From DOMA to Obergefell : A Natural Experiment into Institutional Discrimination and the Outcomes that Result from Discrimination Against Same-sex Couples

Between the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act declaring marriage to be a union between a man and a woman and the 2015 SCOTUS Obergefell decision, numerous states, granted marriage licenses to same-sex couples but most did not. This division allowed for a natural experiment wherein states were divided into two groups and couples into three: opposite-sex, male-male, and female-female. The analysis of states denying same-sex marriage revealed empirical estimates of institutional discrimination, which, together with individual discrimination, ranged in total for male-male couples from 8.2% to 13.5% and for female-female couples from 8.4% to 13.7% in these states