The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA)1 appears to be headed toward the scrap heap of obsolete legislation. President Barack Obama recently directed the Justice Department to cease defending the law in court. President Bill Clinton, who signed DOMA into law in 1996, changed course last week and announced his support for marriage equality. This week, an immigration judge in Newark postponed the scheduled deportation of a Venezuelan man married to an American man, in order to give the Attorney General and an appeals court time to sort out the immigration status of same-sex spouses.
All indications are that DOMA is destined to join ‘separate but equal’ as an embarrassing footnote in our history of jurisprudence. When this happens, same-sex marriage laws will be determined and given effect at the state level.
