99 News Reporter

It’s be less than a week since the Supreme Court struck down a substantial part of the Defense of Marriage Act, and by now there are many people whose lives are the better for it. Julian Marsh and his husband, Traian Popov, are two of them. in the early hours last week, Marsh, a fifty-five-year-old American-born music producer and Popov, a forty-one-year-old Bulgarian adapt student, were still in legal limbo, unsure of how long Popov would be able to stay in the United States on his student visa or whether they’d eventually have to leave the country in order to remain together. On Friday, Marsh and Popov heard that, thanks to the Court’s pronouncement in Windsor, the federal government would grant them the same status that similarly situated heterosexual couples enjoy, and Popov became the first spouse in a same-sex marriage to be granted a green card. They got the news by e-mail, while celebrating Marsh’s birthday at a Red Lobster in Fort Lauderdale. “The amazing, overwhelming fact,” Marsh told the Times, “is that the government said yes, and my companion and I can live in the country we chose and we love and we want to stay in.”

According to a 2011 study by the Williams Institute, the United States has twenty-eight thousand five hundred cohabiting same-sex couples in which one person is a U.S. citizen and one is not, which means there are nearly sixty thousand people who stand to have their lives eased and clarified as Marsh and Popov’s were, right away. There are over a thousand federal rules that distinguish between married and single people in matters like taxes, Social Security, and veteran’s benefits. And there are approximately a hundred and fourteen thousand same-sex married couples—close to a quarter of a million spouses—living in states that recognize their marriages, all of whom are in a better, more secure place today than they were before the Court ruled.

What the DOMA decision does not instantly improve is the lot of same-sex couples who live in the thirty-seven states without marriage equality. Thirty-one of those states go further, with bans on same-sex marriage—their own versions of DOMA. Nor does it make simpler the situations of couples who are legally married in one state but move to another where same-sex marriage is not legal. Windsor struck down Section 3 of DOMA, which dealt with the federal government, but it left untouched Section 2, which allows states to deny recognition to other states’ marriages. Indeed, the victory in Windsor was grounded in the notion that marriage law has traditionally been left up to the states. So while Justice Anthony Kennedy’s language in the opinion—his powerful invocations of dignity and respect and equal protection—will certainly give aid and comfort to anyone trying to overturn the state-level DOMAs, it doesn’t help much in the no-nonsense short term.

These “mini-DOMAs,” as the legal scholar Steve Sanders calls them this week on the SCOTUSblog, “deny legal recognition to the marriages of same-sex couples who migrate from states where such marriages are perfectly legal; some expressly purport to ‘void’ such marriages.” For same-sex couples living in “mini-DOMA states,” the uneven landscape of marriage equality means that “Windsor simply creates new legal dilemmas.”

The Obama Administration could help insure that the Windsor decision, which it applauded, helps as many couples as possible by heartening all of its agencies to adopt a “place of celebration standard”—that is, to recognize marriages based on where they were performed rather than on where the couple resides. On immigration matters, this is the rule already; that’s why Marsh and Popov prevailed. Though they live in Florida, which does not recognize same-sex marriage, they were wed in New York, which does. Or, as Julian Marsh put it, “We are first-class citizens in New York and in the eyes of the federal government, but second-class people in Florida.”

As Sanders argues, the constitutional problem presented by state laws—which “transform married gays and lesbians into legal strangers, effectively divorcing them against their will by operation of law”—should be the next frontier of marriage-equality litigation.

Political activism will surely make progress in repealing the state-level DOMAs over the next few years. But court case will be important, too, to point out the peculiar unfairness, in our highly mobile society, of forcing legally married couples who relocate to other states for personal or professional reasons to sacrifice recognition of their marriages. The remarkable progress of marriage equality in the past decade makes it clear that neither a legal nor a political strategy alone work; they have succeeded in tandem—legal decisions clearing obstacles, political efforts building a democratic consensus.

In the meantime, maybe marriage sightseeing can become a new form of activism. Since Windsor, gay and lesbian couples who marry in states where it’s legal for them to do so can count on recognition of their marriage at the federal level, which is an supplementary enticement to marry even if they have to return to a state that doesn’t yet make out their union. It’s a good bet that the money useless in, and the first-class will elegant toward, marriage-equality states will craft the settle down drive of a happy instance.