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Edith Windsor , the plaintiff in the landmark Supreme Court case United States v. Windsor , has become an icon of the marriage equality movement for her successful effort to force repeal the DOMA provision that denied married same-sex couples a host of federal provisions and protections. In 2007, after having lived together since the late 1960s, Windsor and her partner Thea Spyer were married in Canada, where same-sex marriage was legal. After Spyer died in 2009, Windsor received a $363,053 federal tax bill on the estate Spyer had left her. Because her marriage was not valid under federal law, her request for the estate-tax exemption that applies to surviving spouses was denied. With the counsel of her lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, Windsor sued the federal government and won ( [link] ).
Because of the
Windsor decision, federal laws could no longer discriminate against same-sex married couples. What is more, marriage equality became a reality in a growing number of states as federal court after federal court overturned state constitutional bans on same-sex marriage. The
Windsor case gave federal judges the moment of clarity from the U.S. Supreme Court that they needed. James Esseks, director of the
American Civil Liberties Union ’s (ACLU) Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender&AIDS Project, summarizes the significance of the case as follows: “Part of what’s gotten us to this exciting moment in American culture is not just Edie’s lawsuit but the story of her life. The love at the core of that story, as well as the injustice at its end, is part of what has moved America on this issue so profoundly.”
James Esseks. 2014. “Op-ed: In the Wake of Windsor,” June 26. http://www.advocate.com/commentary/2014/06/26/op-ed-wake-windsor (June 24, 2015). In the final analysis, same-sex marriage is a protected constitutional right as decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, which took up the issue again when it heard
Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015.
What role do you feel the story of Edith Windsor played in reframing the debate over same-sex marriage? How do you think it changed the federal government’s view of its role in legislation regarding same-sex marriage relative to the role of the states?
Following the Windsor decision, the number of states that recognized same-sex marriages increased rapidly, as illustrated in [link] . In 2015, marriage equality was recognized in thirty-six states plus Washington, DC, up from seventeen in 2013. The diffusion of marriage equality across states was driven in large part by federal district and appeals courts, which have used the rationale underpinning the Windsor case (i.e., laws cannot discriminate between same-sex and opposite-sex couples based on the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment ) to invalidate state bans on same-sex marriage. The 2014 court decision not to hear a collection of cases from four different states essentially affirmed same-sex marriage in thirty states. And in 2015 the Supreme Court gave same-sex marriage a constitutional basis of right nationwide in Obergefell v. Hodges . In sum, as the immigration and marriage equality examples illustrate, constitutional disputes have arisen as states and the federal government have sought to reposition themselves on certain policy issues, disputes that the federal courts have had to sort out.
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