Comment by fizbin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fizbin | Hacker News Reader

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And looking at something already settled by the courts, it's also interesting to compare the article's chart on the legal status of interracial marriage with public opinion data:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interracial_marriage_in_the_Uni...

Note that the "Approve" line doesn't cross the "Disapprove" line until the mid-1980s, long after the USSC had spoken. With same-sex marriage on the other hand, the "Approve"/"Disapprove" cross-over happened a bit over three years ago and the USSC has yet to speak as definitively as it did in Loving v. Virginia.

(One could argue that in invalidating most of DOMA, the USSC has already spoken strongly - if not definitively - in favor of same-sex marriage, and therefore that we should use that decision when making analogies to Loving. I'm not sure about that.)

> One could argue that in invalidating most of DOMA, the USSC has already spoken strongly - if not definitively - in favor of same-sex marriage, and therefore that we should use that decision when making analogies to Loving

Not very convincingly, because it did not hold that States cannot deny equal marriage, which would be the equivalent of the holding in Loving.

That was only because it wasn't the question put in front of the court (and the people involved wouldn't have standing to sue if it was, because they had been married of years).

> That was only because it wasn't the question put in front of the court

The "only" here is pure speculation. The fact is that the US Supreme Court has not issued a Loving like decision on same-sex marriage, and that same-sex marriage remains illegal in many states because of that. Therefore, it does not make sense to treat United States v. Windsor (which struck down Section 3 of DOMA) as an equivalent, in the domain of same-sex marriage, to Loving v. Virginia, in the domain of interracial marriage.

The federal government never did something like DOMA on interracial marriage (there was, relevant to Section 3, no federal policy against recognizing state-sanctioned interracial marriages), so Windsor naturally has no parallel among the interracial marriage cases.

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