A bill before the U.S. House of Representatives would protect a state’s right to define marriage. HR 3829, the State Marriage Defense Act, introduced on Jan. 9 by Rep. Randy Weber (R-Texas) with the support of 28 co-sponsors, would require that federal agencies apply marital status only to couples who are given marital status by their state of legal residence.
“The 10th Amendment was established to protect state sovereignty and individual rights from being seized by the federal government,” Weber said in a press release. “For too long, however, the federal government has slowly been eroding state’s rights by promulgating rules and regulations through federal agencies.” Webber explained, “by requiring that the federal government defer to the laws of a person’s state of legal residence in determining marital status, we can protect states’ constitutionally established powers from the arbitrary overreach of unelected bureaucrats.”
The act was a response to the 2013 Supreme Court decision, United States v. Windsor, which struck down section 3 of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) recognizing marriage as the union between one man and one woman for the purposes of the federal administration. The Supreme Court decision means that the federal government must recognize marriages that are recognized by the state. The Supreme Court, however, did not clarify what was to be done with couples who had a same-sex “marriage” in one state, but moved to another that does not recognize such unions.
Under the influence of the Obama administration, however, some federal agencies have been ignoring the state of residence’s marriage laws if they did not permit same-sex “marriage.” Just a day after Webber introduced the State Marriage Defense Act, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the federal government would recognize “married” same-sex couples in Utah even though the governor said such “marriages” would not be given legal status while the state appealed U.S. District Court Judge Robert Shelby’s ruling that struck down Utah’s previous ban on same-sex “marriage.”
Social conservative groups are supportive of Weber’s bill.
Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, said “the State Marriage Defense Act is consistent with the ruling in Windsor, which reiterated that states have the ‘historic and essential authority to define the marital relation.’ The current Obama administration policy is doing the very thing which the Court condemned – ‘creating two contradictory marriage regimes within the same State’.”
Ryan Anderson of the Heritage Foundation on the organization’s blog said: “Redefining marriage will entail high social costs. Thus all Americans should insists our laws embody the truth about marriage. And the federal government should respect it when state laws do so.”
The SMDA is also supported by the National Organization for Marriage, Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, US Conference of Catholic Bishops, and Concerned Women for America.
Steve Benen of MSNBC, however, does not think that the bill has a good chance of making it into law: “There is simply no way the legislation could pass the Democrat-led Senate or get President Obama’s signature.”
