The phrase “Love the judgment, not the judges” comes to mind. Huh, I wonder where I could have gotten that from…
First, I IANAL, but as of today I believe that the federal government will be required to treat all legally married couples equally in regards to federal benefits.
The ability to sponsor a fiance or spouse (and his/her kids) for immigration is a federal benefit which should be affected by the DOMA ruling.
It is not clear from today’s ruling that states will have to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states as it relates to provisioning of state benefits. That is a lawsuit for another day and one which will surely come.
A lawyer type may disagree, but I believe today’s ruling would mean that a legally married same-sex couple can file a joint federal income tax return regardless of the couple’s state of residence or where the couple got married. Joint filing status for married couples is a federal tax issue. But it is not clear that the same couple could file a state income tax return jointly.
The DOMA decision (actually United States v. Windsor) is a mere 77 pages long, including the dissents. The Prop 8 case (Hollingworth v. Perry is only 35 pages - a short bathroom read by Supreme Court standards. Thousands of pages will be written by the pundits about both rulings by the end of the day.
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As Nevada residents you will still have to comply with whatever requirements (waiting period or residency requirements? I really don’t know) are in place in California law in order to obtain a marriage license. But yes, same-sex marriage is now legal in California.
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As far as I can tell, you are eligible for admission to the Married-Filing-Jointly club as soon you get to that CA courthouse and the deed is done.
The SC Opinions are here, for anyone with an hour or so to kill… (PDFs)
From the Opinion:
So individual States have the option to recognize out-of-state same-sex marriages or not. And after this ruling, they still have that right. So a same-sex couple married in New York is now considered ‘married’ by the Federal Government, but may not be considered ‘married’ by other States (I’m not sure about Texas laws in particular). It seems that said couple could file Federal taxes as married, but at the same time be required to file State taxes as individuals, for example.
I agree with this interpretation. There doesn’t seem to be a single word in the dissent that addresses the *merits *of the Prop 8 case; only the question of whether the petitioners did or did not have standing. I suspect that the dissenters either were not permitted to, or felt they should not, address the merits of the case itself, since the Court declined to hear the Case.
Today my Canadian marriage to my British spouse is recognized in my home state of California and my home country. Should I wish to return, I can sponsor my husband for a green card.
I’m about to start crying, which is kind of embarrassing as I’m by myself in a café.
A lot of unanswered questions and confusing contradictions still, but this is a very good thing.
On the standing issue: the Obama Administration wasn’t defending DOMA, but as long as the IRS wasn’t giving Windsor her $360K back – even though she won in the 2nd Circuit – she still had standing.
IANAL either, though, and I might have missed some history there.
Yes. No question Windsor had standing. The concern was whether the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group has standing. If the SCOTUS decided BLAG did not have standing then they could have dismissed as improvidently granted. That would have allowed the lower court ruling to stand but would not have had such wide-sweeping impact.
Must pop in to say I am so very happy about these rulings!
My first thought (besides the obvious “Yay for LGBT Rights”) was that, if striking down DOMA means that all federal agencies are now required to recognize same-sex marriages performed in states where they are legal, I’m really glad I’m no longer working for the Social Security Administration. All of the entitlement codes used to identify spouses and widows are gender-specific, and unless they’ve made some major system changes since I retired they’re going to have big problems when they have to process claims for same-sex couples.
Has their ever been a more misnamed piece of legislation than the “Defense of Marriage Act”.
My first thought was: Lawrence v. Texas came out 10 years ago, also on June 26th. Has my birthday become Awesome Gay Judicial Opinion Day? Is the cosmos trying to tell me something?
Back on Planet Whack-a-doodle, Justice Scalia is still carping about homosexual sodomy. Somehow, I think he protests too much.
Well, he obviously cannot condemn non-homosexual sodomy. Everyone loves sodomy.
With DOMA gone do all states have to recognize same sex marriages from states that allow it?
They didn’t strike down DOMA. Just section 3 of DOMA. Section 2 says states don’t have to recognize gay marriage from other states.
No. That section of DOMA still stands; the court only struck down the part that applies to the federal government.
And just to be clear, Section 2 was not under consideration, so they did not rule one way or the other specifically, so it is still law.
It sounded better than “Defense of bigots clinging desperately to a sinking ship”.
And here is Nancy Pelosi awesomely responding to a question about Michele Bachman’s comments on the decision
Prop 8 is dead “for the moment” in California. Nothing stops a future Governor or Attorney General, who would have standing, to go back to the Supreme Court.
Considering that, when Prop 8 was first passed, it was immediately blocked, but when the state Supreme Court ruled it valid, it also ruled that any same-sex marriages performed during the stay of execution would remain valid, I wonder how many couples are going to try to get married ASAP just in case somebody with standing does get elected in 2014.
Then again, I wouldn’t be surprised to see requests to circulate petitions for a ballot proposition to replace the currently unconstitutional text with “California recognizes for all purposes as valid any marriage between two consenting adults” (with possible text along the lines of “except where both persons are the grandchild of the same person”) on their way to Sacramento as I type this. That is probably how this will end up being resolved once and for all.
I can’t believe I read the whole thing… and I think the court blew it on the standing issue on the Prop 8 case. The dissent seems much more persuasive to me.
I think they should have found standing and then decided this mess on the issues at hand in a way that would have affected the entire country.