Defense of Marriage Act

Right-wing pseudo-historian David Barton, who compares homosexuality to smoking and celebrates the fact that there isn’t a cure for AIDS, said today on WallBuilders Live! with co-host Rick Green that same-sex marriage is much like letting people marry horses or dogs. Discussing the Defense of Marriage Act, Barton warned that marriage equality proponents may try to “evangelize” their belief that “marriage shouldn’t be between a man and a woman” since “that’s unfair for two men who want to be together, or two women, or a horse and a dog, or whatever it is.”

Barton: Other courts, other areas started saying ‘well you know we can’t really justify this position anymore, marriage shouldn’t be between a man and a woman, that’s unfair for two men who want to be together, or two women, or a horse and a dog, or whatever it is,’ so at that point as it looked like the states were starting to mess around the problem you have is the contracts in one state are supposed to be honored by another. So if I make a business contract with you in Texas and we move to Oklahoma, that contract is going to be recognized in Oklahoma. Well on marriage, that’s a contract. So if one state suddenly says we want same-sex marriage and in Texas we say we don’t, just because you got married in Vermont and moved to Texas doesn’t mean we have to recognize your contract.

So that ability of saying one contract is going to be forced on another caused Congress to act in 1996 and say look the federal government and the states both have to deal with marriage, now here’s what we’re doing, on the federal level we are telling you marriage is a man and a woman and everything that deals with marriage on the federal level is going to be considered a man and a woman. They said as far as the states, you states are not going to be bound by the marriage decision of another state. Green: You do it the way you want to do it and don’t expect to be able to export that to another state.

Barton: Don’t use that to try to evangelize the other forty-nine states.

Green: And we won’t let the other states force it on you.

Barton: That’s right.

Ed Meese, who served as attorney general under Ronald Reagan, told Barton and Green that the legalization of same-sex marriage in several states “just shows how the culture has deteriorated over two centuries,” and asserted that same-sex marriage is an attempt to “defy nature.”

Green: It’s almost like they are making it up on the fly, the actual language of the Constitution doesn’t matter; it’s what these judges that happen to be on the bench at the time think it should mean.

Meese: The founders, we go back to the founders, the reason that they didn’t put something in the Constitution to say that marriage is the union of a man and a woman is nobody would have even thought at that time that there could be any other. It just shows how the culture has deteriorated over two centuries.

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Green: You also mention that the Defense of Marriage Act should control what’s happening on the military side of things. How have they managed to push through so much with the military in the Obama administration on this issue working around DOMA?

Meese: Well that’s still an open issue and that’s why DOMA is very important. For example, whether chaplains should be required to participate in a homosexual marriage ceremony; whether that would be required as part of their duties, that’s where DOMA is a very important statute. This idea that somehow there is some obscure right in the Constitution to defy nature, as they do in homosexual marriage, is just ludicrous.

Today, yet another court ruled that the Defense Of Marriage Act (DOMA) is unconstitutional, this time finding that Section 3 of the law, which prevents the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages in states where they are legal, fails the “rational basis test” as applied to laws that deny equal protection and harm a group long subject to discrimination. The unanimous ruling by the three judge panel of the First Circuit Court of Appeals, including two Republican nominees, found no “connection between DOMA’s treatment of same-sex couples and its asserted goal of strengthening the bonds and benefits to society of heterosexual marriage.”

Bruce Hausknecht of Focus on the Family’s CitizenLink criticized the court’s “unfortunate exercise of judicial tampering with the rules by which constitutional cases are decided,” and the Alliance Defense Fund’s Dale Schowengerdt said the decision permits states to “hold the federal government, and potentially other states, hostage to redefine marriage.”

Remarkably, Massachusetts Family Institute president Kris Mineau claimed that the First Circuit Court of Appeals shouldn’t have any federal power to rule on the case as “a Massachusetts-based court “…seemingly unaware that it is a federal court!

Kris Mineau, president of the Massachusetts Family Institute, argued Thursday that the ruling is "bizarre" for requiring the federal government to accept Massachusetts' definition of marriage, and violates the federal government's right to determine the application of federal benefits.

"For a Massachusetts-based court to just audaciously proclaim that the federal government is wrong and has to recognize a unique social experiment in Massachusetts for the purpose of providing benefits is bizarre and a violation of the principles of our federalist system," Mineau said, according to Reuters.

Judson Phillips of Tea Party Nation told members today that marriage equality for gays and lesbians is part of the “east coast liberal freak show” bent on ruining America:

Whether we like it or not, because the liberal states have enacted homosexual marriage, sooner or later the Supreme Court is going to say those marriages must be recognized by all fifty states.

While there are many religious and moral arguments that can be made about this, the simple fact is for the last sixty years or so; the left has been attacking the basic family unit. The end result of this has been the creation of poverty where none existed before. It has been the creation of an under class, born and raised in poverty, unlikely to escape poverty and encouraged to engage in the same behaviors that landed their parents in poverty.

Given the left’s track record in this area, they should not even be allowed to offer an opinion much less pass laws as they are doing in some of the east coast liberal freak show states.

Last week we reported that the Family Research Council asked members to pray against “homosexual tyranny” in America after the federal government agreed to have Blue Cross Blue Shield offer full benefits for a same-sex spouse of a federal employee after a judge ruled in favor of the employee in her lawsuit against the Defense of Marriage Act. Naturally, Americans For Truth About Homosexuality president Peter LaBarbera is demanding that Congress impeach President Obama as a result of his administration’s decision to grant her health benefits:

"This is another shocking act by the Obama administration, which has got to be the most arrogant and Constitution-abusing president in America's history," he decides. "The Obama administration didn't like the Defense of Marriage Act, which was passed by Congress [and] signed into law by then-President Clinton, and so now they're just ignoring it and blatantly disregarding it."

This particular case, however, is not over, as Republicans have appealed the district court's decision, which has no effect on enrollments requested by other same-sex couples. Even though the law is being challenged in court, LaBarbera says it is still the law.

"I believe that President Obama should be impeached on this alone," he suggests. "He's not dictator of the United States of America; he's president, and he can't just ignore the law, ignore the Constitution, to pander to his homosexual activist base."