- 09/27/2012 by Andrea Sears (WBAI)

Lawyers representing a woman who was forced by the Defense of Marriage Act to pay estate tax on her inheritance from her wife were in the Federal Court of Appeals in New York today.  Edith Windsor and Thea Spyer were together for more than forty years and had been legally married for two years when Spyer died in 2009.  But because the federal Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, prohibits federal recognition of same sex marriages, Windsor was forced to pay three hundred sixty thousand dollars in estate taxes, taxes she would not have to pay had she been married to a man.  WBAI's Andrea Sears spoke with James Esseks, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s LGBT Project.