:pop Should be interesting. How do you think they will rule on this? Personally I think DOMA will be ruled un-constitutional. There are a few social conservatives who will vote against it, but I think Roberts & Kennedy will vote with the lefties on the bench.
Wow! :VeryScared: A non-election thread.
Thomas Sowell: There are no solutions, just trade-offs.
I have to disagree Fred. Section 3 of the DOMA legislation is nothing more or less than the definition of the word "marriage" as it was understood and applied by Congress when it wrote legislation for the previous 200+ years the United States existed. It seems a bit unreasonable for SCOTUS to argue that the legislative intent of the 14th Amendment was an instruction on how the courts were to interpret the amendment and then turn around and say that legislative intent is not germane to interpreting the legislation of Congress. How could Congress have intended to include homosexual marriage when it was writing legislation for the past 200 years when there was not a single segment of society and not a single legislative body in existence that used a working definition of marriage which included the union between two homosexuals? It isn't as though homosexual relationships are a recent invention, they have been part of human history for as long as humans have existed. It isn't akin to new technology which didn't exist at the time the 4th Amendment was written being included in an existing prohibition. Marriage between homosexuals had never before been recognized or contemplated by any legislative body or any court. Section 3 of DOMA doesn't preclude Congress from updating the definition, it simply establishes what the definition as understood by Congress was when it drafted existing legislation.
Do you really think that SCOTUS is empowered to ignore the intent of Congress as it interprets the legislation that it passed? I might agree that the federal law which fails to allow a homosexual couple that is legally recognized as being in a civil union or married under the laws of a State to file bankruptcy jointly is discriminatory and thus unconstitutional, but the remedy for that is to declare that law unconstitutional and make Congress rewrite the law, not to take the language of the law and apply new court derived definitions to the language the law contains. The court may not legislate, that power is reserved to the legislative bodies themselves. It is one thing for SCOTUS to declare a law discriminatory and unconstitutional, quite another for the Court to apply its own definitions to the language of the law, definitions never even considered or contemplated by the legislative body when it was writing the legislation.
