There's been a lot of heated discussion on this site about Obama's defending DOMA -- many people on this site claiming that he was required to despite evidence to the contrary.
Well, now Time Magazine has weighed in. And they agree with the "No he didn't" crowd.
Now the Administration says it opposes DOMA and wants it overturned — but that tradition dictates that it defend the law. And that is why, the White House said in a statement, "the Department of Justice has filed a response to a legal challenge to [DOMA], as it traditionally does when acts of Congress are challenged." (See a gay-rights timeline.)
Legalistically speaking, the tradition argument is true, but it's yet another Obama dodge. The Administration could easily decline to defend the anti-gay law on discrimination grounds, just as the Administration of George H.W. Bush declined to defend federal laws setting a preference for awarding broadcast licenses to minority-owned businesses in 1990. The radical firebrand at the Department of Justice who successfully argued against defending those laws? A young DOJ attorney named John Roberts, who is now the Chief Justice of the United States. Clearly, Obama could have refused to defend DOMA if he had really wanted to. Georgetown's Hunter cites other cases in which the Justice Department has declined to defend laws, including one involving a minor cable-TV dispute. As Eugene Volokh of UCLA told me Aug. 18, there is nothing in the constitution or the law that would have prevented the Department of Justice from sitting on the sidelines in the DOMA case.
Nothing except politics. Obama's triangulation between left and right has become excruciatingly obvious on this issue, and he's not quite as deft a politician as Bill Clinton at keeping his left flank at bay.
Obama did NOT have to defend this odious law, but chose to.