June was a long month. We knew that the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) was going to hand down its judgment on the wretched Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). DOMA is the US law that among other things forbids the federal government from from recognizing same-sex marriage. It means that at the federal level J and I are unrelated to each other and has caused us all sorts of problems.
The main issue has been immigration: I have an L1-A intracompany manager visa and in normal circumstances my spouse would get an L2. This a good visa to have because it allows 'dual-intent' - even though it is a temporary non-immigrant visa you are explicitly allowed to have the intention of staying for good and in fact converting to a green card is rather simple (or at least as simple as these things get). J is denied an L2 because of DOMA and worse than that he can get only a tourist visa.
The rules allow him to stay concurrently with my L1 but he must leave every six months and every time he returns to the border the officers do not understand the situation and he is always sent to secondary inspection. The supervisors may understand the rules but I wonder what Harriet makes of the fact that after a seven hour flight they are treated as little more than criminals every time. We have been told not to fill in a joint customs forms because 'we are not a family'.
There are other costs too - we must file taxes jointly and for people in our situation (i.e. where one person does not work) this is a huge disadvantage. We pay thousands of dollars a year extra because of this.
DOMA was signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1996. It was an election year and the Republicans controlled congress. He did not want gay marriage to be an election issue so he threw us under the bus. So many people have worked so hard to eventually get to a Supreme Court case in 2013. The actual case was a woman who had to pay a large amount of inheritance tax that would otherwise not have been required if her marriage had been recognized.
Our general sense was that the oral arguments in court meant that DOMA was in trouble. The court has nine judges: four avowed conservatives, four liberals and the crucial swing vote, Kennedy. It was Kennedy's comments in April (plus his record) that gave us hope.
Still, the Supreme Court works slowly. Every Monday and then Thursday in June we waited to hear if DOMA as due to be decided. Only right at the end, on the very last day was it clear that it would finally come. So much depended on this.
I shut my office door and set my status to 'Busy' from an hour before. I was following on SCOTUSblog, which on decision days converts to a simple chat window. There was a lot of good humored banter (about how one of the Justices arrives to work on a unicorn) but I was nervous. I had twitter open but I was not going to look at it because it is too unreliable. I would just have to wait till the legal analysts at SCOTUSblog gave the verdict. In the case of DOMA one could work it out from a single word ('affirmed' - meaning the Supreme Court agreed with the lower courts that DOMA was unconstitutional) but also important would be the words of the judgment. This judgment would set the terms of battle for the subsequent fights to bring true equality to the US (since DOMA only applies to Federal government and much remains to be done with individual states, particularly the southern and more conservative states).
This is what I saw on my screen at 10:01
All I could do was sit and wait. It was extremely nerve-wracking.
In less than another minute SCOTUS blog announced that DOMA was unconstitutional! They started posting excerpts from the decision and it was immediately clear that this was going to be a good day (there is a web version of the decision but it is on a tape delay so we really rely on someone reading the paper version at this stage).
Crucially Justice Kennedy gave an expansive reasoning that took DOMA to task and called it for what it was: a law motivated by animus, intended to show moral disapproval and injures many families and many children. He writes:
By seeking to injure the very class New York seeks to protect DOMA violated basic due process and equal protection principles
It is by no means the end of the story (after all the parts of DOMA that allow states to ignore each other's legal same-sex marriage is still alive) but there is now reasonable hope that we get J his L2. In this process we have found that it is unlikely the US will consider our civil partnership as a marriage so we have got married at city hall but that is another story!
