The court ruled against Speaker of the House John Boehner’s hand-picked lawyer for theBLAG, Paul Clement, whom U.S. taxpayers are paying up to $1.5 million to defend DOMA. With this ruling, now five federal court judges have declared DOMA unconstitutional.
This quote came from the NCRM blog and an article about how another Federal Court has called DOMA unconstitutional. The linked article is a great read, but the point I want to address deals specifically with the way our tax dollars are being used to find these unsuccessful attempts to defend discrimination. Why is no one really screaming about that?
First, let me say, that I don’t think every citizen gets to pick and choose how their specific tax dollars are spent. I believe in the representative democracy system that we have, and we send women and men to Washington, and expect them to make wise decisions as they spend our money. The budget is huge, and I’m not looking for citizens to try and micromanage specific line items of such a complex budget. On the other hand, these are our hard earned tax dollars, and it is a very fair question to wonder why the Republican controlled House feels they can spend these sums of our money in failed attempts to defend discrimination.
It seems to me there ought to be some national LGBT organizatIon to start to pound away at this, with the goal to continually draw attention to how the Far Right leadership uses limited resources and doesn’t spend them to really help people, but rather to pay a high priced individual lawyer.
There is no one strategy that should be used against DOMA, but rather, it should be attacked from multiple angles and for multiple reasons. This is often a failing of the LGBT community when it comes to activism. We put all our efforts behind one perspective, and even if we are “right” in that approach, we sometimes fail. This is best evidenced looking at how we have not been able to win a marriage equality battle in the voting booth. Even when we are right, and marriage equality should pass, we lose. We DOMA we must not rely on only one strategy, but adopt and work on all of the various strategies we can find. Some of these are:
- By its very nature, rules governing who can marry have been left to the states. DOMA. represents an infringement upon allowing states to manage marriage.
- DOMA discriminates against legally married couples and treats legally married same-sex couples different from legally married opposite-sex couples. All couples who are legally married should be treated the same regardless of the sexual orientation or gender of the two persons.
- The Department of Justice has determined that it can not defend DOMA, and it should follow that whatever a court decides should hold. By choosing to defend DOMA, the US House has chosen to act outside of the balance of government.
- In a time of tight financial hardships, why is one branch of our government using taxpayer funds to fight a battle fueled by religious arguments?
- On the one hand, DOMA is about marriage Equality, but on another level, it is not. Where else is there a federal law that demands people be treated differently because of gender or sexual orientation?
There may be others as well.
Point! Nicely written