Box Turtle Bulletin
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyJune 26th, 2016
Thea Spyer and Edith Windsor
Edith Windsor and Thea Spyer shared a modest Greenwich Village apartment for three decades before they finally decided to marry in Canada in 2007. The decided to formally marry after Spyer, already paralyzed with Multiple Sclerosis, was diagnosed with a heart condition. Spyer died at home in 2009, which sent the grieving Windsor to the hospital with a heart attack. When she came home, she found a $363,053 estate tax bill on the inheritance that Spyer had left her. Windsor filed for a refund from the IRS, but it was denied because of Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act, which barred the federal government from recognizing their marriage. Windsor got a lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, and sued, arguing that DOMA violated the U.S. Constitution’s Equal Protection clause.
The lawsuit was filed in November of 2009, just three months before U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Obama Administration agreed that DOMA was unconstitutional and that the Attorney General’s office would no longer defend the law in court. This left the door open for the Republican-led House of Representatives to defend DOMA instead, but to no avail. On June 6, 2012, Judge Barbara S. Jones ruled that Section 3 of DOMA was unconstitutional under the Equal Protection clause. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that decision in October, which sent the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. On June 26, 2013, the court issued its 5-4 decision in the case of United States v. Windsor, finding that Section 3 of DOMA violated the U.S. Constitution “as a deprivation of the liberty of the person protected by the Fifth Amendment” because the Federal Government was treating some state-sanctioned marriages differently from others. This federal action, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote, “demean[ed] the couple, whose moral and sexual choices the Constitution protects.” Kennedy also noted the broad reach of DOMA’s effects:
DOMA instructs all federal officials, and indeed all persons with whom same-sex couples interact, including their own children, that their marriage is less worthy than the marriages of others. The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and to injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in person hood and dignity. By seeking to displace this protection and treating those persons as living in marriages less respected than others, the federal statute is in violation of the Fifth Amendment.
The Windsor decision had both immediate effects and far-reaching ones. Immediately, Edith Windsor got her estate taxes back from the IRS. Soon after, the Obama Administration began issuing instructions for granting federal recognition of same-sex marriages with regard to taxes, employment benefits, Medicare, Veterans Benefits, and other areas impacted by marital status.
Windsor has also had some very important legal effects which influenced 64 state and federal court rulings in favor of marriage equality. According to Freedom to Marry, forty-one marriage equality rulings have been issued in federal court, eighteen have been issued in state court, and five have been issued by a federal appellate court. Only five rulings have gone against marriage quality, including the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. Marriage equality is now the law for 37 states (although Alabama and Kansas both have been recalcitrant), the District of Columbia and Guam. Those developments make the scathing Windsor dissent by Justice Antonin Scalia both entertaining and somewhat prescient:
In my opinion, however, the view that this Court will take of state prohibition of same-sex marriage is indicated beyond mistaking by today’s opinion. As I have said, the real rationale of today’s opinion … is that DOMA is motivated by “bare… desire to harm” couples in same-sex marriages. How easy it is, indeed how inevitable, to reach the same conclusion with regard to state laws denying same-sex couples marital status.
…As far as this Court is concerned, no one should be fooled; it is just a matter of listening and waiting for the other shoe. By formally declaring anyone opposed to same-sex marriage an enemy of human decency, the majority arms well every challenger to a state law restricting marriage to its traditional definition.
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Lonnie
June 26th, 2016
“HRC and others quietly gave created a mythology around her, that she was a little old lady sitting in an empty garrett somewhere in a cold, drafty apartment in New York, striking match after match just to keep herself warm while the wolves howled at her door.
In fact, Windsor is more than well off — my informal and rough estimates place her value at around ten million. She is a pauper only in comparison to New York’s wealthy, for whom the amount is pocket change, but she is far more comfortably off than many of the delusional gays and lesbians living on much, much less who fondly imagine that they actually have estates that would be affected by the DOMA ruling in any way. The central point is what we have to pay attention to: that Windsor was not refusing to pay taxes because she couldn’t afford to, but because she refused to.”
The Secret History of Gay Marriage by Yasmin Nair
http://yasminnair.net/content/secret-history-gay-marriage
Priya Lynn
June 26th, 2016
So, Lonnie you’re saying that because the taxes weren’t a big deal to Windsor she should have been happy to pay them when a similarly situated heterosexual widow wouldn’t have to.
That’s incredibly dumb and bigoted.
Ben in Oakland
June 26th, 2016
Yasmin nair is an enemy of neoliberalism, which is a right wing ploy to call radical conservatism a liberal plot.
If she said the sky was blue, I’d probably go out to check.
CPT_Doom
June 26th, 2016
In her book on the DOMA case, Roberta Kaplan was very frank about Edie & Thea being well off. In fact, it was a concern in taking the case: would a rich woman be a sympathetic plaintiff? On the other hand, conservatives hate paying taxes, so the case might appeal to judges who are not liberal. And the tax argument was a very clear one; the inequity was obvious. Sure Edie got more than $600 grand back, with interest, but the case provided such an important ruling that most people wouldn’t begrudge Edie her wealth.
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