{"id":31,"date":"2010-07-09T09:31:46","date_gmt":"2010-07-09T09:31:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/07\/doma-should-survive.html"},"modified":"2010-07-09T09:31:46","modified_gmt":"2010-07-09T09:31:46","slug":"doma-should-survive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/07\/doma-should-survive.html","title":{"rendered":"DOMA should survive"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the clear light of the next morning, I guess I’m prepared to go some of the way with Jack Balkin’s critique<\/a>  of Judge Tauro’s two DOMA decisions. The equal protection argument advanced in Gill<\/i><\/a> is certainly in tension with the Tenth Amendment argument advanced in Commonwealth<\/i><\/a>. If the right to define marriage is to be reserved to the states, what exactly does equal protection mean, when the laws can vary so much.<\/p>\n

Consider Reynolds<\/i>, the famous 1890 decision in which the Supreme Court ruled that polygamy was not a right protected under the Free Exercise clause. To be sure, the decision did not involve state law; at the time, Utah was federal territory (albeit governed de facto by the LDS Church). But let’s leave aside the issue of how Reynolds has become applicable to the states since the religion clauses were “incorporated” in the middle of the last century. <\/p>\n

Suppose the court were to reverse Reynolds <\/i>and Utah were to go ahead and make Mormon “plural marriage” legal. Would Judge Tauro’s equal protection argument require the federal government to provide marriage benefits to all the wives of a one husband? Maybe there would be a rational basis for deciding not–namely, that marriage benefits can rationally (on money-saving grounds?) be limited to one spouse per customer. The question is whether a state, acting according to its own marital lights, can force the feds have to cough up benefits. Probably not.<\/p>\n

Still, it’s going to be fun to watch the Tenth Amendment enthusiasts argue that, well, when it comes to family law, the federal government actually has an enumerated right to intervene. 
<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the clear light of the next morning, I guess I’m prepared to go some of the way with Jack Balkin’s critique  of Judge Tauro’s two DOMA decisions. The equal protection argument advanced in Gill is certainly in tension with the Tenth Amendment argument advanced in Commonwealth. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}