This story about an elderly widow who was hit with a major tax burden because she was married to a woman and not a man is a sad read. The women were together for decades and made a series of great real estate buys, amassing quite a bit of wealth.
Ms. Windsor (the surviving wife) cared for her partner for years through an illness, to which her wife eventually succumbed. Then, because of the Defense of Marriage Act, she was forced to pay enormous sums on her wife’s share of their assets — sums she would not have had to pay if she had been married to a man. Yes, it’s Rich People Things, but it’s still a wildly unfair application of the estate tax. The end of the piece, though, particularly stood out to me:
The Justice Department under President Obama has refused to defend the law, but the Republican majority in the House of Representatives is paying for lawyers to argue that it should be upheld.