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The March Toward Marriage Equality in a Post-<i>Windsor</i> Nation

By Frank Gulino
November 26, 2013

The Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Windsor, 133 S. Ct. 2675 (2013), has had immediate, positive effects on the aspirations of same-sex couples to be accorded the same rights long held by heterosexual spouses. In Windsor, the Court struck down as unconstitutional the definition of marriage ' as the union of one man and one woman ' contained in the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) (codified at 1 U.S.C. ' 7). The Court ruled that DOMA, by its restrictive definition of marriage, sought to ' and did ' injure same-sex spouses, legally married under state law, by denying them the array of federal benefits enjoyed by heterosexual married couples.

As Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in his majority opinion, “DOMA writes inequality into the entire United States Code ' forc[ing] same-sex couples to live as married for the purpose of state law but unmarried for the purpose of federal law ' .” Windsor, 133 S. Ct. at 2694. Justice Kennedy noted that DOMA prevented same-sex married couples from obtaining benefits they would otherwise be entitled to under more than 1,000 federal statutes and regulations. See id. at 2690, 2694.

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