Which judges voted down doma

Their win prompted the Obama administration to switch course and join with the challengers, who said the law was discriminatory. House Republicans voted to take up the legal defense of the law.

The decision leaves in place another provision in the law that says no state is required to recognize gay marriages performed in any other state. That provision was not under challenge. Follow Politics Now on Twitter and Facebook. David G. Myanmar court sentences U. Man sentenced to life in prison for killing Holocaust survivor in France. Venezuela judge grants appeal hearing to jailed U.

United States. Updated: April 25, Supreme Court Case Status: Decided. Privacy statement. This embed will serve content from youtube. DOMA Unconstitutional! And Prop 8 Goes Down, Too! Today at the Supreme Court: Ms. Windsor Goes to Washington. The decision overturning DOMA was long-sought, and is a major victory. The decision in the Prop. I was working in the White House at the time. Clinton signed the bill into law, neutralizing the issue.

But it had no immediate practical effect, as same-sex marriage was not recognized anywhere at the time. As more and more states recognized gay marriages, however, the law came to be seen as profoundly unfair and, according to recent polling, unpopular. The case before the Court involved a claim by Edith Windsor, an eighty-three-year-old widow, for an estate-tax refund of over three hundred and sixty-three thousand dollars, which she was forced to pay because the federal government did not recognize her marriage to Thea Spyer, her partner of several decades, and, in the last years of her life, her wife.

Windsor will get her money back. But the ruling will affect many thousands of couples, perhaps none more dramatically than those gay Americans who are married to foreign nationals and who will now be allowed to sponsor their spouses for green cards. The ruling was on the grounds of a new equal-protection test, with overtones of other constitutional considerations that will be analyzed and dissected for some time, and thus will serve as an important precedent for other gay-rights cases.

The rulings today close out its term for the summer and come ten years to the day of its landmark gay-rights ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down state anti-sodomy laws. In his dissent in that case, too, Scalia had predicted that the ruling would have wide implications—even opening the door to same-sex marriage.