Gay marriage opponents love to fear monger about the slippery slope of extending marriage beyond the legal union between one man and one woman. They prophesy that if we allow marriage between two men or two women, we will descend into a Gomorrah of incest, adultery, polygamy, and animal love. In his essay, Big (Gay) Love: Has the IRS Legalized Polygamy?, Anthony Infanti makes subversive use of this repugnant meme to advance his view that tax results should not depend on marriage in the first place.
Infanti’s argument focuses on an analysis of Revenue Ruling 2013-17 (the Ruling), which recognizes same-sex marriages for federal tax purposes. Issued in 2013, after the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated section three of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, the Ruling announces the IRS’s adoption of a general interpretive rule that “for Federal tax purposes … recognizes the validity of a same-sex marriage that was valid in the state where it was entered into, regardless of the married couple’s place of domicile.” Infanti interprets the Ruling to apply to a limited subset of same-sex marriages, in contrast to what he calls the “alternative interpretation” of the Ruling, which reads the Ruling more expansively to cover a larger number of same-sex marriages. Infanti claims that under alternative interpretation of the Ruling, the IRS would also have to recognize the validity of plural marriages. Continue reading "Next Up, Incest"
