Anyone who is involved with the gay rights movement, either for or against, is well aware of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). In case you don’t know about it, let me catch you up. DOMA was signed into law back in 1996 by then President Clinton. The purpose of the rather fast passage was the fear that Hawaii was about to legalize gay marriage. What’s the problem with that you may be asking, well I’ll tell you. Before the passage of DOMA, the federal government was basically required to acknowledge any legal marriage performed within the United States. Hawaii is of course a state, so they were worried about having to recognize any gay marriages, so in order to stop that, they quickly passed DOMA. So DOMA makes it so the federal government cannot recognize gay marriage and it also allows individual states to decide if they want to recognize the marriages as well.
