New Citizen Initiative Asks EU to Protect Marriage and Family – Will Europe get a DOMA?

By J.C. von Krempach, J.D. | October 18, 2015

One year and a few months ago, a controversial 5-4 judgment of the US Supreme Court emasculated the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), a federal statute according which the term “marriage”, when used in federal legislation, had no other meaning than the union between a man and a woman. This was viewed as, and indeed turned out to be, the necessary first step for the even more controversial Obergefell v. Hodges decision of 26 June this year, in which the same 5-4 majority of the SCOTUS imposed that it was henceforth illegal for any of the 50 States to define marriage in a way that excludes same-sex couples from “marrying”.

Now it seems that DOMA might see a surprising come-back – not in America, but on the other side of the Atlantic. Indeed, a new European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) has been launched by a group of citizens, petitioning the EU to adopt a legal act that would clarify the meaning of marriage (exclusively) as a union between a man and a woman. If within a year the petition (which bears the name “Mum Dad & Kids”) is signed by more than 1 million citizens, the EU institutions will have to seriously deal with the proposal.

Like its US model, the European proposal would mean that the term “marriage”, whenever it appears in a legal act of the EU, can only mean a union between one man and one woman – thus effectively ruling out any attempt of the EU to impose on its Member States, be it directly or indirectly, an obligation to give legal effects to same-sex “marriages”. But the proposal goes even one step further than DOMA, as it also provides for a definition of the term “family” based on marriage and descent.

The US Supreme Court’s decision of last year needs not bother the petitioners: the US Constitution is not applicable in the EU, and even less do EU citizens need to feel bound by the aberrant interpretations to which the Constitution has been subjected by a narrow minority of Supreme Court Justices.

Considering that the French pro-marriage movement has on several occasions mobilized up to 1.3 million French citizens to protest the law through which the country’s Socialist government has legalized same-sex “marriages” in 2013, and given the high degree of citizen mobilization that this and similar issues have prompted in countries such as Spain, Slovakia, Croatia, and Slovenia, the chances that the new petition will be supported by far more than the required minimum of 1 million citizens are very considerable.

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