A few years ago I wrote a book, The Right To Privacy, in which I demonstrated how various court decisions linked contraception, abortion, assisted suicide and same sex unions. More recent cases again show the connections between approval of contraception and same sex unions: the willingness to disregard legislation altogether in favor of "penumbra" or vague implications:
Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 case that overturned Connecticut's contraception ban and provided a crucial foundation for the deadly Roe v. Wade. In Griswold, the Court was undeterred by the total absence of textual constitutional support for its position because of, well, implications (or something). Recall these famous words?
The foregoing cases suggest that specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.
The DOMA case doesn't contain this cringe-worthy language, but it does contain much the same cringe-worthy substance. In the absence of textual constitutional support, a court must necessarily grasp at straws in its quest to "do the right thing," and if implications are all it has, then implications will be enough.