Will DOMA be DOA in ’10?
A claim of "DOMA destroying legislation" making its way through Congress comes not as an optimistic pronouncement from GLBT equality groups seeking to secure marriage equality for gay and lesbian families, but rather as a cry of alarm from anti-gay blogger Peter Labarbera, who runs the GLBT-bashing site Americans for Truth About Homosexuality.
A Dec. 17 article at anti-gay religious site OneNewsNow says that the Domestic Partnership Benefits and Obligations Act, which provides family benefits for gay and lesbian employees of the federal government, is "a back-door attempt to achieve federal recognition of same-sex ’marriage,’" and quotes Labarbera as saying, "This appears to be a violation of the spirit and the law of DOMA."
DOMA, or the "Defense of Marriage" Act, is an anti-gay 1996 law that stipulates that the federal government will only recognize marriage as the legal union of a heterosexual couple. The law also grants states the right to ignore marriages bestowed in other states, a provision that some say violates the U.S. Constitution’s "full faith and credit" clause. A legal challenge to DOMA on those grounds is currently underway in federal court.
"DOMA was intended to encourage marriage, the recognition of marriage by the federal government, and this is the repudiation of that," claimed Labarbera, who opposes marriage for gay and lesbian couples. "This is giving marital benefits to both homosexuals and heterosexual ’shack-up’ couples. It’s very bad public policy for the federal government to de-incentivize people getting married... and that’s exactly what this legislation would do."
But right-wing howls of impending doom notwithstanding, Newsweek predicts that DOMA is safe for the coming year, in which midterm elections will take place. "Many activists believe that in his heart Obama supports their flagship issues: the ability to serve openly in the armed forces, to be protected from employment in the workplace, and the right to marry (even though he’s on record as favoring civil unions over marriage)," a Newsweek article titled "Obama Does Nada on Gay Rights" read.
"But they’ve received almost nothing for their troubles," the article notes. "What the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered community has learned this year is that the president is ultimately a pragmatist. Although his very presence in the White House is the stuff of culture wars, Obama himself is reluctant to wade into one. Moreover, if socially divisive policies have the potential to compromise his legislative agenda, Obama has proven that he simply won’t pursue them.
"Expect this tension to become more acute as the 2010 elections loom-and for gay rights to be shunted aside again," the article continued. "The last thing this pragmatist president will do is hand election-year ammunition to an already energized conservative base that’s venomously opposed to gay marriage."
Obama is not alone; openly gay Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank has come out as not in support of another bill in Congress called The Respect for Marriage Act, which would repeal DOMA and protect marriage--all marriages, that is--by granting federal-level recognition to families, gay or straight, who had been married in any jurisdiction. "It’s not anything that’s achievable in the near term," Frank told the media, saying that a host of other, more easily achievable objectives ought to take precedence.
