LGBT issues

by Jeremy Leaming

The Dish headline called it the “single biggest night for gay rights in electoral history.” And it’s hard to mess with that assessment. Voters in Maryland, Maine, Washington and Minnesota voted in favor of marriage equality.

But beyond those ballot measure victories, Andrew Sullivan reports that gay men and lesbians made up five percent of the electorate, the vast majority of them supporting Obama, “the first president to support marriage equality, and who mentioned gays by name for the first time in the history of victory speeches.”

Then of course, there was the election of Tammy Baldwin to the U.S. Senate, the first openly gay person to serve in that chamber.

But Sullivan’s post provides plenty of detail of the efforts to defeat the equality measures, including the funding and work of the National Organization for Marriage, a religious right outfit that strives to scuttle marriage equality by employing tired tactics of demonization. NOM says its mission is “to protect marriage and the faith communities that sustain it.” Sullivan highlights a piece from Adam Serwer reporting that NOM “believed that putting forth black and Latino spokespeople, they could discredit the idea of same-sex marriage as a civil rights cause and drive a wedge between two typically Democratic constituencies…".

In Maryland Serwer concluded NOM’s strategy appeared rather wobbly.

Indeed, Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Coalition, said part of the success in Maryland involved creating partnerships with other civil liberties groups, such as the NAACP, clergy and businesses, The Washington Post reported.

by Jeremy Leaming

In helping to advance equality, a second federal appeals court today invalidated on equal protection grounds the so-called Defense of Marriage Act.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit found a provision of the act a violation of the Constitution’s equal protection clause. In May, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit also invalidated DOMA as a violation of the equal protection clause. Sec. 3 of DOMA states that the federal government only recognizes marriages between men and women.

In Windsor v. U.S., the Second Circuit panel took a different route to invalidating Sec. 3 of DOMA, saying it could not survive “intermediate scrutiny,” meaning the discriminatory treatment of Sec. 3 of DOMA must surive a stricter test of whether a law violates constitutional rights. The government in this case had the burden of explaining why a grouping of people – lesbians and gay men – for discriminatory treatment did not violate the Constitution’s equal protection clause.

In this matter Edith “Edie” Windsor and her partner Thea Spyer were married in Canada in 2007. The married couple lived in New York and when Spyer died in 2009, Edie was forced to pay taxes on Spyer’s estate, something she would not have had to do if her marriage were treated by the government like straight couples’ marriages.

“The class affected by Section 3 of DOMA is composed entirely of persons of the same sex who have married each other,” and same-sex couples like Windsor and her partner  “are the population most visible to the law, and they are foremost in mind when reviewing DOMA’s constitutionality,” the appeals court ruled.