Maggie Gallagher to Testify Before Congress

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Maggie Gallagher, the chairman of the board for the National Organization for Marriage, was confronted on Friday morning by a member of the group GetEqual, who accused her of contributing to LGBT suicides. Gallagher was on her way to will testify at a House subcommittee hearing titled "Defending Marriage."

Members of GetEqual presented Gallagher with the "First Annual Anita Bryant 'Unparalleled Bigotry' Award."

The panel testifying before six Republicans and four Democrats on the House Subcommittee on the Constitution also included Ethics and Public Policy Center president Edward Whelan (a fellow marriage equality opponent) and Carlos Ball, a Rutgers Law School professor who will testify that President Barack Obama and his Justice Department were correct in calling the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional. In February the administration announced it would no longer defend the 1996 law in court.

Visit the subcommittee site for a link to a webcast of the hearing, which is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m.

"It is unusual for an administration to decide not to defend the constitutionality of the statute, but it is by no means unprecedented," Ball told the Washington Blade Thursday. "The first President Bush did it; President George W. Bush did it as well. In my view, any administration has a constitutional obligation to make an independent judgment on the constitutionality of certain statutes, especially when there is no clear law on whether the statutes are constitutional or not."