Two giant blows against DOMA

July 09, 2010

Posted by Lisa Keen on keennewsservice.com:

"In an enormous victory for the freedom to marry, a federal judge in Boston Thursday, July 8, ruled—in two separate lawsuits—that a critical part of the federal Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional.

"In one lawsuit, Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. Health and Human Services, Judge Joseph Tauro, of the U.S. District Court in Boston, ruled that DOMA violated the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution by taking from the states powers that the Constitution gave to them. In the other lawsuit, Gill v. Office of Personnel Management, he ruled that DOMA violates the equal protection principles embodied in the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment in an effort to 'disadvantage a group of which it disapproves.'

... "Both of the lawsuits heard by Tauro targeted Section 3 of DOMA. That section states that, for federal government purposes, 'the word ‘marriage’ means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word ’spouse’ refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife.' Neither lawsuit challenged the section of DOMA that enable any state to ignore valid marriage licenses issued to a same-sex couple in other states.

"In ruling Section 3 of DOMA unconstitutional in Gill, Tauro stated that he could not find 'any identifiable legitimate purpose or discrete objective' for DOMA to treat same-sex couples differently. DOMA, he said, 'is a status-based enactment divorced from any factual context from which [this court] could discern a relationship to legitimate [government] interests.'

"That finding was important because, in 1996 decision, in Romer v. Evans, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that animus cannot be used to justify a law."

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