WHY THE GAY-MARRIAGE FIGHT IS OVER - by Jeffrey Toobin

March 28, 2013
WHY THE GAY-MARRIAGE FIGHT IS OVER
Posted by Jeffrey Toobin

This is what I will remember about the atmosphere at the Supreme Court during the same-sex marriage cases: that it wasn’t terribly memorable. The place was relaxed. The Justices were attentive but unemotional. The audience was cheerful. It was a lot like most arguments before the Justices, except that every seat in the courtroom was taken.

The reason for the mellow vibe was unspoken but clear. Everyone knows that same-sex marriage is here to stay; indeed, it’s expanding throughout the country at a pace that few could have imagined just a few years ago. The Justices were not irrelevant to the process, but they weren’t central either. They knew that—and so did everyone else.

I don’t mean to diminish the significance of the issues in the Proposition 8 and DOMA cases. Edith Windsor, the highly appealing plaintiff in the DOMA case, illustrated in stark terms the stakes of that case. She had to pay $363,000 in inheritance taxes because DOMA, the 1996 law, forced the Internal Revenue Service to treat her late wife as a legal stranger. If Justice Anthony Kennedy was previewing his vote with his comments, then Windsor will likely get her money back—not because DOMA is a piece of legislative bigotry, but because Kennedy has a consuming affection for state’s rights. (In other words, he thinks that the states alone should define the meaning of marriage.)

Indirectly, the two most memorable moments in Wednesday’s argument made clear how much the world had changed—and why the Supreme Court was kind of a sideshow to what’s really going on in the country.


Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/03/why-the-gay-marriage-fight-is-over.html#ixzz2OqejHun8