Tag Archives: marriage equality

DOMA Upheld

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DOMA has faced its first court test and has been found constitutional by a federal district judge in Florida. Here’s the opinion.

This is good, kind of, because any signal that courts will uphold DOMA will take even more pressure off the Senate to pass the FMA. (One of the reasons Bush is going to stop pushing for the FMA right now is that most of the Senate thinks DOMA makes the FMA unnecessary.) If a court strikes down DOMA, the fundamentalist Christian right is going to have a massive spazz attack and we’ll be that much closer to a constitutional ban on gay marriage across the entire nation.

Even so, as I mention in the post linked above, the U.S. Supreme Court would probably uphold DOMA. So again, we seem to have reached a tentative equilibrium right now under which same-sex marriage is a state-by-state issue. In a couple of decades things will get better, because young people support gay marriage in much greater numbers than their elders, and people will see that just because there’s gay marriage in some states, doesn’t mean the world falls apart.

No More FMA

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In addition to the most widely-quoted paragraph of Sunday’s Washington Post story (“President Bush said the public’s decision to reelect him was a ratification of his approach toward Iraq and that there was no reason to hold any administration officials accountable for mistakes or misjudgments in prewar planning or managing the violent aftermath”), there are also some interesting paragraphs about the Federal Marriage Amendment.

On the domestic front, Bush said he would not lobby the Senate to pass a constitutional amendment outlawing same-sex marriage.

While seeking reelection, Bush voiced strong support for such a ban, and many political analysts credit this position for inspiring record turnout among evangelical Christians, who are fighting same-sex marriage at every juncture. Groups such as the Family Research Council have made the marriage amendment their top priority for the next four years.

The president said there is no reason to press for the amendment because so many senators are convinced that the Defense of Marriage Act — which says states that outlaw same-sex unions do not have to recognize such marriages conducted outside their borders — is sufficient. “Senators have made it clear that so long as DOMA is deemed constitutional, nothing will happen. I’d take their admonition seriously. . . . Until that changes, nothing will happen in the Senate.”

Bush’s position is likely to infuriate some of his socially conservative supporters, but congressional officials say it will be impossible to secure the 67 votes needed to pass the amendment in the Senate.

Yesterday morning, the day after the interview, White House spokesman Scott McClellan called to say the president wished to clarify his position, saying Bush was “willing to spend political capital” but believes it will be virtually impossible to overcome Senate resistance until the courts render a verdict on DOMA.

That’s a relief. It’s not like the FMA could ever have gotten the votes of 67 senators anyway, but it’s good that Bush is retreating. (Though it’s what some would call flip-flopping.) DOMA’s not going anywhere for now — the U.S. Supreme Court would probably find it constitutional if given the chance — so it looks like this will remain a state-by-state issue. The next state to legalize gay marriage will probably be New Jersey, followed by California. And momentum is on our side.

This is good, good, good.

(Here’s Andrew Sullivan’s take.)

Self Defeat

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E.J. Graff says that although anti-gay-marriage amendments will probably pass in all 11 states in which they’re on the ballot on Tuesday, not to worry: time is on our side.

Imagine coming upon this sentence for the first time, without having listened closely to any discussion of gay rights: “Marriage consists only of the union between one man and one woman.” Wouldn’t that strike you as a dictionary definition of marriage? That was exactly the intention of this brilliant and sneaky sentence’s framers, when the first Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), was loosed upon the nation in 1995. And it’s still the effect that the phrase has on most ordinary voters today. That particular version comes from the first sentence of the proposed Arkansas constitutional amendment; with a few tweaks, it’s what you’ll find on eleven state ballots next week. And it reads less like a ban than an affirmation, a simple declaration of fact. What voter wants to mess with Webster’s?

But, of course, Webster’s keeps issuing new editions–because words are continually changing to fit our changing lives. In the mid-nineteenth century, the comparable sentence would have been this: “Nothing is Marriage but a solemn engagement to live together in faith and love till death” (italics in the original). That was written by New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, who argued that marriage’s very definition–you could read it in the dictionary!–precluded divorce. In his mind, and in the minds of many at the time, divorce with remarriage was immoral bed-hopping, simple polygamy, since it enabled someone to have more than one living spouse at a time. The nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century public discussion over marriage’s exit rules was as heated as today’s debate over whether marriage’s entrance rules should be gender-neutral. But in that century-long debate, Americans concluded that Webster’s was wrong: The essence of marriage wasn’t in the phrase “till death,” but in the more central phrase, “a solemn engagement to live together in faith and love.” Not coincidentally, that’s also the definition under which same-sex couples belong. …

Same-sex marriage advocate Evan Wolfson, the founder and director of the national group Freedom to Marry, likes to say that about a third of the country already backs same-sex marriage and that about a third (roughly the percentage that identifies as evangelical Christian) is unalterably opposed. The remaining portion, the “movable middle,” has not thoroughly thought the issue through. Many such folks hold two opposing impulses at the same time, impulses they haven’t yet managed to reconcile. On the one hand, they have that deep American belief in the importance of equal rights for all. On the other hand, they think gay sex (and therefore gay marriage) is really, really icky. The Defense of Marriage Acts are written to appeal to one side of those conflicting beliefs, pushing the other out of the voters’ minds. And so, in most states, passing those dictionary-definition DOMA amendments takes little or no work; you just have to get one on the ballot.

Defeating a DOMA, however, requires a ferocious retail effort. It means talking, one on one, to a significant percentage of voters in a state. On the nation’s coasts and in the biggest cities, the places to which so many lesbians and gay men flee for protection and refuge, those conversations have indeed been happening. As a result, in states like Massachusetts or New Jersey, same-sex marriage has at least a plurality of supporters. But here’s where those conversations have not been happening, or at least, not in significant enough numbers: Arkansas, Georgia, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, or Utah. …

Over the next five, ten, and twenty years, as lesbians and gay men keep leading ordinary lives in full view, those hastily passed DOMA amendments will be peeled right back off the books, one by one. Coastal states like Massachusetts, New Jersey, Connecticut, New York, California, and Washington will keep moving toward more fully recognizing a life commitment between two women or two men. Many of those now-married couples and their kids will regularly head home to the interior for Thanksgiving, Passover, Christmas, Juneteenth, birthdays, high-school reunions, and so on for years to come. Eventually, their families and friends will agree that they, too, fit marriage’s meaning and deserve the recognition of civil law.

That shift will happen faster in states where marriage equality advocates have been hunkering down and educating their fellow citizens. It will take longer in states where, instead, lesbians and gay men have simply picked up and moved away. The shift won’t happen next Tuesday. It won’t happen next Wednesday. But–unlike the Red Sox–this team won’t keep me waiting for 86 years.