Abstract
This amicus brief filed by Scholars of the Constitutional Rights of Children turns the spotlight on children in same-sex families. The brief enumerates the ways Section 3 of DOMA impairs children's interests by denying federal recognition of their parents' marriages.
Highlights
The children of same-sex married couples are identically situated to the children of opposite-sex married couples, in terms of their need for and entitlement to the types of family-supporting governmental rights and benefits regulated by Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA)
The child-welfare justifications advanced by Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group (BLAG) in support of DOMA embody the very essence of invidious discrimination: BLAG contends, in essence, that families headed by married, opposite-sex couples are benefitted because families headed by married, same-sex couples are excluded from important rights and benefits – rights and benefits that serve the general social good of promoting family stability
Multiple courts have found that DOMA does preference for allocation of family responsibilities under which wife plays a dependent role); and Nevada Dept. of Human Resources v
Summary
BLAG acknowledges that the Equal Protection Clause “is essentially a direction that all persons situated should be treated alike,”[3] and yet DOMA patently violates this most fundamental understanding of the equal protection guarantee. Children.”[8] In addition to exacting an impermissible legal and economic toll on the excluded class of children, DOMA stigmatizes and psychologically harms all children of same-sex couples by declaring their families inferior to those headed by opposite-sex couples.[9] Far from promoting the welfare of children, DOMA does nothing to help the children of oppositesex couples, while actively harming the children of same-sex couples This purported state interest cannot provide even a rational basis for the law, as it finds no “footing in the realities of the subject addressed by the legislation.”[10]. Laws are not permitted to permanently place a disfavored group of children into a disadvantaged class.[13]
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