Gay Marriage Research Paper

The right for homosexuals to marry has to be one of the most controversial topics of today’s time. The issue of gay marriage has been around since the turn of the century. In 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450, banning homosexuals from working for the federal government or any private contractor because they are considered “security risks”. In 1969, patrons of the Stonewall Inn riot for three days after an attempted police raiding to exterminate the neighborhood of “sexual deviants”. In 1982, Wisconsin became the first state to outlaw discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. In 1993, the department of Defense issued a directive prohibiting applicants from serving in the United States Armed Forces, this
The DOMA Act enacted on September 21, 1996 by President Bill Clinton was a federal law, prior to being ruled as unconstitutional, defined marriage as the union of one man and one woman. The act states that “No State, territory or possession of the United States, or Indian tribe, shall be required to give effect to any public act, record, or judicial proceeding of any other State, territory, possession, or tribe respecting a relationship between persons of the same sex that is treated as a marriage under the laws of such other State, territory, possession, or tribe, or a right or claim arising from such relationship (Act to define and protect the institution of marriage, 1996, p. xx).” On June, 25, 2013 the Supreme Court ruled by a five to four vote that the DOMA Act is in fact unconstitutional. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority opinion stating that “by seeking to displace this protection and treating those persons as living in marriages less respected than others, the federal statue is in violation of the Fifth Amendment (Reilly, 2013).” With the overturning of the DOMA Act through the ruling of United States v Windsor, marriage between to persons of the same sex has the right to marry in all fifty states and is constitutional through the 2015 ruling of Obergefell v.
Windsor sought to claim the surviving spouse’s exemption but was barred from doing so because of section three of the DOMA Act. The act stated that the term “spouse” only applied to unions between a man and woman and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) ruled that the specified exemption did not apply to marriages of the same sex. The IRS denied Windsor’s claim and enforced her to pay the estate tax. If same-sex marriage was recognized by the federal government, Windsor would have qualified for exemption and would have paid no federal estate