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Lambda Legals Jon Davidson on the DOMA Lawsuits
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LGBT POV
11/09/2010
"Lambda Legal has also been working on fighting DOMA and on Monday filed a brief in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in the case of Golinski v. United States Office of Personnel Management.
"This is an interesting case because Karen Golinski is an employee of the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. She is suing the Obama administration’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and its openly gay Director, John Berry, to secure spousal health insurance benefits for her wife, Amy Cunninghis – the same benefits afforded spouses of the court’s heterosexual employees.
"...I asked Davidson to put the DOMA lawsuits into a broader context. Here’s his reply:
"'When the government violates the Constitution and our elected officials refuse to do anything about it, it falls to the courts to enforce the Constitution’s promises of liberty and equality for all. We won’t be intimidated by the thugs at the National Organization for Marriage into shying away from demanding that the judiciary stand up to its responsibility to ensure that constitutional rights are protected, and we are confident that judges will follow their oaths to uphold our nation’s loftiest principles of justice.'"