Bob Barr, the who drafted the U.S. Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) as a member of Congress, has called for the repeal of the law in an op-ed piece appearing today in the Los Angeles Times.

In the commentary, Barr, a former Republican who ran unsuccessfully for president as a Libertarian, argued that “DOMA is not working out as planned” and called for its repeal.

He offered a federalism, not a gay-rights, rationale. After explaining that the two operative provisions of DOMA were intended, respectively, to prevent states from having to recognize other state’s same-sex marriages and to prevent the federal government from having to recognize any state’s same-sex marriages, Barr reasoned that the law has had the practical effect of frustrating states’ rights.

As Barr explained his view:

In effect, DOMA’s language reflects one-way federalism: It protects only those states that don’t want to accept a same-sex marriage granted by another state. Moreover, the heterosexual definition of marriage for purposes of federal laws — including, immigration, Social Security survivor rights and veteran’s benefits — has become a de facto club used to limit, if not thwart, the ability of a state to choose to recognize same-sex unions.

He concluded that “[i]f one truly believes in federalism and the primacy of state government over the federal, DOMA is simply incompatible with those notions.”

Whatever the merits of his analysis of the federalism point, Barr included one misrepresentation in the piece. He asserted in passing that the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the U.S. Constitution “normally would require State B to recognize any lawful marriage performed in State A.” In fact, there is virtually no case law in support of this view of the Clause, and the established interpretation of the Clause contradicts this view, as I have previously explained. The claim that the Full Faith and Credit Clause required interstate recognition of same-sex marriages is a myth perpetuated, for different reasons, by advocates on both sides of the marriage issue.