Big Dog Bites Back On DOMA

In 1996, President Clinton signed the Defense Of Marriage Act into law, preventing the federal government from recognizing any aspect of a same-sex marriage.  Some 17 years later, Big Dog says he did it to prevent an even worse law from going into effect, but he admits that discriminatory DOMA needs to go in a new op-ed for the Washington Post.

When I signed the bill, I included a statement with the admonition that “enactment of this legislation should not, despite the fierce and at times divisive rhetoric surrounding it, be understood to provide an excuse for discrimination.” Reading those words today, I know now that, even worse than providing an excuse for discrimination, the law is itself discriminatory. It should be overturned.

We are still a young country, and many of our landmark civil rights decisions are fresh enough that the voices of their champions still echo, even as the world that preceded them becomes less and less familiar. We have yet to celebrate the centennial of the 19th Amendment, but a society that denied women the vote would seem to us now not unusual or old-fashioned but alien. I believe that in 2013 DOMA and opposition to marriage equality are vestiges of just such an unfamiliar society.

Americans have been at this sort of a crossroads often enough to recognize the right path. We understand that, while our laws may at times lag behind our best natures, in the end they catch up to our core values. One hundred fifty years ago, in the midst of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln concluded a message to Congress by posing the very question we face today: “It is not ‘Can any of us imagine better?’ but ‘Can we all do better?’ ”

The answer is of course and always yes. In that spirit, I join with the Obama administration, the petitioner Edith Windsor, and the many other dedicated men and women who have engaged in this struggle for decades in urging the Supreme Court to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act.

Clinton signed the bill anyway.  I'm glad he's admitting the bill enshrines discrimination into the United States Code, but it's not like he wasn't in a position to veto the damn thing.  I'm not giving him a pass on that, there are a ton of Gingrich-era GOP bills Clinton signed into law that have had long-lasting and painful effects on America (and yes, I'm fully aware that 17 years from now, I'll probably be saying the same thing about Barack Obama.)

Hopefully the Supremes will do the right thing here and fix Clinton's mistake.  But the blame remains at least partially on a Democratic President who should have known better.