The Supreme Court’s ruling against DOMA: a pit stop, not the finish line
Last week the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Windsor that section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is unconstitutional. For all purposes of Federal laws, section 3 defined marriage as a union between one man and one woman. The case arose in New York, under the law of which same-sex couples may enter a status that New York defined as marriage. Ms Windsor, a resident of New York, was the beneficiary of her deceased same-sex spouse's sizeable estate. Under Federal tax law as affected by section 3 of DOMA, she could not claim the marital exemption that would have sheltered all her inheritance from the IRS. Rather, she was assessed over US$363,000 in Federal estate taxes. The legal issue, as the Court chose to define it in the majority opinion, was whether the Federal constitution was violated when it applied its definition of marriage to the resident of a state in which the definition was broader. In this situation, the Court held, DOMA is unconstitutional as