This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, June 26, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Supreme Court handed down today an end to a key provision of the Defense of Marriage Act or DOMA.

The decision throws out the main federal impediment to marriage equality, but leaves many questions

about how states must now deal with the ruling's implications. Trevor Burris, a research fellow at the Cato Institute,

comments. In his majority opinion, Justice Kennedy relies on both federalism and equal protections.

What are we to make of that with respect to DOMA?

That's a great question.

With DOMA, that means DOMA goes down.

The more interesting thing is what happens going forward and we say what are

we to make of it, the better question is what are the courts going to make a bit because

lower courts are going to have to apply this decision. So you have one thing where you say the

federalism grounds which is that there are states and there's the federal government, and the states usually have the ability to control their family law and how they want to define marriage.

And so some of Kennedy's opinion says that by passing Doma, the federal government is encroaching on state's definition of marriage.

But then he also says that Doma was passed because it wanted to hurt an unpopular group, an animus motivation, which goes back to some

opinions he wrote in the 90s.

And so then it kind of seems like DOMA is suspect not just because it encroaches on

states, but also why it was passed.

And so the really interesting question is this more of a federalism opinion or is it more

of an equal protection opinion?

Because the one thing we knew going into the decision release I knew is that the court would not create a

constitutional right to gay marriage in every state but if they create an opinion that

...