Edith Windsor, who helped end gay marriage ban, dies

NEW YORK » Edith Windsor, a gay rights pioneer whose landmark Supreme Court case struck down parts of a federal anti-gay-marriage law and paved a path toward legalizing same-sex nuptials nationwide, died Tuesday. She was 88.

Windsor died in New York, said her lawyer, Roberta Kaplan. The cause of death wasn’t given, but Windsor had struggled with heart issues for years.

Former President Barack Obama called her one of the “quiet heroes” whose persistence had furthered the cause of equality.

“Few were as small in stature as Edie Windsor — and few made as big a difference to America,” the Democrat said in a statement Tuesday, adding that he had spoken to her a few days earlier.

Windsor already was 81 when she brought a lawsuit that proved to be a turning point for gay rights. The impetus was the 2009 death of her first spouse, Thea Spyer. The women had married legally in Canada in 2007 after spending more than 40 years together.

Windsor said the federal Defense of Marriage Act’s definition of marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman prevented her from getting a marital deduction on Spyer’s estate. That meant Windsor faced a $360,000 tax bill that heterosexual couples would not have.

“It’s a very important case. It’s bigger than marriage, and I think marriage is major. I think if we win, the effect will be the beginning of the end of stigma,” she told The Associated Press in 2012, after the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.

Win she did: The justices ruled 5-4 in June 2013 that the provision in the law was unconstitutional, and that legally married same-sex couples are entitled to the same federal benefits that heterosexual couples receive.

The opinion marked a key moment of encouragement for gay marriage supporters then confronting a nationwide patchwork of laws that outlawed such unions in roughly three dozen states.

It also affronted conservatives who hewed to defining marriage as between a man and a woman. ThenSupreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia predicted the ruling would be used to upend state restrictions on marriage and warned: “The only thing that will ‘confine’ the court’s holding is its sense of what it can get away with.”

Ultimately, the opinion in Windsor’s case became the basis for a wave of federal court rulings that struck down state marriage bans and led to a 2015 Supreme Court ruling giving samesex couples the right to marry from coast to coast.

“One simply cannot write the history of the gay rights movement without reserving immense credit and gratitude for Edie Windsor,” said Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. He called Windsor “one of this country’s great civil rights pioneers.”

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, said he was heartbroken by the death of a woman who “embodied the New York spirit, taking it upon herself to tear down barriers for others.”

Edith Windsor