Supreme Court to Rule Shortly On Same Sex Marriage

The power the Constitution grants it also restrains.
And though Congress has great authority to design laws to
fit its own conception of sound national policy, it cannot
deny the liberty protected by the Due Process Clause of
the Fifth Amendment.
What has been explained to this point should more than
suffice to establish that the principal purpose and the
necessary effect of this law
are to demean those persons
who are in a lawful same-sex marriage. This requires
the Court to hold, as it now does, that DOMA is unconsti
-
tutional as a deprivation of the liberty of the person pro
-
tected by the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.
The liberty protected by the Fifth Amendment’s Due
Process Clause contains within it the prohibition against
denying to any person the equal protection of the laws.
See
Bolling
, 347 U. S., at 499–500;
Adarand Constructors,
Inc.
v.
Peña
, 515 U. S. 200, 217–218 (1995). While the
Fifth Amendment itself withdraws from Government the
power to degrade or demean in the way this law does,
the equal protection guarantee of the Fourteenth Amend
-
ment makes that Fifth Amendment right all the more
specific and all the better understood and preserved.
The class to which DOMA directs its restrictions and
restraints are those persons who are joined in same-sex
marriages made lawful by the State. DOMA singles out a
class of persons deemed by a State entitled to recognition
and protection to enhance their own liberty. It imposes a
disability on the class by refusing to acknowledge a status
the State finds to be dignified and proper. DOMA in
-
structs all federal officials, and indeed all persons with
whom same-sex couples interact, including their own
children, that their marriage is less worthy than the mar
-
riages of others. The federal statute is invalid, for no
legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to
disparage and to injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity.
By seeking to displace this protection and treating those
persons as living in marriages less respected than others,
the federal statute is in violation of the Fifth Amendment.
This opinion and its holding are confined to those lawful
marriages.
The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Second
Circuit is affirmed.

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