Edie Windsor vs. DOMA May Be Best Chance To Strike Federal Gay Marriage Bar

Edith "Edie" Windsor, 83, never really thought she would be suing the government. But just to be safe, she and her late wife, Thea Spyer, always kept extensive records.

"We needed to make sure that everything was perfectly well defined and in order," Windsor said. "Because I had no idea that this might happen, and yet all our lives we knew that it was going to happen."

When Spyer died, she left her entire estate to Windsor. But because the federal government did not recognize their marriage under the Defense of Marriage Act, Windsor was hit with a bill for $363,000 in federal estate tax. If Thea had been a Theo, Windsor likes to say, she would have received her spouse's estate tax-free.

Like a handful of other plaintiffs across the country, Windsor is now hoping the U.S. Supreme Court will take her case in order to overturn DOMA, the 1996 law signed by President Bill Clinton that defines marriage as the legal union of one man and one woman. As more states have legalized same-sex marriage -- leading to more than a dozen suits challenging the constitutionality of the federal law -- and public opinion continues to shift in favor of expanded gay rights, legal experts expect a ruling from the high court to come soon. But at 83, with a heart condition, Windsor is not sure it will be soon enough.

On June 6, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York sided with Windsor. This week, her lawyers filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to take her case and let her skip what would be the usual next step of going before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit. This is the second attempt by Windsor's legal team to speed up the case. On June 13, after Congress' Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group filed a notice of appeal to the 2nd Circuit -- Congress has defended DOMA ever since President Barack Obama decided his Justice Department would not -- Windsor filed a motion to expedite that appeal.

Windsor's lawyers -- many of them from the American Civil Liberties Union's Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender Project -- argued in their Supreme Court petition that her case is the best vehicle for challenging DOMA because it is so clear that Windsor suffered financially as a direct result of the policy.