Three Minute Legal Talks: The Respect for Marriage Act

After passing both chambers of Congress with bipartisan support, President Joe Biden signed the Respect for Marriage Act into law on December 13, 2022. Proponents of marriage equality celebrated its passage as it provides protections for same-sex and interracial couples.

To understand the importance of the Respect for Marriage Act, the American public needs to look back to 1996 when then-President Bill Clinton signed into law the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). It took away the traditional role of the states in defining marriage for federal purposes, and limited rights and benefits on the federal level to those marriages of one man and one woman.

The United States Supreme Court overruled that provision of the law sixteen years later and overruled the rest of it in 2015. New concerns have arisen about whether the Supreme Court would reverse course, which inspired Congress to act again, this time protecting marriage equality and interracial marriages.

Follow along as Terry Price, UW Law Associate Teaching Professor, explains what the Respect for Marriage Act does — and, also importantly, what it does not do — in three minutes.


Read the Transcript

Terry Price: I am Terry Price. I'm an associate teaching professor here at the University of Washington School of Law.

Three-Minute Legal Talks: The Respect for Marriage Act provides protections for interracial couples in the LGBTQ+ community. Can you tell us what it does specifically from a legal standpoint?

TP: It repeals the Defense of Marriage Act, which limited marriage for federal purposes, to marriages of one man, one woman only. It also has requirements that a state must accept, must give full faith and credit to a marriage that is lawfully performed in another state. So, it undoes that prohibition from DOMA from that as well. The amendment added by the Senate protects religious liberty in this area and freedom of conscience. So, the Senate was concerned that people of faith would be required to perform these marriages, or otherwise perform or provide services for marriages that they felt were contrary to their religious beliefs.

TMLT: What was the motivation behind the Respect for Marriage Act?

TP: To think about the Respect for Marriage Act, we actually have to go back to 1996. What happened then, and what the act is trying to fix now. In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed what's called the Defense of Marriage Act. That's referred to as DOMA. The Defense of Marriage Act had two parts to it. It had the part that said that for every federal act, regulation, statute, whatever, the definition of marriage would be between one man and one woman. And then also it had the other part, which said that no state would be forced to recognize a marriage from another state that was contrary to its public policy.

In June of this year, in the Dobbs decision, which was about abortion, not about marriage, in his concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas indicated he would be open to considering reversing the Supreme Court's marriage equality case Obergefell v. Hodges, which is how we got to the Respect for Marriage Act, is that Congress, and I believe the President are concerned the Supreme Court might reverse itself in Obergefell v. Hodges, which said that the Constitution protects marriage equality, and go back to DOMA.

TMLT: What doesn't the law do?

TP:  What the Respect for Marriage Act does not do, because the federal government cannot do this is reach into the states and require the state to have a certain kind of marriage law. Family Law has always been the province of the states, not the federal government. So, I've seen and heard some concerns from the left about why doesn't the federal government just define marriage for the purposes of the states? And the answer is it doesn't have that power to do that.