Adams v. Howerton, 673 F.2d 1036 (9th Cir. 1982), cert. denied, 458 U.S. 1111 (1982) is a decision from the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that held that the term "spouse" refers to an opposite-sex partner for the purposes of immigration law and that this definition met the standard at the time for rational basis review. It was the first U.S. lawsuit to seek recognition of a same-sex marriage by the federal government. Lawsuit In 1975, Richard Frank Adams, an American citizen, and Anthony Corbett Sullivan, an immigrant from Australia, were one of several same-sex couples that received marriage licenses from the clerk of Boulder County, Colorado. Adams then petitioned the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) for classification of Sullivan as an immediate relative of Adams, on the basis that they were married under Colorado law. The petition was initially denied, with a letter stating that "[Adams and Sullivan] have failed to establish that a bona fide marital relationship can exist between two faggots." A revised letter was later sent, explaining that "[a] marriage between two males is invalid for immigration purposes and cannot be considered a bona fide marital relationship since neither party to the marriage can perform the female functions in marriage." After the INS petition was ultimately denied, they filed suit against the INS in the United States District Court for the Central District of California, alleging that their marriage was valid under both Colorado law and immigration law, and that failure to recognize its validity violated the Fifth Amendment's substantive due process and equal protection components. The district court rejected the plaintiffs' claims, noting that "Congress in its immigration statutes is not obligated to follow the law of the place where the marriage was contracted". The court also held that under Colorado law marriage is a union of "a man and a woman", agreeing with the state attorney general's opinion, and also noted that "[t]he Colorado statutes don't specifically allow, nor do they specifically prohibit, marriages between persons of the same sex." It also held that "[t]he legal protection and special status afforded to marriage (being defined as an union of persons of different sex) has historically ... been rationalized as being for the purpose of encouraging the propagation of the race." Regarding the constitutional claims, it held that if federal law governs, then "the constitutional challenge is rejected as insubstantial", because