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Originally Posted by Psi U MC Vito
Actually IIRC correctly, DOMA was passed because the federal government was afraid that the Hawaiian legistalture was going to approve marriage equality which ended up happening only recently.
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I think it was more fear that the Hawaii Supreme Court would do so. The state Supreme Court had held that prohibition of same-sex marriage violated the equal protection clause of the state constitution and therefore could only survive if the state could pass the "strict scrutiny" standard by showing that the prohibition was narrowly tailored to further a compelling state interest. The court sent it back to the trial court for further proceedings as to that standard. That (1) fueled the DOMA engine, and (2) led to a state constitutional amendment in Hawaii that explicitly gave the legislature the authority to ban same-sex marriage, which mooted the lawsuit.