Maggie Gallagher, the board chair of
the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), on Wednesday chided
President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder for deciding to drop
the Department of Justice's defense of the Defense of Marriage Act
(DOMA), the 1996 law that bans federal agencies from recognizing the
legal marriages of gay and lesbian couples and allows states to
ignore such marriages.
Facing a March 11 deadline to respond
to two legal challenges to the law, Obama
directed the DOJ to end its defense of the law. Holder said he
agreed with the president.
In speaking via telephone to Fox News
about the groundbreaking decision, Gallagher said Obama's decision
was an “end run around our normal constitutional processes.”
“And we're going to be seeing a lot
more of this by President Obama now that he faces a Republican
dominated Congress,” she added.
“He has unilaterally declared that
gay is like black, that orientation is now subjected to strict
scrutiny.”
Gallagher, who has previously
criticized the Department of Justice's defense as weak, said that her
group would lobby for Congress to defend its own law.
“In a backwards way, I think its
gonna end up being good news for the Defense of Marriage Act,”
Gallagher said. (The video is embedded in the right panel of this
page.)