Richard WarnickCongress Should Repeal DOMA
Glenn Greenwald, while recognizing that there are higher priorities for the incoming administration, says the time has come to ask Congress to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). An editorial in today’s Washington Post says it’s “time to press Washington to move in the right direction” on DOMA in response to California’s Prop 8 fiasco, and similar unfair and unconstitutional discriminatory measures in Florida and Arizona.
From Greenwald’s post:
Legalizing gay marriage remains very controversial. But extending marriage-based government benefits equally to same-sex couples — which is all repealing DOMA, especially Section 3, would do — is not particularly controversial.
How is it possible to argue otherwise in light of polls which conclusively prove that majorities of Americans favor (and have long favored) such policies, as well as — more persuasively still — the fact that the country just elected, by a landslide, a President who condemned DOMA as an “abhorrent law” and vowed emphatically to repeal it, while his Vice President said, in the debate watched by tens of millions of Americans: “in an Obama-Biden administration, there will be absolutely no distinction from a constitutional standpoint or a legal standpoint between a same-sex and a heterosexual couple.” That statement didn’t create even a ripple of controversy, nor did Obama’s emphatic opposition to DOMA.
We have to restore the Constitution of the United States of America. While we’re at it, let’s have Congress make warrantless surveillance illegal again and bring back habeas corpus. Torture is already illegal, and our new President can end that with an executive order.