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Defense of Marriage Act

Civil Rights struggles live on in the fight for marriage equality

Submitted by BrianNapoletano on 16 October, 2009 - 23:03
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This column first appeared in the 15 October 2009 print edition of the Purdue Exponent
Forty-six years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. lead a 250,000-person march on Washington, D.C. to demand that black people be granted the same rights as white people. At that historic march, Dr. King shared his vision for a different world—a world where humanity would no longer be divided by ignorance and hatred. On Sunday, roughly 200,000 people followed his example and once again marched on Washington to bring his dream closer to fruition. Drawing inspiration from the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s and 1970s that prepared the way for the nation's first black president, protesters, many of them young people in their twenties and thirties, arrived from all over the nation to declare that the right to marry whom they choose is a fundamental civil right.

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Defending Marriage Against Whom?

Submitted by BrianNapoletano on 9 July, 2008 - 17:09
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The issue of same-sex marriage is a surprisingly controversial one in the United States1. Presently, the federal "Defense of Marriage Act" (DOMA, Public Law 104-199) defines marriage as thus:

"In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, or of any ruling, regulation, or interpretation of the various administrative bureaus and agencies of the United States, 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."
This quote is actually an amendment to the original law, which essentially states that no state, territory, etc. may be required to recognise a marriage between two people of the same sex, even if the said marriage was legally performed and recognized by another state. I would like to set aside the many issues that come along with the loaded topic of homosexual marriages or homosexuality in general, and focus on the issue of this law as it relates to the U.S.'s Constitution, and in particular to the First Amendment thereto.

  1. 1. See, for instance, the Wikipedia article and related discussion regarding the Defense of Marriage Act.

Marriage Equality and its Opponents

Submitted by BrianNapoletano on 26 March, 2008 - 12:44
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As I contend in a related blog entry, I do not believe that the arguments supporting legislation against the legal recognition of homosexual marriages in the United States are consistent with the letter or the spirit of the U.S. Constitution. The pragmatic arguments against homosexual marriages are weak at best (particularly considering the dismal divorce rate in heterosexual marriages) and fail to justify current and proposed legislation on their own, leaving only the religious arguments underlying them---arguments which, of course, cannot legally be used to justify an act of Congress. Consequently, the burden of proof in the debate on the legislation lies not on the proponents to demonstrate that same-sex marriages should be acceptable but on the opponents to demonstrate, without resorting to hackneyed pseudo-religious dogma, that same-sex marriages both are economically or otherwise quantitatively detrimental to the public interest, and lead to the violation of individual rights. Unless such a basis can be offered, I offer that the current "Defense of Marriage Act", the proposed "Marriage Protection Act", and the many state-level imitations thereof are in diametric contradiction to the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

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