We need to start now to tell our Congresspoeple that we expect a repaal of the Federal DOMA ASAP. Our enemies will be climbing all over the newcomers and the established ones to try to intimidate them into preserving Federal DOMA. We need to demand a repaal but do it politelu and to express our concerns that our antigay opponents will stop at nothing to preserve DOMA. This will be another “mother of all marriage battles” for them to keep marriage equality from achieving national recognition.

Once we get national gay marriage recognition, more and more ststes will likely be passing gay marriage laws at the state level, and other laws like the US customs and immigration will before long be like Canada’s border customs for entering Canada recognition of married gay couples as family at the border crossing both ways and no more absurdities like family and marriage discrimination at US Customs booths within Canadian airports on Canadian soil itself.

Speak up, object, action now.

I love the postcard idea, but they need to be sent to every member of Congress; not just the President. Obama will sign a repeal of DOMA if it hits his desk. We need to convince Congress to pass the bill to get it to him. They need the postcards. Obama is only one branch of the government and hopefully he, unlike Bush, will respect the checks and balances set up in the constitution.

I’ve been in the trenches since the 1970s; now I’m old and disabled and about all I can do is raise hell on the net and write to my State and Federal representatives, and the occasional blast at the most odious of the Non-Religious Reich and the most brain-dead of the remaining Rethuglicans in government.

Speaking of, Newt the Toad Gingrich needs a SERIOUS “high, hot, and a helluva lot” … a serial adulterer spouting off about LGBT people? Broke up with one wife while she was in the hospital with CANCER??!!

Give me an effing break.

Ditto evangelical preachers on the “down low,” gay or straight.

I’m from the South; preachers got the best piece of fried chicken at Sunday dinner and other men’s wives the rest of the week.

And preachers had BETTER tend to their OWN flocks and their OWN marriages before they start in on US.

JESUS said (paraphrasing) “get the 2×4 out of your OWN eye and THEN worry about the SPLINTER in your BROTHER’S eye.”

BUD BURGOON-CLARK
2nd class citizen for now, no thanks to ALL of the above-mentioned, and the ROMAN AND MORMON PAGAN FERTILITY CULTS

Trace: you know what convinces me that Obama will repeal DOMA? HIS OWN WEBSITE!

Tom: Why don’t the bigots help struggling families right now? Because they’re conservative. If you actually care about people other than yourself and your family you’re labeled “liberal” (as if 30 years of conservatism in this country has worked out SO well for us), “radical” “socialist” and/or “communist”.

The conservatives are trying to focus the nation on same-sex marriage, the one area where most voters don’t support equality. We need to ignore the bait and focus on employment nondiscrimination, hate crimes protections, and the like – areas where a large majority supports us.

By Bob Barr…. (As Printed in the LA Times)

In 1996, as a freshman member of the House of Representatives, I wrote the Defense of Marriage Act, better known by its shorthand acronym, DOMA, than its legal title. The law has been a flash-point for those arguing for or against same-sex marriage ever since President Clinton signed it into law. Even President-elect Barack Obama has grappled with its language, meaning and impact.

I can sympathize with the incoming commander in chief. And, after long and careful consideration, I have come to agree with him that the law should be repealed.

The left now decries DOMA as the barrier to federal recognition and benefits for married gay couples. At the other end of the political spectrum, however, DOMA has been lambasted for subverting the political momentum for a U.S. constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. In truth, the language of the legislation — like that of most federal laws — was a compromise.

DOMA was indeed designed to thwart the then-nascent move in a few state courts and legislatures to afford partial or full recognition to same-sex couples. The Hawaii court case Baehr vs. Lewin, still active while DOMA was being considered by Congress in mid-1996, provided the immediate impetus.

The Hawaii court was clearly leaning toward legalizing same-sex marriages. So the first part of DOMA was crafted to prevent the U.S. Constitution’s “full faith and credit” clause — which normally would require State B to recognize any lawful marriage performed in State A — from being used to extend one state’s recognition of same-sex marriage to other states whose citizens chose not to recognize such a union.

Contrary to the wishes of a number of my Republican colleagues, I crafted the legislation so it wasn’t a hammer the federal government could use to force states to recognize only unions between a man and a woman. Congress deliberately chose not to establish a single, nationwide definition of marriage.

However, we did incorporate into DOMA’s second part a definition of marriage that comported with the historic — and, at the time, widely accepted — view of the institution as being between a man and a woman only. But this definition was to be used solely to interpret provisions of federal law related to spouses.

The first part of DOMA, then, is a partial bow to principles of federalism, protecting the power of each state to determine its definition of marriage. The second part sets a legal definition of marriage only for purposes of federal law, but not for the states. That was the theory.

I’ve wrestled with this issue for the last several years and come to the conclusion that DOMA is not working out as planned. In testifying before Congress against a federal marriage amendment, and more recently while making my case to skeptical Libertarians as to why I was worthy of their support as their party’s presidential nominee, I have concluded that DOMA is neither meeting the principles of federalism it was supposed to, nor is its impact limited to federal law.

In effect, DOMA’s language reflects one-way federalism: It protects only those states that don’t want to accept a same-sex marriage granted by another state. Moreover, the heterosexual definition of marriage for purposes of federal laws — including, immigration, Social Security survivor rights and veteran’s benefits — has become a de facto club used to limit, if not thwart, the ability of a state to choose to recognize same-sex unions.

Even more so now than in 1996, I believe we need to reduce federal power over the lives of the citizenry and over the prerogatives of the states. It truly is time to get the federal government out of the marriage business. In law and policy, such decisions should be left to the people themselves.

In 2006, when then-Sen. Obama voted against the Federal Marriage Amendment, he said, “Decisions about marriage should be left to the states.” He was right then; and as I have come to realize, he is right now in concluding that DOMA has to go. If one truly believes in federalism and the primacy of state government over the federal, DOMA is simply incompatible with those notions.

Bob Barr represented the 7th District of Georgia in the House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003 and was the Libertarian Party’s 2008 nominee for president.