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NOM's Maggie Gallagher to Testify Before Congress
Maggie Gallagher, the chairman of the board for the National Organization for Marriage will testify Friday morning at a House subcommittee hearing titled "Defending Marriage."
Maggie Gallagher, the chairman of the board for the National Organization for Marriage will testify Friday morning at a House subcommittee hearing titled "Defending Marriage."
The panel testifying before six Republicans and four Democrats on the subcommittee will also include Ethics and Public Policy Center president Edward Whelan (a fellow marriage equality opponent), and Carlos Ball, a Rutgers Law School professor who will testify that President Barack Obama and his Justice Department were correct in calling DOMA unconstitutional. In February, the administration announced it would no longer defend the 1996 law in court.
Visit the subcommittee site for a link to a webcast of the hearing, which is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m.
“It is unusual for an administration to decide not to defend the constitutionality of the statute, but it is by no means unprecedented,” Balltold the Washington Blade on Thursday. “The first President Bush did it; President George W. Bush did it as well. In my view, any administration has a constitutional obligation to make an independent judgment on the constitutionality of certain statutes, especially when there is no clear law on whether the statutes are constitutional or not.”
Gallagher has testified before this subcommittee on DOMA in the past (click here for her testimony from a 2003 hearing).
