from entering the country illegally. The constitutional conclusion from this line of cases is clear:
No matter how reprehensible a state finds certain adult conduct, it cannot curb that conduct through laws that punish children.
The parallels between the laws struck down in these cases and bans against same-sex marriage are unavoidable. States that ban gay marriage once argued that they did so in order to condemn homosexuality; today, they argue that gay marriage must be forbidden in order to somehow incentivize straight marriage. No matter the rationale, the effect of these laws is clear:
Gay marriage bans deny the children of same-sex couples critical benefits, both economically and psychologically. Even if one believes that gay marriage bans are a justifiable effort to control the conduct of adults, it is simply unconstitutional to punish children based on that belief.
In 2013, an amicus brief was filed explaining why the court’s child-centered equal protection precedent should make United States v. Windsor an easy case to decide. But while Justice Anthony Kennedy did discuss harm to children in his groundbreaking Windsor opinion, (
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/fed.../opinion3.html ) he did not explicitly recognize the legal theory that the harm to children alone should render gay marriage bans unconstitutional.
Extract from Kennedy's Windsor Opinion -
The differentiation demeans the couple, whose moral and sexual choices the Constitution protects, see Lawrence, 539 U. S. 558 , and whose relationship the State has sought to dignify. And it humiliates tens of thousands of children now being raised by same-sex couples. The law in question makes it even more difficult for the children to understand the integrity and closeness of their own family and its concord with other families in their community and in their daily lives. ... DOMA also brings financial harm to children of same-sex couples. It raises the cost of health care for families by taxing health benefits provided by employers to their workers’ same-sex spouses. See 26 U. S. C. §106; Treas. Reg. §1.106–1, 26 CFR §1.106–1 (2012); IRS Private Letter Ruling 9850011 (Sept. 10, 199
. And it denies or re- duces benefits allowed to families upon the loss of a spouse and parent, benefits that are an integral part of family security. See Social Security Administration, Social Security Survivors Benefits 5 (2012) (benefits available to a surviving spouse caring for the couple’s child), online at http://www.ssa.gov/pubs/EN-05-10084.pdf. 
