Challenging DOMA - One Year In
A year ago, we stood in a ballroom at the Parker House in Boston, a band of LGBT lawyers, same-sex married couples, and widowers, milling around the microphones, ready to go. We were there to announce our filing of Gill v. Office of Personnel Management, the first serious legal challenge in the country to the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).
The Parker House, right on the Freedom Trail, is a great place to challenge the status quo: it’s where JFK announced his initial run for Congress in 1946, where Malcolm X worked as a teenager, and where in 2003 GLAD talked to the press when we won Goodridge– making Massachusetts the first marriage equality state.
It’s been a busy year since we filed Gill. An initial flurry of national press coverage was followed by analysis in the National Law Journal, the New Yorker, and in blogs from Politico to Pam’s House Blend. Other cases were filed (Perry v Schwarzenegger, Massachusetts vs HHS), and marriage equality passed legislatively for the first time in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. (Though Maine voters took it back, for now.)
Gill has moved forward with briefings from GLAD and counter-briefings from the Department of Justice. We even won an interim victory for same-sex spouses seeking new passports in their married names. Briefing is now complete and the next step will be for the judge to set a hearing date (stay tuned).
But the most important DOMA development of this past year is this: hundreds of same-sex couples got married, in Iowa, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and, most recently, Washington D.C. And when they did, they ran smack-dab into DOMA. We keep hearing from folks – on our InfoLine, through our DOMA survey, by email and phone call, of the many and poignant ways in which DOMA hurts their families.
One woman wrote to us about her wife, who had just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. They are worried about the road ahead and the federal government’s denial of their marriage, for the life they’ve built together, and for the struggles they will face together and someday alone. A young couple wrote in disbelief when they found that one of them, a federal employee, would not be able to put the other, who is self-employed, on her health insurance. Another frets about her Mexican fiancée,– unlike heterosexual married couples, gay people cannot sponsor their spouses for citizenship.
These stories continue to flow, as we knew they would a year ago when Herb Burtis stood at the microphone in the Parker House ballroom and told about his 60 years with John, their marriage, and John’s death from Parkinson’s disease. “Just as I struggled to cope with John’s loss, I never thought I would have to fight the federal government for the legal and financial protections that I need, and that other surviving spouses can count on.”
Herb and all of our plaintiffs will soon have their first day in court. On that day, we will all take the next giant step in bringing down DOMA.
Today we are launching DOMA Stories: Federal Discrimination Hurts Families. Each week, we will publish a new story from a family whose life is impacted by DOMA. This week, read about Rebecca Rehm, Judi Burgess and their daughter Beau, A Very Ordinary Family.