Obama’s Marriage Equality Position Sets Up Future Clash

via Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post

President Obama is walking a tightrope on same-sex marriage, teetering between his stated view that marriage is the province of the states and his legal position that refusal to recognize same-sex marriage can violate the Constitution.

In his interview with ABC’s Robin Roberts, the president emphasized the traditional state role in defining marriage. “I continue to believe that this is an issue that is going to be worked at the local level because, historically, this has not been a federal issue,” he said.

Referring to Mitt Romney’s support for a constitutional amendment to bar same-sex marriage, the president warned it would be “a mistake to try to make what has traditionally been a state issue into a national issue.”

But in Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court’s 1967 ruling that anti-miscegenation laws violate the equal protection and due process clauses of the Constitution, the justices did exactly what Obama counsels against. The decision transformed a state issue into a national one, because of the odiousness of discriminating on the basis of race and the fundamental importance of the right to marry.

“The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men,” Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in Loving.

Federal courts are now grappling with the ruling’s modern-day equivalent: whether those constitutional protections extend to same-sex couples. Under Obama’s direction, the Justice Department took the extraordinary step of declining to defend the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the 1996 law that prohibits the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages from states that perform them.

“We consider that a violation of [the] equal protection clause,” Obama told Roberts. “I helped to prompt that move on the part of the Justice Department.”

The stance of the Obama Justice Department in the DOMA cases can, for now, be squared with the president’s states’-rights position. After all, in the pending litigation the department is arguing in favor of the ability of states to define marriage on their own terms, rather than being dictated to by the federal government.

But the implications of the Justice Department’s legal arguments point to an eventual clash with the president’s leave-it-to-the-states approach. In its brief arguing that DOMA is unconstitutional, the department said that laws discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation should be subject to “heightened scrutiny” by courts. That would mean such laws could pass constitutional muster only if they are “substantially related to an important governmental objective.”

DOMA, it contended, failed to meet that test. Citing earlier Supreme Court rulings, the Justice Department argued that the interests Congress asserted in passing DOMA, such as “defending traditional notions of morality” or “promoting heterosexuality,” are not acceptable justifications.

“Discouraging homosexuality, in other words, is not a governmental interest that justifies sexual orientation discrimination,” the brief stated.

Neither, it continued, is the notion of defending traditional heterosexual marriage. “As an initial matter, reference to tradition, no matter how long established, cannot by itself justify a discriminatory law under equal protection principles,” the brief said.

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