Analysis
The proposed legislation raises Constitutional questions in relation to the Full Faith and Credit Clause. Joanna Grossman, writing for FindLaw, emphasized "the need for the federal courts to weigh in", rather than for states to continue making a public-policy exception when deciding the status of same-sex relationships independently of the decisions of other states, as states have been permitted to do in the case of incestuous marriages. The Act was designed to protect DOMA by prohibiting federal courts from hearing cases like that of Nancy Wilson, who sued to have her relationship with Paula Schoenwether treated as marriage in Florida because it had been treated as marriage in Massachusetts. In that case, the federal court upheld DOMA.
The U.S. Constitution permits Congress to make exceptions to court jurisdiction. The degree to which such exceptions may undermine federal separation of powers, the Equal Protection Clause, or the Due Process Clause, may render the Marriage Protection Act unconstitutional, according to Grossman.
Read more about this topic: Marriage Protection Act
Famous quotes containing the word analysis:
“The spider-mind acquires a faculty of memory, and, with it, a singular skill of analysis and synthesis, taking apart and putting together in different relations the meshes of its trap. Man had in the beginning no power of analysis or synthesis approaching that of the spider, or even of the honey-bee; but he had acute sensibility to the higher forces.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)