Good morning, all!!! Court: Heart of gay marriage law unconstitutional
The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston said the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman, discriminates against married same-sex couples by denying them federal benefits.
The law was passed in 1996 at a time when it appeared Hawaii would legalize gay marriage. Since then, many states have instituted their own bans on gay marriage, while eight states have approved it, led by Massachusetts in 2004.
The appeals court agreed with a lower court judge who ruled in 2010 that the law is unconstitutional because it interferes with the right of a state to define marriage and denies married gay couples federal benefits given to heterosexual married couples, including the ability to file joint tax returns.
http://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/Court-Heart-of-gay-marriage-law-unconstitutional-3594468.php#ixzz1wSWbsIR2
Lovely day, it is.
= new reply since forum marked as read
is commonly called the SJC.
Since this case involved Massacussetts, I thought that's what you meant.
Should've realized the complication... I've only lived here forever.
A writ of certiorari must generally be filed within 90 days of the judgment. So the timing is relatively fixed. Since these cases started being pushed in California and Massachusetts, I've been worried that they were just a hair too soon (since bad law is harder to get rid of than it is to make new law on a blank slate). Our adoption case made bad law in two districts in Ohio, and we opted out of pushing it farther to avoid making bad law for the entire state when it became clear the Ohio Supreme Court was not inclined to rule in our favor.
But these cases may not be as much too soon as I was worried they might be. I predicted in 2008 that marriage equality would be achieved within 10 years, and I still think we're on track. I do think we need a few more states, and a few more years without mass destruction of heterosexual marriages occurring in those states (do I really need to add 
) before I would be confident of the outcome.
This particular piece of DOMA, however, has a pretty good chance of being overturned. It is essentially a states' rights case. States have always had the freedom to define marriage. If the state in which you were married said you were married - you were also married in the eyes of the feds, and all of the rights/obligations associated with marriages applied to you. DOMA created a glaring exception that tromped all over states' rights to define marriage. You have to do some pretty hard gyrations to favor state's rights, yet deny them the right to define marriage. Not impossible, but Supreme Court Justices - just like everyone else - sees the writing on the wall, and this is a relatively small (in the big picture) change they can make to both honor state's rights and not look too stupid 40 years from now:
I don't think this Supreme Court is ready to overturn all of DOMA - but I do think there is a pretty good chance that it may be ready to with respect to the states' rights portion of DOMA.
However, another law suit can be brought up at any time. There are several dozen in fact in the system already in a variety of states. This is a good first step though because it provides precedence that future rulings can be based around.
