# Defense of Marriage Act (1996) Signed by President **Bill Clinton on September 21, 1996** after passing Congress with overwhelming bipartisan majorities (House: 342–67; Senate: 85–14). DOMA had two operational sections: - **Section 2** — authorized states to refuse recognition of same-sex marriages performed in other states (a federal carve-out from the Constitution's Full Faith and Credit Clause) - **Section 3** — defined "marriage" and "spouse" for all federal purposes as exclusively between one man and one woman, denying same-sex couples federal recognition even when their marriages were valid under state law ## The Political Context DOMA was passed as a **preemptive strike** against the 1993 Hawaii Supreme Court decision *[[Baehr v. Lewin]]*, which had ruled that Hawaii's marriage statute might violate the state constitution's equal-protection clause and which signaled that Hawaii could become the first U.S. state to legalize same-sex marriage. Federal Republicans introduced DOMA in May 1996 explicitly to block federal recognition if Hawaii (or any other state) legalized. Clinton signed the bill at 12:50 AM with no public ceremony. He later said publicly that he regretted signing it. In 2013, Clinton publicly called for DOMA to be struck down. ## How DOMA Was Dismantled The federal-recognition piece (Section 3) was struck down by **[[United States v. Windsor]] (2013)** in a 5–4 decision authored by [[Justice Anthony Kennedy]]. Windsor — an 83-year-old widow forced to pay federal estate taxes on her wife Thea Spyer's estate because their Canadian marriage wasn't recognized for federal purposes — was the named plaintiff. *Windsor* was the doctrinal predecessor of [[Obergefell v. Hodges]] (2015), which struck down state-level same-sex marriage bans. The state-level non-recognition piece (Section 2) was rendered inoperative by *Obergefell* and was finally formally repealed by the **[[Respect for Marriage Act]]**, signed by [[President Biden]] on December 13, 2022. The Respect for Marriage Act also added a new federal statutory requirement that states recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states — building a statutory backstop in case *Obergefell* itself is overturned. ## Place in the Vault DOMA is one of the canonical case studies in **how movements lose, then win** — passed at the high-water mark of 1990s social-conservative power and fully dismantled within 26 years through litigation strategy ([[Lambda Legal]], ACLU, GLAD) and demographic-driven public-opinion change. --- ## See Also - [[Queer Liberation Ecosystem]] - [[Queer Liberation Timeline]] - [[Obergefell v. Hodges]]