Supreme Court Rules - DOMA Unsconstitutional, Prop 8 Overturned

With the Supreme Court's rulings today, the part of the Defense of Marriage Act that prevented federal recognition of their marriages is no more. And the Proposition 8 law that banned same-sex couples from marrying is once again overturned.

Exactly what the pair of rulings mean is still being interpreted by journalists and legal analysts. What is reported for sure,according to SCOTUSblog, is that in a 5-4 ruling on DOMA, the liberal wing of the court picked up the vote of Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion.

"DOMA singles out a class of persons deemed by a State entitled ot recognition and protection to enhance their own liberty," the opinion said in ruling it unconstitutional.

Chief Justice Roberts made clear, though, that the court did not consider in its DOMA ruling whether states have the right to use "the traditional definition of marriage."

On Proposition 8, the Supreme Court ruled by dismissing the appeal by those who challenged it being overturned in California. The majority ruled they did not have "standing" to challenge the law being overturned. The ruling in Proposition 8 was less clear cut than DOMA, with Chief Justice Roberts siding with the 5-4 majority. Then the dissenters were Sonia Sotomayor, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

On DOMA, the court ruled that Edie Windsor will get her money back. The 83-year-old from New York was forced to pay more than $360,000 in estate taxes because the federal government did not recognize her marriage to her wife spouse, Thea Spyer. And the ruling could have far-reaching consequences for couples in a myriad of circumstances caused by DOMA's ban on federal recognition of same-sex marriages.

In 1996, when a court case in Hawaii appeared to be paving the way for legal same-sex marriage in that state, Congress had passed DOMA and President Clinton signed it into law, in what some critics considered a cynical election-year move to appeal to conservative voters. The law not only prevents the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages but allows any state to deny recognition of such marriages performed in other states. The Windsor case dealt with only the former section.

Marriage equality never came to Hawaii; the first state to establish it was Massachusetts, in 2004. The first court challenge to DOMA, Gill v. Office of Personnel Management, originated there in 2009. In that and other cases, several federal trial and appeals courts ruled that section 3 violated the U.S. Constitution.

But the case the Supreme Court decided to hear was Edie Windsor's. Windsor, who had been with Spyer for decades, married her in Canada after same-sex unions became legal there. After Spyer's death, Windsor ended up liable for estate taxes that she would not have owed had the federal government considered the two women legally married. Windsor's suit was filed in 2010, and trial and appeals courts found in her favor in 2012.

The Obama administration had declined to defend the law, and the Republican-led Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group, consisting of congressional leaders, took up the defense and hired lawyer Paul Clement. As the Supreme Court prepared to hear the case, more than 40 friend of the court briefs were filed in support of Windsor, and Bill Clinton announced that he was now opposed to DOMA and believed it should be struck down.

When the case was argued before the Supreme Court March 27, Justice Kennedy pointed out several times that regulation of marriages was generally left to the states, not the federal government. All four of the liberal members of the court questioned the law's constitutionality, with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg saying it created “two kinds of marriage: the full marriage, and then this sort of skim milk marriage.”

Justice Elena Kagan cited a report from the time of the law's enactment that member of Congress saw it as a way to “express moral disapproval of homosexuality.” Clement responded that “just because a couple legislators may have had an improper motive” was not by itself a reason to invalidate the law. However, Roberta Kaplan, Windsor's lawyer, told the court DOMA resulted in “discrimination for the first time in our country’s history against a class of married couple.