By James Kalb
In United States v. Windsor, the case that invalidated the Federal definition of marriage as the marriage of man and woman, the Supreme Court based its holding of unconstitutionality on the assertion that “the principal purpose and the necessary effect of [the definition] are to demean those persons who are in a lawful same-sex marriage,” and later spoke of “the purpose and effect to disparage and to injure [those persons].” It was evidently of no interest to the Court, because they didn't mention it, that there is a public interest in supporting marriage as an institution, that it is impossible to understand the features that give marriage its unique importance without understanding it as a union of man and woman, and that to say that other sorts of relationships are not marriages is not an attempt to “demean,” disparage, or injure anyone.
