The Full Faith and Credit Clause has been applied to orders of protection, for which the clause was invoked by the Violence Against Women Act, and child support, for which the enforcement of the clause was spelled out in the Federal Full Faith and Credit for Child Support Orders Act (28 U.S.C. § 1738B).
Until the Supreme Court struck down all laws banning interracial marriage in 1967, a number of states banned interracial marriage and did not accept interracial marriage certificates issued in other states. The full faith and credit clause was never used to force a state to recognize a marriage it did not wish to recognize.[17] However, the existence of a common-law marriage in a sister state (still available in nine states and the District of Columbia) has been recognized in divorce or dissolution of marriage cases.
The clause's application to state-sanctioned same-sex marriages, civil unions, and domestic partnerships is unresolved, as is its relationship to the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment. Between 1996 and 2004, 39 states passed laws and constitutional amendments that defined marriage as consisting solely of different-sex couples. Most explicitly prohibit the state from honoring same-sex marriages performed in other states and countries. Conversely, same-sex marriage is legal in several states and the District of Columbia. In August 2007, a federal appeals court held that the clause did require Oklahoma to issue a revised birth certificate showing both adoptive parents of a child born in Oklahoma who had been adopted by a same-sex couple married in another state.[18] Another federal appeals court held differently in April 2011 in a Louisiana case, Adar v. Smith.[19] The Obama administration also announced they believed DOMA was unconstitutional in 2011. Section 3 of DOMA (codified at 1 U.S.C. § 7) provides that in determining the meaning of any Act of the U.S. Congress or any federal regulation, etc., the word "marriage" would mean only a legal union between one man and one woman. On June 26, 2013 in a New York case, Windsor v. the United States, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down section 3, which limited the federal definition of marriage to one man and one woman. Section 2, which allows states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages performed in states where such marriage is legal, was not at issue in the Windsor case[20] and remains in effect.
