TheBakersfieldCalifornian.com

Imagine for a moment that your spouse died. Of course that is a terrible way to start the morning, but sometimes playing the "What if?" game in your mind brings useful insight. So imagine: Your spouse has died, you are grieving, and your vision of the future is upside down as you face life without your soul mate.

Now it gets even worse: Your in-laws are legally challenging your spousal status. They are maneuvering to take away your beneficiary rights as a surviving spouse and to keep their child's money from a law firm's profit-sharing plan for themselves. You would think this was a cruel joke, or that you were living in a country devoid of basic human rights. But no. You'd be living in Pennsylvania, you'd have gotten married in 2006 in Canada, and you'd be a woman who had legally wed a woman.

Your plight and your sorrow, far from being private, are splashed in newsprint all over the country. And Kevin McCarthy, the congressional representative from Bakersfield, would be leading the fight against your marital rights on behalf of your in-laws. Why does McCarthy care about your situation? Because it gives him a showcase in his fight to uphold the constitutionality of a federal law called the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA. Since DOMA defines the word "spouse" specifically as a person of the opposite sex in a legal union between a man and a woman, and since the Justice Department will not defend DOMA in court, McCarthy and his fellow Republican members of the House Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group have made it their mission to intervene in any cases that challenge the constitutionality of DOMA. Cases like yours, in which your spouse's parents lack the decency to honor their daughter's life and wishes, and in which your rights are being trampled.

Normally the Department of Justice represents the federal government in cases that question federal laws. But Attorney General Eric Holder, at the direction of President Obama, has declined to uphold DOMA, maintaining that the law lacks constitutionality by violating the equal protection component of the Fifth Amendment. Passed in 1996, and signed by President Bill Clinton, DOMA is a fairly recent addition to a list of unjust laws that, for example, have supported slavery, suppressed women's suffrage, imprisoned American citizens of Japanese descent, outlawed interracial marriage, criminalized homosexuality and discriminated against minority voters. DOMA, like many other misguided laws later repealed or found to be unconstitutional, may have seemed like a good idea at the time, but has not withstood the test of American constitutionality or justice. Discrimination, even when encoded into law, is never in keeping with the spirit of American liberty for all.

The opposition to same-sex marriage in the United States flows mainly from those who identify themselves as members of the conservative Christian right. While the freedom to practice one's faith is certainly a founding principle of our country, civil rights cannot be dictated by a particular faith. The right to civil marriage is a separate issue from any religious or sacramental aspect of marriage. Individual churches regularly refuse to marry couples on religious grounds -- for example, a divorced Catholic cannot marry in the church -- which will be unchanged by the repeal of DOMA.

A troubling development in conservative Christianity's condemnation of civil same-sex marriage is the way it has been lumped in with other "life" issues, such as the practice of abortion, capital punishment and euthanasia. Unlike these very real life-and-death matters, however, civil marriage does not take a life. Life in a same-sex marriage is as sacred and respected as every life ideally is. The sanctity of heterosexual marriage is undiminished by someone else's same-sex marriage. Far from destroying the world as we know it, every loving commitment that two people make to partnership and family only strengthens our society.

In the United States, moral opposition to a practice does not justify legislation against it. For example, I may be morally opposed to the killing of animals for food and find the practice personally distasteful and even sinful, but I would be ill advised, from a constitutional point of view, to propose a law called the Defense of Poultry Act, or DOPA. Similarly, a member of Congress who is morally opposed to same-sex marriage does not have the mandate to defend legislation that denies the fundamental human rights of some of his or her constituents, even if they are, as is the case with Kevin McCarthy, a small minority in his district.

In fact, Representative McCarthy needs to hear from his constituents, both gay and straight, that DOMA, rather than being defended, must go the way of all dinosaur laws. DOMA must die a well-deserved death.

These are the opinions of Valerie Schultz, not necessarily those of The Californian. Email her at vschultz22@gmail.com.