High court could make gay marriage a 2012 issue

Umm am I allowed to say....Oh shit? This is big? I hope I'm right...

 

I hope so too. This is something to watch, for sure.

 

This is actually quite big. As it says in the article "depends on how the decisions are written: you could write a very broad federal DOMA decision striking down the Defense of Marriage Act, that does really call into question the individual state definitions, by saying that gay and lesbian couples can’t be discriminated against and the government has no good reason for doing so."

If the SCOTUS were to get its hands on this case, the DOMA would lose pretty easily I believe. The federal gov't can't officially take a stance on a social issue, so it's definitely unconstitutional. However, if the only thing they do is strike down DOMA and say that it is entirely a states' rights issue (for which a reasonable case can be argued), then the US ends up with the possibility of states continuing with denials of same-sex marriages. If they completely strike down Section 3, and state that states must recognize out-of-state same-sex marriages, then we basically win. That would imply that I could take a six hour drive from where I am, get married in Iowa, then return to Missouri as a married gay person. It would make the state constitutional definitions and statutes completely useless... We'll see how this goes down.

 

The current Supreme Court doesn't always adhere to the Constitution in its rulings, especially lately. There's a not small chance that the Supreme Court would uphold DOMA. It all depends on the mood of Justice Kennedy. Don't forget that several of the SCOTUS judges think laws forbidding gay sex are Constitutional.

 

It is true that they could uphold DOMA, but I'm rather optimistic with SCOTUS atm since they ruled on Brown vs. EMC in the EMC's favor, which was rather constitutionally sound. In essence, 7/9 ruled in EMC's favor with 5 of those doing so because they classified video games as free speech in the same way they classified other entertainment media as free speech. Perhaps I'm being overly optimistic (from that case), but it seems to me they will at least go as far as disbanding DOMA.