http://www.nationalreview.com/bench-memos/230872/judge-tauro-does-doma/hadley-arkes
Because I hate you, Miki.
Let me retaliate with a reason Harry Reid deserves to win.
Angle also charged in two separate radio interviews Wednesday that Reid is "just trying to hit the girl."
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/thefix/morning-fix/1-2-a-republican-governors.html#moreEDIT: regarding your post, super:
Up until the early 1990s 2008, when judges started acting as engines to install same-sex marriage an individual right to bear arms, it did not seem to occur to most people that marriage the 2nd amendment meant anything other than the marriage of men and women. right for militiamen to bear arms.
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Regarding the criticism in the NR piece, the lady doth protest too much.
Gill is not the world's greatest opinion, and they're right to point out some arguments are worded too cursorily, but the important points are completely defensible.
The meat and potatoes of the opinion is that singling out same-sex couples for worse treatment is a violation of equal protection because it fails the rational basis standard of review. That standard of review applies when any old group is singled out for treatment, be they homosexuals, felons, taxidermists, or redheads (as opposed to higher standards of review which apply when race, sex, or alienage are at issue). Rational basis extremely deferential to congress: so long as the purpose of a law is valid and the means of a law could conceivably advance that purpose, the law is valid. It is quite rare for a law to fail rational basis.
Congress articulated 4 purposes for the law:
1. To promote a healthy environment for children.
2. To promote heterosexual marriage.
3. To show disapproval of homosexuality.
4. To save money by not extending benefits to too many people.
According to the judge:
1 fails because there is a scientific consensus that kids are no worse off being raised by homosexuals. this is the weakest part of the opinion, because that may not have been true when the law was passed, and congress doesn't have to choose the best method of doing something, merely one that's plausible.
2 fails because preventing people who are already in legal same-sex marriages are extremely unlikely to go out, get divorced, and remarry just to get federal benefits.
3 fails because moral disapproval is an invalid purpose for a law, ever since
Lawrence v. Texas.
4 fails because the desire to save money can't by itself justify a law that singles out a group for no other valid reason.
1,2, and 4 are weak arguments by themselves, and in normal circumstances would pass rational basis review, BUT Supreme Court precedent implies (though it never comes out and says) that when congress passes a law for reasons of moral animus, judges should not defer to what other reasons congress supplies for a law. In other words, though the arguments against 1, 2, and 4 are weak, the judge didn't have to address them in any serious way. Lending support to the judge's decision to dispense with all 4 of those reasons without too much elaboration was the defendant: the government, which admitted that none of those were valid purposes and supplied a different reason altogether for why the law should stand: that congress really passed DOMA in order to allow states to do their own thing with marriage without disturbing the national equilibrium. For states to be isolated laboratories of marriage law, in other words. Well, that works as a reason why states are barred by DOMA from having to credit same-sex marriages from other states, but it bears no relationship whatsoever to the question of federal benefits for same-sex couples. This lawsuit was about the latter rather than the former issue with DOMA, so the judge found that that argument failed rational basis because the means doesn't advance the purpose.
