Defense of Marriage Act - Background

Background

The issue of same-sex marriage attracted mainstream attention infrequently until the 1980s. A sympathetic reporter heard several gay men raise the issue in 1967 and described it as "high among the deviate's hopes". In one early incident, gay activist Jack Baker brought suit against the state of Minnesota in 1970 after being denied a marriage license to marry another man, and in Baker v. Nelson the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples did not violate the United States Constitution. He later changed his legal name to Pat Lynn McConnell and married his male partner in 1971. A 1972 off-Broadway play, Nightride, depicted, in the author's words, "a black–white homosexual marriage". In 1979, Integrity, an organization of gay Episcopalians, raised the issue as the Episcopal Church in the U.S. considered a ban on the ordination of homosexuals as priests. The New York Times said the question was "all but dormant" until the late 1980s when, according to gay activists, "the AIDS epidemic ... brought questions of inheritance and death benefits to many people's minds." In May 1989, Denmark established registered partnerships that granted same-sex couples many of the rights associated with marriage. In September 1989, the State Bar Association of California urged recognition of marriages between homosexuals even before gay rights advocates adopted the issue. New York's highest court ruled that two homosexual men qualified as a family for the purposes of New York City's rent-control regulations. Within the movement for gay and lesbian rights, a debate between advocates of sexual liberation and of social integration was taking shape, with Andrew Sullivan publishing an essay "Here Comes the Groom" in The New Republic in August 1989 arguing for same-sex marriage: "A need to rebel has quietly ceded to a desire to belong", he wrote.

Gary Bauer, head of the Family Research Council, predicted the issue would be "a major battleground in the 1990s". In 1991, Georgia Attorney General, Michael J. Bowers withdrew a job offer made to a lesbian who planned to marry another woman in a Jewish wedding ceremony. A committee of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America released a report in 1993 after four years of study that asked Lutherans to consider blessing gay marriage and said that lifelong abstinence was harmful to gay and lesbian couples. The Conference of Bishops responded, "There is basis neither in Scripture nor tradition for the establishment of an official ceremony by this church for the blessing of a homosexual relationship." In a critique of radicalism in the gay liberation movement, Bruce Bawer's A Place at the Table (1993) advocated the legalization of same-sex marriage.

In Baehr v. Miike (1993), the Supreme Court of Hawaii ruled that the state must show a compelling interest in prohibiting same-sex marriage. This prompted concern among opponents of same-sex marriage that same-sex marriage might become legal in Hawaii and that other states would recognize or be compelled to recognize those marriages under the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the United States Constitution.