"Congress undertook this classification ... to disadvantage a group of which it disapproves."

Tauro ruled the act violates the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution.

Rights. The Constitution. Defense of the minority against the tyranny of the majority. It's simple.

News Article Here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=4458048&mesg_id=4458048

Letourneau called the rulings "life-changing." "I can get on Nancy's insurance," she said. "That's just a huge victory, and it gives us peace of mind."

Shame it will be appealed...

You wouldn't want to see this ruling apply anywhere else?

Why?

Because a ruling by this court is not effective anywhere else.

It will be very hard for a conservative jurist to find that the federal government can tell a state who is married and who is not.

DOMA does not stop any couple in Massachusetts from marrying. It merely denies the federal benefits of marriage to married same-sex couples. It is discriminatory, but it is not clear-cut to say that it amounts to federal interference in state prerogatives: the federal government, after all, has already acquired a large role in determining the legal benefits of marriage.

The result here depended at least partially on the judge's decision that DOMA irrationally discriminates against same-sex couples, which means that it is inherently out of the scope of federal power. But his argument that this is so is a stronger and bolder argument--though quite correct--than the Court of Appeals or the Supreme Court is likely to accept at this point in the nationwide same-sex marriage debate.

They might overturn DOMA on narrower grounds that have weaker implications for state marriage laws, though, which would be better in terms of making concrete progress but worse in terms of leaving intact marriage discrimination broadly considered.

The part of DOMA which defines marriage for federal purposes, in contrast to how any state might define it, strikes me as something of a no-brainer.

Whether an equal protection claim would succeed at the SC is an open question, but the federal government already recognizes couples as married in their respective states, even though there is no uniform definition of marriage eligibility.

Marriage between first cousins is an example that has existed for ages. There are three batches. Some states allow unrestricted first cousin marriage, some states prohibit it, and some states allow it under certain circumstances. But nobody ever proposed some sort of "federal rule on first cousin marriages". Just because some states prohibit first cousin marriages is no reason for the federal government to step in and say they are not going to recognize those people as married for federal purposes. It is simply not an area of valid federal authority.

Once that is nailed down, there is a wedge that can be driven into the DOMA restriction of full faith and credit - independent of an equal protection claim - because you have to identify a valid federal reason for restricting the application of FFC to same sex marriages.

What this decision says in broader dicta is beside the point of the confines of the specific question in issue.

Full faith and credit has nothing to do with this issue. That would be the basis of a challenge to Section 2 of DOMA, not Section 3.

The federal government is not obligated to recognize state marriages in its laws. It made a policy decision to do so, to recognize all state marriages. Then it changed its policy decision to only recognize opposite-sex state marriages. I'm not sure how the second amounts to an interference in family relations law any greater than the first. Certainly the second raises much stronger equal protection issues, but if we leave those aside, the argument becomes much weaker.

It's true, the federal government traditionally recognizes first-cousin marriages, but the question is not whether it does but whether it is obliged to.

What I said was that a win here provides a framework for the REST of DOMA. Law doesn't usually deal with sweeping question in one fell swoop. It didn't with school desegregation either. Brown v. Board of Education was not the first case addressing segregation, nor the only case, and wouldn't have come out the way it did without prior cases that had chipped away at basic assumptions underlying Plessy v. Ferguson.

We would not have reached Roe v. Wade without Griswold v. Connecticut.

The question of whether the federal government is "obliged" to treat persons as married when they are lawfully married in their domiciliary state is one that is hard to argue against, given the weight of authority on "who says who is married". It is practically the mirror image of the DoJ's challenge to Arizona's assertion of a right to enforce federal immigration law.

The federal legislature is simply not in the business of determining who is married, who is divorced, who inherits what, etc. Nailing that down in the narrow confines of the issue in THIS case, would THEN be helpful for a DIFFERENT case that asks "what is the policy basis for a federal restriction of full faith and credit in the OTHER part of DOMA?"

I am not "confusing two issues". I am suggesting that taking this case to a higher level would be a useful foundation in some respects.

I agree: if the federal government's policy is accurately described as saying that people who are married under state law aren't actually married, then the federal government loses.

But the federal government doesn't have to say that. It can say (and did say), instead, that its policy says nothing about who is and is not married, and merely clarifies that it only wants to offer benefits to a certain class of married couples: opposite-sex ones (just as it offers certain benefits to married couples and not unmarried ones.) When the federal government offers welfare benefits, it doesn't have to depend on state definitions of poverty or disability; its social policy can classify people however the government wants it to, as long as it doesn't run afoul of other constitutional limits. What it cannot do is intervene directly in family law: it cannot determine who can marry whom, it cannot regulate divorce, and so forth.

Now, arguably as applied to DOMA this is a distinction without a difference, and what the government is clearly trying to do is interfere with states' determinations of who is eligible to be married and who not. But this argument is not obviously a successful one, especially not for a judiciary that doesn't want to overrule a Congressional statute and isn't interested in standing up for the civil rights of gay people. And the judge's opinion in this case sidestepped this question entirely, because the equal protection argument let him argue that the government's spending policy was independently barred.

As for the Sec. 2 implications, I don't think it's in dispute that if Section 2 is an attempt for the federal government to nationalize a marriage definition, it is unconstitutional. But the question of whether states can avoid full faith and credit via "public policy" exemptions, or whether Congress, in defining the "effect" of full faith and credit, can just nullify any effect at all, are distinct questions from that issue.

Ahem... you mean "standing up for state sovereignty".

"Civil rights of gay people" per se is tangential to the question presented here.

See, e.g., Hollingsworth v. Perry.

Maybe I'm not being clear.

The question of the conditions under which a federal court may or may not allow televised proceedings is not a state's rights issue.

I'm not sure you appreciate the extent to which this case plays right into the professed principles of right wing jurists.

First, my intention in citing Hollingsworth was not to suggest that it was a states' rights case, but rather to illustrate how the context of a contentious social issue can easily turn a legal issue entirely distinct from the social issue into an ideological battle along predictable lines.

Second, as I have said repeatedly, the states' rights claim in this case is just not as strong as you think it is, even on a conservative account of federalism's limits. Conservatives have focused on challenging statutes that expand the federal government's regulatory powers beyond its constitutional limits. But DOMA is about the allocation of benefits in areas that are indisputably under federal control, areas that are already governed by independent federal statutes. Again, neither party claims that the federal government can say who is married and who is not. But that is not what DOMA does.

Crucial to the Massachusetts states' rights challenge to DOMA, and the court decision agreeing with it, was the equal protection elements to the case. If these do not pass muster higher up in the courts, and both of us agree I think that they quite possibly won't, then the states' rights argument is just not very compelling.

protected by the 9th Amendment.