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Silly Season for the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA)

By: AndrewHyman (Diary)  |  March 8th, 2013 at 11:32 AM  | 

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As you may be aware, the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) will soon decide whether to uphold the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) as constitutional, or not. This statute was signed by Bill Clinton (who has now “evolved” into not only an opponent of DOMA but also a denier of its constitutionality).

One of the things that DOMA did was define what the word “marriage” means as that term is used in other federal statutes, and that definition is a union between a woman and man. On the other hand, DOMA allows states to define the word however they want in the statutes that their legislatures write.
The dispute seems to boil down to whether Congress has power to define the terms it uses. This is a very weird argument, in my view. One of its main proponents is Ernie Young, and he writes that Congress can’t do this because each state should decide what this word in federal statutes means. If a state passes a law that says single people who are next-door-neighbors shall be deemed married for purposes of federal law, then Congress is helpless to clarify what federal statutes mean by the word “marriage.”
Surely, we are now in the Twilight Zone. Young compares this situation to a hypothetical federal statute that deems two people married even though they’ve obtained a divorce under state law. But if there are nutjobs in Congress who would do such a thing, I say let ‘em do it, and let ‘em lose their seats in Congress.
Please note that I am only speaking here about the constitutionality of DOMA. I am not addressing whether it was a good statute in the first place, or whether Congress ought to repeal it. But I will note that there are an awful lot of speech police in this country who want to insist that everyone be forced to call a union between man and man (or woman and woman) a “marriage.” That seems wrong to me, and akin to forcing everyone to call a rose a tulip.

COMMENTS

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  • Viet71

    My bet: DOMA falls, Prop 8 stands.

    • ww2nd95

      I think if one fails, they both do. I’m not sure how they can say one passes constitutional muster, but the other doesn’t. I understand state’s rights, but even still, I think it would be a difficult conclusion for the SCOTUS to come to.

  • PaladinLostHour

    “That seems wrong to me, and akin to forcing everyone to call a rose a tulip.”

    Then you haven’t thought through the larger issue.

    Look, a favored tactic of the left is to simply restrict or distort language to accomplish their ends. A current example -= “partner”, which is now being force fed through the NYTimes, the popular media (US, People, etc) and pretty much every Bravo show in place of ‘boyfriend’ or ‘girlfriend’ – these being deemed too ‘hetero-specific’ and ‘exclusionary to gays’. So instead of a word that connotes a romantic relationship, we’re to use, because of leftist deconstruction, a word that implies in the main a business relationship.

    That is the analgous case to marriage, and the federal government isn’t acting as the ‘speech police’ here, to use your construction. It was simply attempting to defend a fundamental civilizational construct and concept against the same Orwellian impulse that lets North Korea term itself a ‘Democratic Republic’; and against the left’s deliberate attempt to pervert the full faith and credit clause of the Constitution to impose gay marriage across the country through a few state court decisions.

    • AndrewHyman

      I think you misunderstood my blog post. I didn’t say that the federal government is acting as the speech police. Just the opposite. The people who are acting like the speech police are the ones who want to force everyone to start calling a homosexual civil union a “marriage”.

  • Kyle-MI

    On top of all the excellent points you make, the left is being disingenuous on this issue. The whole purpose of getting gay marriage accepted by one of the states is to then force it on all the states using the full faith and credit clause. So, though they don’t like DOMA forcing a marriage definition on all states, they are perfectly willing to force a marriage definition by a judicial ruling.

  • barfaulkner

    I just love it when people in power run a muck with abusing the power they think they have. Marriage a word brought about by religions. It is NOT a word that the religions changed into their meaning. It is a word that belongs and rightfully so to the religions. The government did not have a say in who and who could not be married until later years when it became apparent that some deformities and some blending was not to their liking. They then put some restraints on who could marry. They started keeping records, then they started issuing licenses behind the idea that they would control sexuality transmitted diseases, they charged money and it became a tax. Again they had no claim to the religion’s marriage. As long as you said your vows regardless of having a document issued by the government, you were married in the eyes of God. Now, it is time for the government to stop changing something it has no business in changing. You can call all this a “union”, a “pack”, a “unification”, BUT it is in NO WAY a marriage. Homosexuals get over yourself. The Bible will have its contents about homosexuality. It will not be removed. Why would you ever want to use a word from such religions????? That makes no sense other than giving yourself the idea you will be accepted. I personally do NOT care what anyone is doing in their bedrooms. I want it out of my face. I do not approach anyone and say I am sleeping with whomever. It is NONE of anyone’s business and to think that they would even want to know such things is more than making an a** of myself. Stop all the nonsense. Governments changed your wording to include marriage and unification so that all benefits granted to married people are also offered to unification people. This solves everything and no one (except for these idiots who think God will accept them if they are “married”) will be mistreated. If you are in a unification, what’s wrong with that? Nothing! It always seems that people who fight for someone else’s beliefs that they can change will really believe that it will be so? NOT hardly. Get a new word and use it. NO one will care. But you will never, ever be married regardless of what a government said.