Back in March, eight married gay couples and three widowers filed suit to compel the federal government to recognize their legal marriages. The effort is being led by the same team that helped bring marriage equality to Massachusetts five years ago and seeks to overturn section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which denies married gay couples spousal protections in Seocial Security, federal income tax, federal employee and retiree benefits, and a few other areas.
According to a press release being put out by what looks like an ad-hoc, Facebook-driven advocacy group domaflipflop.com, the Obama administration has until June 22 to decide whether they will defend DOMA in court. http://
It always bears repeating and reinforcing how important marriage equality is to LGBT couples on the guts-and-bricks-and-bones level. A few details from the NYT's coverage of the suit:
The widowers include Dean Hara, the spouse of former Representative Gerry E. Studds. After Mr. Studds died in 2006, Mr. Hara, 51, was denied his Congressional pension and other benefits normally extended to surviving spouses of federal employees.
Another married couple, Melba Abreu and Beatrice Hernandez, estimate they would have saved about $20,000 in federal income tax over the past few years if they had been able to file jointly.
"In our case, the core of our American dream has always been for Melba and I to provide for one another," said Ms. Hernandez, 47, of Boston. "This presents a real threat to that, when we take a good hard look at our future years."
Another plaintiff, Herbert Burtis, 78, lost his spouse last year and would be entitled to about $700 a month in Social Security survivor benefits if his marriage had been heterosexual.
"Nobody else has to go through that begging to be considered equal to other married people," said Mr. Burtis, who married in 2004 but was with his partner for more than 60 years.
See the faces of justice delayed and denied at Towleroad.
I'm looking for verification of the June date for the Holder Justice Department to decide whether or not to defend DOMA, which Obama has called "abhorrent."
They'll have to decide sooner or later, though, and now that both of them are in a totally different kind of pressure cooker than when they spoke out against DOMA, does anybody have a sense of how this will play out.