Moon Native Who Helped Craft DOMA Glad to See the Legislation Go

A Moon Township native who was part of the team that crafted the federal Defense of Marriage Act recently told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that she is more than glad to see the legislation go.

GOP lobbyist Kathryn Lehman, who grew up in Moon, Scott and Springdale, was chief counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee on the Constitution in 1996 when the law was enacted.

The U.S. Supreme Court in a 5-4 vote on Wednesday declared the law unconstitutional.

Things were pretty different in Lehman's world in 1996. She was engaged to a man. Same-sex marriage wasn't legal anywhere. And the public perception of what it meant to be gay wasn't anything like it is now, she says

"I was pleased, obviously, that [DOMA] was struck down, but I was even more pleased that it was struck down because of what was fundamentally wrong with it," Lehman told the Post-Gazette.

Lehman, now 53, went to Moon High School before leaving Pittsburgh for college and law school. Her immigrant grandparents operated a garage on Centre Avenue in Oakland. Her father, who passed away in 2010, was a choir director at St. George Antiochian Orthodox Cathedral in Oakland and Moon High School.

Things were pretty different in Lehman's world in 1996, when the conservative-led U.S. Congress voted on the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, largely in response to the potential legalization of same-sex marriage by the Supreme Court of Hawaii. She was engaged to a man. Same-sex marriage wasn't legal anywhere. And the public perception of what it meant to be gay wasn't anything like it is now, she told the Huffington Post. 

Today Lehman is in a committed relationship with her partner, Julie Conway, with whom she lives in Virginia. According to the P-G, she is a partner at the Washington, D.C. office of the law firm Holland & Knight and a lobbyist on behalf of Freedom to Marry, an organization that works to advance the cause of same-sex marriage. 

She lobbied for the past two years trying to persuade fellow Republicans to support gay marriage.

Lehman's told the P-G her contributions were more involved with writing Section 2 of DOMA -- which permits states that do not have same-sex marriage not to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states -- than with Section 3. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled only Section 3 unconstitutional, which defines marriage as between one man and one woman.

Lehman continued working on Capitol Hill after DOMA passed and told the P-G she didn't spend a lot of time thinking about the law until later. She was happily married until 2001, when her husband abruptly wanted out. In 2004, same-sex marriage became legal in Massachusetts. Late that same year, she started seeing Conway.

Lehman, who is still a staunch conservative, said personal and political circumstances led to her change of heart on same-sex marriage. 

She told the Huffington Post that something Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass, said during one of the committee hearings on DOMA had stuck with her. At the time, Frank was the only openly gay member of Congress.

"I remember Barney Frank saying at the time, 'I don't understand how me being married to my partner hurts your ability to be married,'" she recalled. "And I remember thinking, 'Yeah, I don't either.'"