NEW YORK: Another Anti-DOMA Ruling

Metro Weekly's Chris Geidner has the details:

Echoing several other recent court opinions, U.S. District Court Judge Barbara Jones today ruled that the Defense of Marriage Act's federal definition of marriage is unconstitutional insofar as it forced Edie Windsor to pay estate taxes after the death of her wife, Thea Spyer, that would not have been owed had she been married to a man.

The ruling in Windsor's case, which was filed in the Southern District of New York, comes less than a week after a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit unanimously found DOMA unconstitutional under a type of rational basis analysis, affirming a decision earlier reached on more expansive reasoning by U.S. District Court Judge Joseph Tauro.

In a statement reacting to the decision released by her lawyers at the ACLU, Windsor said, "Thea and I shared our lives together for 44 years, and I miss her each and every day. It's thrilling to have a court finally recognize how unfair it is for the government to have treated us as though we were strangers."