For the second time in a week, a federal judge embraced U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent from this summer’s ruling overturning the federal Defense of Marriage Act in a case challenging a state’s ban on gay marriage.
Scalia was adamant in his dissent that the logic of the DOMA decision would result in state bans being overturned. In his decision Monday declaring that Ohio must recognize out-of-state same-sex marriages on death certificates, federal district judge Timothy Black wrote:
And now it is just as Justice Scalia predicted — the lower courts are applying the Supreme Court’s decision, as they must, and the question is presented whether a state can do what the federal government cannot — i.e., discriminate against same-sex couples … simply because the majority of the voters don’t like homosexuality (or at least didn’t in 2004). Under the Constitution of the United States, the answer is no.
Black’s rhetorical nod to the Court’s most outspoken conservative justice was the second such instance in four days. Last Friday, a federal judge in Utah cited Scalia’s DOMA dissent four times across 40 pages in a decision overturning that state’s ban on gay marriage.
The full Ohio decision is below.
