In a historic, eloquent, and at times cryptic opinion, the Supreme Court has taken its first, important step toward recognizing the constitutional right to same-sex marriage. On the last day of its 2012–2013 term, in United States v. Windsor, the Court ruled unconstitutional a provision of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) that selectively denied many federal benefits to same-sex couples whose marriages were recognized by state law. Justice Anthony Kennedy, joined by the Court’s four liberal justices, said that when the states chose to extend marriage to same-sex couples, they “conferred upon them a dignity and status of immense import.” When Congress, by contrast, denied those same couples a raft of federal benefits, Kennedy wrote, it “impose[d] a disadvantage, a separate status, and so a stigma upon all who enter into same-sex marriages.”