Following up on Hadley Arkes’s excellent post, I’m soon going to address the wild pair of rulings yesterday in which federal district judge Joseph L. Tauro (of Massachusetts) held that the Defense of Marriage Act violates equal-protection principles and the Tenth Amendment.

For now, though, I’d like to highlight that Solicitor General Elena Kagan, together with her colleagues in the Obama Department of Justice, has succeeded in sabotaging the Defense of Marriage Act that she was dutybound to defend. (I’ll detail this in follow-on posts.) Her dereliction of duty offers powerful evidence that she would indulge her ideological preferences as a justice and provides ample reason for any senator to oppose her confirmation.