Supreme Court to hear same-sex marriage cases The court will examine a key section of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act. The Obama administration announced in 2011 it was abandoning defense of the law, and a string of lower courts has said it is unconstitutional to deny federal benefits to same-sex couples who are legally married in the states where they live while offering them to opposite-sex married couples. This marks the first time the justices will hear arguments relating to same-sex marriage. Because the DOMA case concerns couples who already are married under state law, the case they selected would not require an answer to the broader constitutional question of whether homosexuals must be allowed to marry. Regarding DOMA, four federal district courts and two appeals courts have struck down the portion of the 1996 law that denies federal recognition of legal same-sex marriages. There are more than 1,000 references to marriage in federal law, code and regulations, relating to issues such as health care coverage, medical leave and taxes. The Supreme Court chose the case of Edie Windsor, who had to pay $363,000 in estate taxes after her partner of 44 years died in 2009. Windsor and Thea Spyer were married in 2007 in Canada, and lived in New York. If Windson had been married to a man, she would not have owed the tax payment. The U.S. Court of appeals for the 2nd Circuit said that deprived Windsor of her constitutional right to equal protection. The court also said it would review a lower court's decision to overturn Proposition 8, in which California voters in 2008 amended the state's constitution to ban same-sex marriage. That case offers the court a more direct path to deciding whether the fundamental constitutional right to marry may be limited based on sexual orientation. But because of the way the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit decided the case, such a finding is not required. Initially, a San Francisco federal judge had decided that gay couples may not be excluded from the fundamental right to marry. But the 9th Circuit panel earlier this year found more narrow ground in overturning Proposition 8. The background for the case: In 2008, the California Supreme Court ruled 4 to 3 that same-sex couples could not be denied the right to wed, and over the next five months, about 18,000 such couples took marriage vows. But that fall, 52 percent of California voters supported Proposition 8, amending the state Constitution to validate "only a marriage between a man and a woman." U.S. Circuit Judge Stephen Reinhardt said this "taking away" of a right by the majority was not allowed. "By using their initiative power to target a minority group and withdraw a right that it possessed, without a legitimate reason for doing so, the people of California violated the Equal Protection Clause" of the federal Constitution, Reinhardt wrote. He based the ruling on the Supreme Court's 1996 decision in Romer v. Evans . It involved an amendment to the Colorado Constitution that prohibited the state or local jurisdictions from outlawing discrimination against gays. It was in response to local governments that had extended such protection. The issue of marriage is traditionally one that individual states control, and nine - including Maryland - plus the District of Columbia either allow same-sex marriages or soon will. The rest do not, and 31 states have amended their constitutions to ban same-sex marriage The two cases were picked from a batch of petitions that brought the issue to the court. The decision to hear the cases heralds a landmark term for the court on civil rights issues; already it has agreed to decide whether racial preferences may play a role in college admissions and the future of a key part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 enacted to protect minorities. The Proposition 8 case is Hollingsworth v. Perry, and the DOMA case is United States v. Windsor.