The Obama administration on Tuesday offered verbal support to United States state officials who decline to defend their own states' bans on same-sex marriage, entering cautiously into legal fights that are playing out across the United States, according to The New York Times.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder spoke to a conference of state attorneys general less than a week after Oregon's attorney general said her office would cease its defense in federal court of the state's gay marriage ban, a decision that followed similar moves by her counterparts in Nevada, Pennsylvania and Virginia, the Times reported.
Chief state legal officers generally are bound to defend laws that are on the books, regardless of whether they agree with them, and Holder said any decision to do otherwise must be rare and founded on constitutional arguments, according to the Times.
"But, in general, I believe we must be suspicious of legal classifications based solely on sexual orientation," Holder told the National Association of Attorneys General, the Times reported.
Holder was more explicit on Monday in an interview with the New York Times, saying the recent decisions were "something that's appropriate for an attorney general to do."
To the newspaper, he drew an analogy to the 1950s legal fights over racial segregation in public schools, the Times reported.
"If I were attorney general in Kansas in 1953, I would not have defended a Kansas statute that put in place separate-but-equal facilities," the Times quoted Holder as saying.
Conservative opponents of same-sex marriage criticized Holder's remarks, the Times reported.
"When there are nonfrivolous grounds for doing so, a state attorney general has a fundamental ethical duty as a lawyer to defend state laws against attacks under federal law. That standard means that state attorneys general are obligated to defend state marriage laws," Ed Whelan, a former U.S. Justice Department lawyer, said in a statement, according to the Times.
