IS DOMA ENOUGH?: Joshua Baker and Maggie Gallagher …For people who define the problem as the seemingly unstoppable spread of same-sex marriage from one state to others, a key question becomes: Is the federal DOMA enough?
The answer is clear: no. The federal DOMA is unlikely to prevent the spread of same-sex marriage from one state to another, for the following reasons: 1. The intellectual groundwork for striking down the federal DOMA has already been laid in the scholarly literature. The legal threat to that law is now imminent, because Massachusetts has for the first time given plaintiffs standing to challenge it. As a note in the June issue of the Harvard Law Review points out, prior to Goodridge, “no potential plaintiff had suffered an injury sufficiently ‘concrete and particularized’ to establish standing to challenge either provision of DOMA.” Now that some same-sex couples have received marriage licenses, “the time is ripe for a constitutional challenge to DOMA.” According to newspaper accounts, same-sex couples in at least 46 states who have received marriage licenses in Massachusetts, California, or Oregon now have standing to challenge DOMA in the federal courts. 2. Even if upheld, DOMA won’t
