Windsor sought to claim the federal estate tax exemption for surviving spouses, but was barred from doing so by §3 of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which amended the Dictionary Act—a law providing rules of construction for over 1,000 federal laws and the whole realm of federal regulations—to define “marriage” and “spouse” as excluding same-sex partners. . The power to interpret “what the law is” is incidental. Windsor claimed the federal estate-tax exemption for surviving spouses but was denied under the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), 1 U.S.C. 462 U. S., at 940. A petition for certiorari has been filed in that case. Against this background of lawful same-sex marriage in some States, the design, purpose, and effect of DOMA should be considered as the beginning point in deciding whether it is valid under the Constitution. Const., Amdt. Consistent with this allocation of authority, the Federal Government, through our history, has deferred to state-law policy decisions with respect to domestic relations. In this case the United States retains a stake sufficient to support Article III jurisdiction on appeal and in pro ceedings before this Court. Citation: 570 U.S. ___, 133 S.Ct. That issue, however, is not before us in this case, and we hold today that we lack jurisdiction to consider it in the particular context of Hollingsworth v. Perry, ante, p. ___. This Court granted certiorari and now affirms the judgment in Windsor’s favor. The majority claims that DOMA’s only purpose was to dehumanize same-sex married couples and is false. Justice Scalia believes this is a “ ‘bald, unreasoned disclaime[r].’ ” Post, at 22. Bear in mind that the object of this condemnation is not the legislature of some once-Confederate Southern state (familiar objects of the Court’s scorn, see, e.g., Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U. S. 578 (1987)), but our respected coordinate branches, the Congress and Presidency of the United States. A statute by its terms allowed one House of Congress to order the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to deport the respondent Chadha. The majority’s limiting assurance will be meaningless in the face of language like that, as the majority well knows. (Emphasis mine.) “A judgment entered under such circumstances, and for such purposes, is a mere form. 12–13. State sovereignty, they argue, is impeded by the federal government’s definition of marriage, instead of leaving the definition up to the individual states. 15, §8 (2010); N. H. Rev. th[e] result [of] the independent action of some third party not before the court.’ Third, it must be ‘likely,’ as opposed to merely ‘speculative,’ that the injury will be ‘redressed by a favor- able decision.’ ” Lujan, supra, at 560–561 (footnote and citations omitted). The sum of all the Court’s nonspecific hand-waving is that this law is invalid (maybe on equal-protection grounds, maybe on substantive-due-process grounds, and perhaps with some amorphous federalism component playing a role) because it is motivated by a “ ‘bare . . The United States District Court and the Court of Appeals ruled that this portion of the statute is unconstitutional and ordered the United States to pay Windsor a refund. 5, 113th Cong., 1st Sess., §4(a)(1)(B) (2013) (“[BLAG] continues to speak for, and articulates the institutional position of, the House in all litigation matters in which it appears, including in Windsor v. United States”). Windsor suffered a redressable injury when she was required to pay estate taxes from which, in her view, she was exempt but for the alleged invalidity of §3 of DOMA. Windsor paid $363,053 in estate taxes and sought a refund, which the Internal Revenue Service denied. It is beyond dispute that the right to same-sex marriage is not deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition. Reg. . Updates? Cancel anytime. Omissions? But the portion of the majority opinion that explains why DOMA is unconstitutional (Part IV) begins by citing Bolling v. Sharpe, 347 U. S. 497 (1954), Department of Agriculture v. Moreno, 413 U. S. 528 (1973), and Romer v. Evans, 517 U. S. 620 (1996)—all of which are equal-protection cases.5 And those three cases are the only authorities that the Court cites in Part IV about the Constitution’s meaning, except for its citation of Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U. S. 558 (2003) (not an equal-protection case) to support its passing assertion that the Constitution protects the “moral and sexual choices” of same-sex couples, ante, at 23. Fourth, the United States contends that gay and lesbian people are both a minority and politically powerless. Some law schools—such as Yale, Vanderbilt, Berkeley, and the University of Illinois—even subscribe directly to Quimbee for all their law students. Indeed, no provision of the Constitution speaks to the issue. Readers are requested to notify the Reporter of Decisions, Supreme Court of the United States, Washington, D. C. 20543, of any typographical or other formal errors, in order that corrections may be made before the preliminary print goes to press. What the views urged in this dissent produce is not insulation from judicial review but insulation from Executive contrivance. For certain married couples, DOMA’s unequal effects are even more serious. It seems fair to conclude that, until recent years, many citizens had not even considered the possibility that two persons of the same sex might aspire to occupy the same status and dignity as that of a man and woman in lawful marriage. Second, sexual orientation is not related to the ability of people to perform or contribute to society, so the government cannot legitimately take sexual orientation into account for classification purposes. The differentiation demeans the couple, whose moral and sexual choices the Constitution protects, see Lawrence, . Brian Duignan is a senior editor at Encyclopædia Britannica. 7 The degree to which this question is intractable to typical judicial processes of decisionmaking was highlighted by the trial in Hollingsworth v. Perry, ante, p. ___. See Williams v. North Carolina, 317 U. S. 287, 298 (1942) (“Each state as a sovereign has a rightful and legitimate concern in the marital status of persons domiciled within its borders”). v. Varsity Brands, Inc. Windsor and Spyer were legally married and moved to New York, a state which recognized their same-sex marriage. They further maintain that the governmental interests that §3 purports to serve are not sufficiently important and that it has not been adequately shown that §3 serves those interests very well.