Tobias Barrington Wolff, Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, appeared on the Rachel Maddow show Wednesday night to discuss the decision by President Obama and US Attorney General Eric Holder not to defend the Defense of Marriage Act in federal court anymore – though the Justice Department is still obligated to enforce the law until it is repealed or overturned by the courts.
As feminist lawyer and philosopher Linda R. Hirshman has an interesting political take in Salon.com:
True, political discourse in America, particularly when it comes to the rights of gays and lesbians, has not always been characterized by the application of perfect logic to empirical data from qualified experts. If House Speaker John Boehner and his fellow Republicans elect to wage a fight for DOMA, they will undoubtedly phrase their announcement in the culture war language that plays so well with their party base.
But then, the Republicans and their lawyers will have to step into federal court and prove — subject to cross-examination — how the republic would be damaged if same sex spouses can get, say, federal railroad retirement benefits. As [star AFER attorney David] Boies said after dismantling that disqualified expert in the Proposition 8 trial, “the witness stand is a very lonely place.”
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It looks like Wolfe should eat a little crow here. He was one of the Obamabots who said that Obama had no option but to defend the constitutionality of all laws when many of us were asking the Justice Department to drop the appeals of the DADT cases and the DOMA cases. Now when Obama does what Wolfe says he couldn’t do, Wolfe says Obama is “breathtaking” in his support of glbtq rights. After wasting two years when he had historic majorities, at least Obama is finally doing something, but this is pretty damn late in the game. No ENDA, no repeal of DOMA, no benefits for federal workers same-sex spouses. I am grateful for this action, but to pretend that Obama has been in the forefront of glbtq progress is just delusional.