Massachusetts Out to Gut DOMA

Maybe it's time to rethink the whole government regulation of marriage thing, as in, let's send it back to the churches, mosques and synagogues, et al, where it belongs and keep the state's paws off.

Massachusetts sues feds over definition of marriage

BOSTON (AP) - Massachusetts, the first state to legalize gay marriage, sued the U.S. government Wednesdayover a federal law that defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

The federal Defense of Marriage Act interferes with the right of Massachusetts to define and regulate marriage as it sees fit, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley said. The 1996 law denies federal recognition of gay marriage and gives states the right to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Boston, argues the act "constitutes an overreaching and discriminatory federal law." It says the approximately 16,000 same-sex couples who have married in Massachusetts since the state began performing gay marriages in 2004 are being unfairly denied federal benefits given to heterosexual couples.

"They are entitled to equal treatment under the laws regardless of whether they are gay or straight," Coakley said at a news conference to discuss the lawsuit.

Besides Massachusetts, five other states—Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine and Iowa—have legalized gay marriage. Gay marriage opponents in Maine said Wednesday that they had collected enough signatures to put the state's pending law on the November ballot for a possible override.

The Massachusetts lawsuit challenges the section of the federal law that creates a federal definition of marriage as "a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife."

Before the law was passed, Coakley said, the federal government recognized that defining marital status was the "exclusive prerogative of the states."

Now, because of the U.S. law's definition of marriage, same-sex couples are denied access to benefits given to heterosexual married couples, including federal income tax credits, employment benefits, retirement benefits, health insurance coverage and Social Security payments, the lawsuit says.

The Defense of Marriage Act was merely meant to prevent one or several states from forcing their definition of marriage -- specifically gay marriage -- on other states. Frankly, if the Constitution were upheld consistently in the courts of the land, there would be no need for it.

But now it actually becomes the focus for an anti-discrimination claim, and there's a good chance the litigants will prevail. Thus we may find ourselves one 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision from complete marriage lunacy.

There is a better way. Get government out of the validation of marriage business. Who ever said that the right to marry or not marry was controlled by the state anyway? If you believe in God, the right comes from Him. If you don't believe in God, you probably think that the right is inherently yours to begin with, not resident in some elected or unelected collection of clowns.

If government needs to issue some sort of certification of common domesticity in order to regulate who files as a couple for tax purposes, fine. Do so, but let's not pretend that it's a decree from High Heaven.

Doing this would allow churches to marry off people as their beliefs see fit. It also should satisfy people of the homosexual persuasion that they are getting a fair shake from the government.

I say "should" because I know that it won't. The end game is to use government regulation of marriage to force churches to abandon their belief system, to make a mockery of the sacrament. You may shake your head and say "no, this isn't true." But it is. Someone should say so.

I used to believe that the First Amendment to the Constitution was nearly impregnable, that the protection of the free exercise of one's faith from government interference was a dead-on lock. But now I'm not so sure that this protection is any safer than any of the other constitutional protections being stripped away by the progressive movement, of which the elevation of gay rights to a higher priority is a part.

It is one thing to say that you don't care what people, of their own free will, do in the privacy of their bedrooms. It is quite another to say that because of that activity they deserve a special shot at government benefits, and that religious institutions should modify their beliefs and rites to accommodate a new privileged class.