President orders halt to support of Defense of Marriage Act

President Obama has ordered the Justice Department to stop defending provisions of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which barred recognition of same-sex marriages by the federal government.

Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. announced the change of policy and some of its immediate ramifications in a letter to Congress. Holder wrote that “Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act, as applied to same-sex couples who are legally married under state law, violates the equal protection component of the Fifth Amendment.”

According to Tobias B. Wolff, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, in a story in the New York Times, the decision marks the first time that the U.S. government has ever backed such a position, and could possibly lead to the end of some forms of discrimination against gays and lesbians.

The Associated Press reported that the move “drew a sharp response” from House Speaker John Boehner’s spokesman, Michael Steel: “While Americans want Washington to focus on creating jobs and cutting spending, the president will have to explain why he thinks now is the appropriate time to stir up a controversial issue that sharply divides the nation,” Steel said.

According to a report by Carolyn Lochhead of the San Francisco Chronicle,  the move has immediate consequences only in the District of Columbia and the five states that allow same-sex marriage: Massachusetts, Iowa, New Hampshire, Vermont and Connecticut, as well as the roughly 18,000 couples whose legal marriages in California were grandfathered in before the Proposition 8 voter initiative took effect in 2008 to ban same-sex marriage.

Holder’s letter to the Congressional leadership said the government would not defend the statutes in two pending lawsuits. However, Congress could decide whether to hire attorneys to defend the statue.

The local impact in California is not yet clear, but attorneys defending Judge Vaughn Walker’s ruling from last year striking down Proposition 8 filed a motion today with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco to lift the stay on same-sex marriages, which was imposed when the proposition was ruled unconstitutional last August, according to a story in the Bay Citizen.

Also today, the Associated Press reported that Hawaii’s governor signed a same-sex civil unions law.

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