Posted on 03/21/2013 4:02:21 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
“[U]nder the Constitution, the regulation and control of marital and family relationships are reserved to the States.”
— U.S. Supreme Court,
Sherrer v. Sherrer (1948)
The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is an exception to the rule that a law’s title is as uninformative about the law’s purpose as the titles of Marx Brothers movies (“Duck Soup,” “Horse Feathers,” “Animal Crackers”) are about those movies’ contents. DOMA’s purpose is precisely what its title says. Which is why many conservatives and liberals should be uneasy Wednesday when the Supreme Court hears arguments about its constitutionality.
Conservatives who supported DOMA should, after 17years’ reflection, want the act overturned because its purpose is constitutionally improper. Liberals who want the act struck down should be discomfited by the reason the court should give when doing this.
DOMA, which in 1996 passed the House 342 to 67 and the Senate 85 to 14, defines marriage for the purpose of federal law as a legal union between one man and one woman. Because approximately 1,100 federal laws pertain to marriage, DOMA’s defenders argue that Congress merely exercised its power to define a term used in many statutes. But before 1996, federal statutes functioned without this definition......
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
How could marriage not be a Federal issue if each state is forced to recognize marriages from other states?
Exactly!
Even though SCOTUS said this, I'm going to disagree. Article 1, Section 8 specifically authorized Congress to set standards for 'weights and measures'. 'Measures' has always been recognized to include legal definitions to ensure consistent application. As long as marriage is a legally recognized contract, defining it falls under that.
I thought George was smarter than that.
There is only one way to deal with this and that is to remove Government from the situation entirely. It’s none of their business how consenting adults chose to order their lives. There’s no good reason for it in the tax code or anywhere else for that matter.
Marriage should be between the participants and the church of their choice. Anything else can be handled by contract lawyers.
He likes those East Coast and California cocktail parties.
I think he's been tasting a lot more than that for a long time.
Never trust a man who wears a bow tie.
They aren't. A same-sex couple married in Massachusetts can't move to Nebraska and file a joint return. And I'd prefer that the feds stay out of it. While now DOMA says that marriage is between a man and a woman it only takes a bad election or two before Congress might decide a marriage is also between a man and a man or a woman and a woman. Should that happen, I don't want them to force my state to recognize it. If Massachusetts wants to recognize same-sex marriage then let them. We don't, and aren't about to. I won't tell them what to do and they don't tell us what to do.
Federal DOMA was even considered because every time the state would pass their own DOMA, the courts would knock it down. Abnormal has become normal.
Shep Smith was just ecstatic to announce the study that gay parents are just as good as straight parents. In a normal world, nobody would believe such BS, but this isn’t a normal world. F*ck Colorado, and all proponents of this.
Which article and section of the Constitution do you think gives the feds that right?
WHo the HELL watches that queer Shep Smith??? He does so much EDITORIALIZING I can;t stand it.
Why do you think getting government out of marriage would be an improvement?
If the federal government supposedly “gets out of the marriage business,” there will still be endless contracts and legalities, and the government will then be equating homo couplings with real marriages as the same thing. Such a government that embraces this degeneracy is a government I wouldn’t lift a finger to save. I voted in my state for an amendment to the constitution that a marriage is one man and one woman, and it passed resoundingly. If these scumbags try to override my vote and my state’s constitution, I’d happily see them and the country burn to the ground first.
It would be a lawyer’s dream come true, that’s for sure.
Why do you assume that is what I think? The Constitution is, indeed, meaningless these days and I feel the fact that it is is responsible for many of our country’s woes. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, The Dept. of Education, The EPA, DHS...are all unconstitutional...why not one more unconstitutional law/mandate/department? That should fix everything, right? No, we have lost our country and the culture that once represented it. I’m in favor of fighting to reinstate the original intent of the constitution, not further deconstruction in the futile hope of somehow changing our depraved culture. I, personally, have no hope that the zeitgeist can be redirected but fighting for more unconstitutional bandaids would be hypocritical for someone who holds my opinion. You are, of course, welcome to yours.
Nice in theory, but it would turn the simple question "Is Bob married" into a complicated examination of the contracts to which Bob was subject, and could easily lead to a situation in which some people would regard Bob as married while other people did not. A total mess. To be sure, such situations can also arise in states with Common Law marriage, but having everyone draft up their own "marriage contracts" would make things even worse.
A contract is a contract. It wouldn’t matter what other people “saw”. If they want to sue each other over it, that’s fine with me. Stupid people should be separated from their money, even if that means getting lawyers involved.
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