Ten years ago, in United States v. Windsor, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the section of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) that prevented the federal government from recognizing any marriage other than one "between a man and a woman." My client Edie Windsor wanted nothing more than for her marriage to her late spouse, Thea Spyer, to be afforded the same respect and dignity as any other marriage. The Supreme Court ultimately agreed that the equal protection clause of the United States Constitution required that recognition.

When DOMA was passed in 1996, supporters made no secret of their desire to target gay people based on a particularly regressive conception of morality. Congressional reports from the time are littered with statements about "defending the institution of traditional heterosexual marriage" and "morality" against an "assault." For instance, Dennis Prager, a conservative talk show host, was quoted in the House Report as saying that the failure to pass DOMA would lead to marriages "between parents and their grown children," and supporting DOMA was "no more 'homophobic' than it is 'siblingphobic' to oppose incest, or 'animalphobic' to want humans to make love only to their own species." Others at the time proclaimed that DOMA was intended to give the force of law to a "collective moral judgment" of "disapproval of homosexuality," and to "promote heterosexuality" by defining an institution to exclude gays and lesbians. Children, as they so often sadly are, were used as a weapon to defend discrimination.