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In her dissenting opinion to the Washington Supreme Court decision upholding the state "Defense of Marriage Act", Justice Bobbi Bridge argues, "If the DOMA is really about the 'sanctity' of marriage, as its title implies, then it is clearly an unconstitutional foray into state-sanctioned religious belief."

Bridge emphasizes the need to keep issues about a religious ceremony that might have the same name distinct from the state's civil laws regarding the contract that also is called "marriage."

What we ought not to address is marriage as the sacrament or religious rite -- an area into which the State is not entitled to intrude at all and which is governed by articles of faith. What we have not done is engage in the kind of critical analysis the makers of our constitution contemplated when interpreting the limits on governmental intrusion into private civil affairs; what we have done is permit the religious and moral strains of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) to justify the State's intrusion. As succinctly put by amici the Libertarian Party of Washington State and the Log Cabin Republicans of Washington: "To ban gay civil marriage because some, but not all, religions disfavor it, reflects an impermissible State religious establishment."

Bridge argues that her fellow justices who issued the thinly supported plurality ruling "frame the issue before us so as to ignore not only petitioners' fundamental right to privacy but also the legislature's blatant animosity toward gays and lesbians."

Bridge concludes,

The DOMA denies fundamental basic human rights to Washington's gay and lesbian citizens, human rights that impact the very core of their everyday lives. The plaintiffs in this case represent the ever-growing diversity of the openly gay community in Washington. They are teachers, attorneys, ministers, and foster parents. In their everyday lives they are bosses, coworkers, neighbors, clients, parents, friends, and volunteers. It is in these seemingly mundane, everyday roles that the discrimination imposed by the DOMA is deeply felt, but it is nowhere more wounding than in their very homes. Unless the concept of equal rights has meaning there, it has little meaning anywhere.

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