Rights And Responsibilities Of Marriages In The United States
According to the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO), there are 1,138 statutory provisions in which marital status is a factor in determining benefits, rights, and privileges. These rights and responsibilities apply to only male-female couples, from the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), defining marriage as between a man and a woman.
Prior to the enactment of DOMA, the General Accounting Office (as the GAO was then called) identified 1,049 federal statutory provisions in which benefits, rights, and privileges are contingent on marital status or in which marital status is a factor. An update was published in 2004 by the GAO covering the period between September 21, 1996 (when DOMA was signed into law) and December 31, 2003. The update identified 120 new statutory provisions involving marital status, and 31 statutory provisions involving marital status repealed or amended in such a way as to eliminate marital status as a factor.
See below for a partial list of these provisions of federal law.
Read more about Rights And Responsibilities Of Marriages In The United States: Rights and Benefits, Responsibilities, Ambiguous, States, Legal Remedies Enacted Following The GAO Report
Famous quotes containing the words united states, rights, marriages, united and/or states:
“Places where he might live and die and never hear of the United States, which make such a noise in the world,—never hear of America, so called from the name of a European gentleman.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Crimes increase as education, opportunity, and property decrease. Whatever spreads ignorance, poverty and, discontent causes crime.... Criminals have their own responsibility, their own share of guilt, but they are merely the hand.... Whoever interferes with equal rights and equal opportunities is in some ... real degree, responsible for the crimes committed in the community.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“You can no more keep a martini in the refrigerator than you can keep a kiss there. The proper union of gin and vermouth is a great and sudden glory; it is one of the happiest marriages on earth, and one of the shortest-lived.”
—Bernard Devoto (1897–1955)
“It is a curious thing to be a woman in the Caribbean after you have been a woman in these United States.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“Money is power, and in that government which pays all the public officers of the states will all political power be substantially concentrated.”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)