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GAO United States
General Accounting Office
Washington, D.C. 20548
Office of the General Counsel
B-275860
January 31, 1997
The Honorable Henry J. Hyde
Chairman, Committee on the Judiciary
House of Representatives
Dear Mr. Chairman:
The Defense of Marriage Act,1 which became law on September 21 of last year, defines
marriage as a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife;
similarly it defines spouse as referring only to a person of the opposite sex who is a
husband or a wife. Because the Act makes both definitions apply [i]n determining the
meaning of any Act of Congress, it potentially affects the interpretation of a wide variety
of federal laws in which marital status is a factor.
In connection with the enactment of the Defense of Marriage Act, you asked us, in your
September 5, 1996, letter, to identify federal laws in which benefits, rights, and privileges
are contingent on marital status. Your staff agreed that we should identify more generally
all those laws in the United States Code in which marital status is a factor, even though
some of these laws may not directly create benefits, rights, or privileges.
To find laws that meet these criteria, we conducted searches for various words or word
stems (marr, spouse, widow, etc.), chosen to elicit marital status, in several electronic
databases that contain the text of federal laws. From the collection of laws in the United
States Code that we found through those searches, we eliminated (1) laws that included
one or more of our search terms but that were not relevant to your request2 and (2) as
agreed with your staff, any laws enacted after the Defense of Marriage Act. The result is a
1Public Law 104-199, 110 Stat. 2419.
2For example, our search for the word stem marr, designed to capture words such as
marriage and marry, also produced references to laws mentioning bone marrow
transplants, the city of Marrakesh, and proper names containing the letters marr.
GAO/OGC-97-16 Defense of Marriage Act](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.gao/gaocrptagsw0001&div=1&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)