How Many Traditional Marriages Were Saved or Strengthened When This Man Lost The Love of His Life and Then His Home?

None.

"DOMA In Real Life," Sullivan headlines his post (via). This is what DOMA does, what it achieves. It doesn't defend marriage. It stigmatizes, punishes, and impoverishes people for the crime of loving each other. It harms people who never harmed anyone else, it does violence to people who posed no threat to anyone else's marriage, traditional or otherwise. But the cruelest irony is that DOMA harms people who have themselves protected "traditional" marriage by refusing to enter into traditional marriages.

The religious right argues that these men should have left homosexuality—and each other—and married women they could never truly love. But loveless, unstable marriages that are likely to end in divorce do more harm to the institution of marriage than same-sex marriage ever could.