He’s a lying sack of shit, Phoenix Woman, and there’s no two ways about it.

The real story is he knows how easy it is to play the LBGT “leadership.” They fall over on a faint and kiss the feet of ANYONE who claims to like them. The fac thjat they’ll turn right around and stab us all in the back — or in Barry’s case the front — isrigorously ignored

2) As long as DOMA is in place, possible benefits are limited. Get rid of DOMA, the limits go away.

3) The best way to end DOMA is through the Congress, as both Laurence Tribe and OPM’s John Berry have stated. Why? Because, as Tribe notes, you don’t want a Supreme Court run by John Roberts deciding this thing:

As someone who wants to see DOMA dismantled and invalidated, I would love it if this ninth circuit case would evaporate into the ether.

Even though I personally believe that DOMA is unconstitutional, I think that this particular lawsuit is very vulnerable; it’s not anywhere near as strong as the one that was brought in the federal district court in Massachusetts [a suit filed by Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders].

In an environment where the Supreme Court is still quite conservative, what makes a suit a strong one is that it finds a point of entry in which it’s possible to invalidate a law in a number of its applications by using more of a scalpel that might appeal to five justices rather than a bludgeon that will almost certainly ask more of the court than it is willing to do.

What’s strong about the Massachusetts case is that these are concrete situations of people who are legally married under the laws of states like Massachusetts or Vermont, and who are being discriminated against by the federal government with respect to federal benefits simply because they are same-sex couples. There’s no other difference between them and other couples in that state, and the court could agree with that without accepting any of the broader theories advanced in the [Smelt] lawsuit in the central district of California, which is basically a bet-the-farm lawsuit that almost dares a conservative Supreme Court to slap it down.

[…]

There are ways for the president to get rid of DOMA. He can advocate for its repeal, he can eventually urge the solicitor general to join in a more surgical attack, but he certainly isn’t obliged to go along with every plaintiff who brings a lawsuit.

The important point here is that the solicitor general traditionally seeks to dismiss lawsuits against federal laws whenever there is a plausible basis to do it. A lot of the outcry about the administration’s position doesn’t take that institutional reality into account.

4) The people most loudly demagoguing the DoJ’s DOMA brief — and at least one gay activist who dislikes the brief isn’t exactly fond of how it’s being demagogued — seem to be confusing or (deliberately?) conflating a DoJ lawyer’s somewhat lazy cites of case law — cites that were likely used in this brief simply because they were used in prior DoJ briefs responding to prior DOMA challenges — with OMGOMGOBAMAHATEZTEHGHEYZZZ!!!

DOJ presented a defense of DOMA that had an egregious anti-gay bias. Who wrote and presented this brief? It could have been one of those Liberty U. grads hand picked by Monica Goodling by the sound of the brief. It was up to Eric Holder and the powers that be at the DOJ to know what was going to be presented in court. FAIL.

Eric Holder’s tenure at DOJ does not have a lot going for it so far and now he has embarassed the administration yet again.

What do you need? Flash cards?