New York Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer predicted Thursday that the Defense of Marriage Act will be repealed, comparing legalizing same-sex marriage to the fight for racial equality.
“This bill will pass. Marriage equality will pass. The question is not if but when and we should just go forward and do it,” Schumer said at the Capitol Thursday, where a group of Democratic senators reacted to the Respect for Marriage Act passing the Senate Judiciary Committee.
He then referenced King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” likening the fight against racial discrimination to the effort to repeal DOMA.
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“[King’s] letter was entitled ‘Why we can’t wait’ and a line in it says to most of us wait means never. We cannot wait, and just as people had all these reasons why we shouldn’t have racial equality … we see the same thing happening today. They come up with all these reasons but they know they’re wrong in their hearts.”
King’s letter said, “For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’ We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied.’”
California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the sponsor of the Respect for Marriage Act, called DOMA “discriminatory” and urged the Senate to pass her bill, which would repeal DOMA and allow same-sex couples to marry and “accrue” the same federal benefits as heterosexual couples.
When speaking on the Senate floor Thursday, Feinstein said DOMA “should be stricken in its entirety from federal law. The Respect for Marriage Act will do that, and I urge my colleagues to report this bill to the floor cleanly, without any amendments.”
She continued, “When DOMA passed 15 years ago, no state permitted same-sex marriage. Today, six states and the District of Columbia do: Vermont, Connecticut, Iowa, New York, New Hampshire and Massachusetts… These changes reflect a firmly-established legal principle in this country: marriage is a legal preserve of the states.”
Feinstein also said DOMA “infringes on this state authority by requiring the federal government to disregard state law, and deny more than 1,100 federal rights and benefits to which all other legally married couples are entitled.”