Justice dept defends DOMA

[luluisme]

The LGBT community's in something of an uproar, and understandably.
Short story: DOMA (The Defense of Marriage Act) is a law that is used as a justification to deny same-sex couple benefits, and in immigration deportations when half the same-sex couple is not of US origin. People have been putting forth lawsuits arguing against it's

Comments

[luluisme]

the commentary regarding the brief has been incredibly slanted and manipulative - I mean, repeatedly saying "OBAMA said 'blah blah blah'" rather than even "Obama's justice department said 'blah blah blah'" is obviously a manipulation.

Yeah, I noticed that too. (As you can see I didn't invoke Obama in my post title.) Although it is important to note, that while there should be quite a bit of seperation between the President and the Justice Department, in reality, the President has been known to set the priorities. So, it's also fair that he take some of the heat.

And there is a BIG difference between saying "there is precedent for states to not recognize some marriages that are legal in other states, such as when some states allowed first cousins to marry and others didn't, or when there was issue regarding minimum marriage age" and saying "same sex marriage is the same thing as incest and child rape"

Agreed that this was not entirely rationally reacted too. That being said, as a group the LGBT community is understandably getting pretty sensitized to the "well we don't allow people to ABC" argument which usually includes children, relations, and pets: entities with arguably limited consent. A more appropriate comparison would be interracial marriage, (something always left to the LGBT community to point out) as consent is not a significant issue to the discussion. Noting that the justice department chose not to point out that there _had_ been precedent in limiting interracial marriage and this is not considered acceptable these days. To take on the precedent angle without the most obvious and relevant precedent (history of interracial marriage), I think, shows either ignorance, bigotry or a purposeful acting in bad faith of the members of the justice dept who chose to bring this argument up. Bigotry is by far the most likely interpretation. Just my 2 cents.

[baerana]

i do think providing precedents that only support you is considered bad faith (as an officer of the court, you are supposed to provide supporting and non-supporting precedents) - whether the bad faith comes from bigotry, of course I couldn't say for sure, not being the people who wrote it, it does seem like it was.