Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley recently filed a lawsuit in United States District Court challenging the constitutionality of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, also known as DOMA. DOMA defines marriage as a union between one man and one woman and therefore excludes more than 16,000 Massachusetts married same-sex couples from certain federal rights.Coakley's suit (no, not her hot lady suit—the lawsuit) alleges that DOMA, which affects more than 1,100 federal statutory provisions, violates the United States Constitution by interfering with the Commonwealth’s sovereign authority to define and regulate the marital status of its residents.
According to Coakley's press release, six states – Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire – currently permit, or will soon permit, qualified, committed same-sex couples to obtain marriage licenses.
In addition, California continues to honor the marriage licenses that were extended to over 18,000 same-sex couples prior to the passage of Proposition 8. Two other states, New York and Rhode Island, as well as the District of Columbia honor marriages between same-sex couples that are celebrated in Massachusetts. Seven states – California, Nevada, Hawaii, New Jersey, Washington, Wisconsin and Oregon – recognize domestic partnerships or civil unions between same-sex couples.
Twenty-nine other states have enacted what are commonly called mini-DOMAs, which ban marriage between couples of the same sex.
Coakley said on July 8, 2009: “DOMA affects residents of Massachusetts in very real and very negative ways by depriving access to important economic safety nets and other protections that couples count on when they marry and that help them to take care of one another and their families. DOMA also directly and fundamentally interferes with Massachusetts’s right as a state sovereign to determine the marital status of its residents.”
DOMA was enacted in 1996 in anticipation of the possibility that Hawaii might license marriages between same-sex couples.
