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the Legal Blurb Blog
The latest legal news and commentary from a conservative perspective.
As we reported in a previous post, the U.S. Supreme Court was scheduled to discuss whether to grant cert. (to take the case) on the marriage cases during their November 20 conference. It looks like that did not happen and, instead, they will consider the cases in their conference this Friday, November 30.
Just to review, the Court is considering several different same-sex “marriage” cases. Among them is California’s Proposition 8 case, Hollingsworth v. Perry, where the Ninth Circuit struck down the voter-approved constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union between one man and one woman.
The Court will also consider several Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) cases. Golinski v. Office of Personnel Management comes from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, where the court struck down DOMA as applied to a woman who was issued a “marriage” license before Proposition 8 was voted on and who now seeks federal benefits for her “spouse.”
Gill v. Office of Personnel Management is a similar challenge brought by six Massachusetts same-sex couples seeking federal benefits for their “spouses” after the state’s Supreme Court imposed same-sex “marriage” on that state. The U.S. District Court in Massachusetts held DOMA to be unconstitutional there.
Another DOMA case to watch is Windsor v. U.S., where a lesbian who “married” her partner in Canada had to pay federal estate taxes on her inheritance because the law did not recognize her same-sex “marriage.”
Stay tuned to CWA’s Legal Blurb Blog for the latest on these and other cases at the Supreme Court. We’ll let you know as soon as we hear.