From Addicting Info: http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/02/22/obama-administration-urges-supreme-court-to-overturn-doma/
By Tiffany Willis
2013/02/22
In a Friday filing, the Obama administration called the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) unconstitutional and urged the Supreme Court to strike down the 1996 law’s prohibition on federal recognition of same-sex marriages.
The law, as it stands, denies benefits to family members of federal employees who are gay. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli is asking the Supreme Court to uphold a federal appeals court ruling that found DOMA to be unconstitutional. Verrili is arguing specifically against Section 3 of DOMA, which defines only marriages between one man and one woman.
Section 3 of DOMA violates the fundamental constitutional guarantee of equal protection. The law denies to tens of thousands of same-sex couples who are legally married under state law an array of important federal benefits that are available to legally married opposite-sex couples. Because this discrimination cannot be justified as substantially furthering any important governmental interest, Section 3 is unconstitutional. (Source)
The brief encourages heightened scrutiny in cases involving DOMA because ”gay and lesbian people have long suffered discrimination in employment, immigration, criminal violence, child custody, police enforcement, voter referenda, and other contexts.” (Source)
[G]ay and lesbian people are a minority group with limited political power. Although some of the harshest and most overt forms of discrimination against gay and lesbian people have receded, that progress has hardly been uniform (either temporally or geographically), and has in significant respects been the result of judicial enforcement of the Constitution, not political action.
To the extent sexual orientation may be considered to fall short in some dimension [to have heightened scrutiny applied], the history of discrimination and the absence of relation to one’s capabilities associated with this particular classification would uniquely qualify it for scrutiny under an approach that calls for a measure of added focus to guard against giving effect to a desire to harm an “unpopular group.” (Source)
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