The Consequences of Bigotry - The LGBT Spousal Diaspora

As this blog has addressed before, the federal Defense of Marriage Act ("DOMA") effects LGBT Americans in many insidious ways ranging from the non-recognition of relationships for the purposes of federal employee benefits, unequal treatment under the tax and inheritance laws, and forcing U.S. citizens to leave the USA in order to remain with their life partners and, in some cases, legal spouses. Same sex couples face a form of relationship discrimination unknown by their heterosexual counterparts where marriage to a citizen of the USA translates nearly automatically into the right to remain in the USA as opposed to facing deportation. One of my own nephews is getting married next month in order that his fiancee, a citizen of the UK, can remain in the USA (her visa is about to expire). Were he gay and his betrothed another male, the couple would have no option but to leave the USA in order to remain together. Andrew Sullivan legitimately vents on this travesty. Here are highlights:
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More and more Americans are being forced by the US government to emigrate because the Defense of Marriage Act will not allow their legal spouses to remain in America. Why? Because the spouses are not US citizens. For ever, the US has acknowledged, perhaps excessively, that marriage and family trump everything in immigration law. As long as the marriage is valid, and sincere, no questions are asked. Why? Because we collectively acknowledge something profound about the decision to commit legally to one other person for life, and respect it.
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But for gay couples, it's so different. It is difficult for a government to express more contempt for a citizen's human dignity than asserting that it is completely indifferent to his or her being able to live in America with the person he or she loves. And this inhumanity is compounded by the fact that in some states and the capital city, Americans can lawfully wed someone of the same gender but of a different nationality.
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No other civilized Western country treats its own gay citizens this way. . . . This is not, in my view, a minor matter. In fact, very few issues demonstrate so starkly the inequality between gays and straights in America than this.