The United States Supreme Court struck down a key part of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) today. The 1996 law signed by President Clinton defined marriage as between a man and a woman for the purpose of federal law.
The split 5-4 decision involved the question of the equal protection for same sex couples and jurisdiction.
The majority opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, who also wrote the court’s gay rights decisions in Romer v. Evans and Lawrence v. Texas. Justices Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, and John Roberts all filed dissents. Justice Clarence Thomas joined Scalia’s dissent, and joined Alito’s in part, while Roberts joined Scalia’s in part. Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined Kennedy’s majority opinion.
Justice Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion, ruled that the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group (BLAG), an organization in Congress, which took over the law’s defense, had standing in the case. House Speaker John Boehner had BLAG take on the case after the Obama administration refused to defend it.
Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote, “DOMA divests married same-sex couples of the duties and responsibilities that are an essential part of married life and that they in most cases would be honored to accept were DOMA not in force.” Kennedy found that the law “places same-sex couples in an unstable position of being in a second-tier marriage.”
Justice Antonin Scalia, wrote in his dissenting opinion that parts of majority’s ruling were “wrong” and their errors spring ‘from the same diseased root: an exalted notion of the role of this Court in American democratic society.”
Same-sex marriage has been adopted by 12 states and the District of Columbia. Another 18,000 couples were married in California during a brief period when same-sex unions were legal there.
“Under DOMA, same-sex married couples have their lives burdened, by reason of government decree, in visible and public ways,” wrote Kennedy. “DOMA’s principal effect is to identify a subset of state-sanctioned marriages and make them unequal,” he said.
Scalia said the court should not have decided the case.