Victims of Our Own Success: The Perils of Obergefell and Windsor
8 Pages Posted: 23 Sep 2015 Last revised: 20 Oct 2015
Date Written: September 22, 2015
Abstract
This short essay was spurred by the numerous celebrations of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Obergefell v. Hodges legalizing same-sex marriage in all fifty states. Though the essay acknowledges the importance of both Obergefell and the Supreme Court’s earlier decision in United States v. Windsor, it highlights the significant perils that these decisions entail for the LGBT community. In the essay, I use tax as a lens for describing some of the lesser-known perils associated with these decisions in the hopes of making those perils more concrete and easily understood by a wide audience of (tax and nontax) readers.
Keywords: gay, lesbian, LGBT, same-sex marriage, gay marriage, Windsor, Obergefell, tax, family, procreation, marriage, artificial insemination, surrogacy
JEL Classification: H20, H24, H31, J12, J13, K34, K39
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation