When Equal Rep began the campaign to encourage the Department of Justice to refuse to defend DOMA, it was a movement based on grassroots participation (you can still send your pink “flip-flop” card to the White House). But now, Laurence Tribe, one of the pre-eminent Constitutional law professors in the country and the professor who hired Obama as a research assistant in his first year of law school, has publicly stated that DOMA Section 3, when applied to the couples in the Massachusetts case, is clearly unconstitutional.

Tribe tells the founder of Equal Rep: “I’m not at all reluctant to have it known that I think the equality component of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause forbids the federal government to deny same-sex spouses benefits identical to those that it would grant to opposite-sex spouses when the spouses are “married” under the law of their state – that is, when the spouses were married and reside in states where the law forbids a distinction between same-sex and opposite-sex marriage and rejects the DOMA definition of “marriage.””

Read the legal memo supporting the right to refuse to defend unconstitutional laws by clicking through to the flip flop site.

The Department of Justice has until June 29th to determine if it will, in fact, defend DOMA.