A former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia charged President Barack Obama with actively sabotaging the federal defense for the Defense of Marriage Act in a Friday Judiciary subcommittee hearing held by House Republicans.
Edward Whelan, who currently serves as president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, testified that Obama is knowingly playing political games when it comes to defending the federal law defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman. He expressed doubt that the president who is versed in constitutional law could change his stance on gay marriage 180 degrees because a Massachusetts judge chose to rule in favor of gay couples in two DOMA-related cases.
DOMA, which was enacted in 1996 under the Clinton administration, was initially challenged in the cases of Gill v. Office of Personnel Management and Massachusetts v. United States.
Whelan contended, “He would have to be very naive to think that it was anything other than a stealth strategy of step by step by step the administration doing whatever it can to promote same-sex marriage and induce the courts to adopt that approach.”
Whelan said he believes that Obama is not naive, but playing an active and underhanded role through the Department of Justice in promoting and implementing the gay civil rights agenda. “The department has only been pretending to defend DOMA while it has been in fact actively sabotaging it,” he said.
Whelan’s testimony gave voice to past allegations conservative leaders have made about the president and the Department of Justice.
Alan Sears, president of the conservative legal group Alliance Defense Fund, has similarly argued, “The administration has ‘expressly disavowed’ the winning legal arguments that the Bush Administration had made in previous cases.”
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