In an op-ed in today’s Los Angeles Times, Bob Barr, the author of the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in 1996, recants his support of the law, which prevents gay marriages from being recognized across state lines.

The public was first introduced to Bob Barr in 1994, when he came to Congress as one of the freshmen class of snarling Gingrichite House Republicans. It was Barr who first submitted a bill of impeachment against Pres. Clinton, well before Clinton had lied in a civil-lawsuit deposition about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. He advocates repealing DOMA now, in part because in the intervening years he has become a civil liberties-loving libertarian, who was, in fact, the Libertarian Party’s presidential candiate last year. Here’s Barr’s explanation of his change in heart:

I’ve wrestled with this issue for the last several years and come to the conclusion that DOMA is not working out as planned. In testifying before Congress against a federal marriage amendment, and more recently while making my case to skeptical Libertarians as to why I was worthy of their support as their party’s presidential nominee, I have concluded that DOMA is neither meeting the principles of federalism it was supposed to, nor is its impact limited to federal law.

In effect, DOMA’s language reflects one-way federalism: It protects only those states that don’t want to accept a same-sex marriage granted by another state. Moreover, the heterosexual definition of marriage for purposes of federal laws — including, immigration, Social Security survivor rights and veteran’s benefits — has become a de facto club used to limit, if not thwart, the ability of a state to choose to recognize same-sex unions.

Even more so now than in 1996, I believe we need to reduce federal power over the lives of the citizenry and over the prerogatives of the states. It truly is time to get the federal government out of the marriage business. In law and policy, such decisions should be left to the people themselves.

What Barr doesn’t mention in the op-ed piece is the toxic levels of political hypocrisy that tainted the passage of DOMA. First of all, there were no high-minded principles behind it. DOMA was sent up by the Republicans as a wedge issue between Pres. Clinton and his gay supporters in the 1996 presidential campaign, which was entering its final heat when the bill passed and Clinton signed it in late September. Yes, it tossed red meat to the gay-hating GOP base, but any pleasure it gave them or damage it might do to the lives of gay people was just a lagniappe for its framers. As a political tool, however, DOMA was a failure, since most gay people saw through it and voted for Clinton, who won reelection handily that November.

Secondly, the four men who pushed DOMA into law all were marriage-abusers. Barr was in his third marriage at the time, and has been accused by his second wife of cheating on her with the woman who became his third wife. Sen Bob. Dole, who shepherded the bill through the Senate before he resigned to focus on his presidential campaign against Clinton that year, left his first wife and child for a flight attendant. More significantly, DOMA would have gone nowhere without the blessing of then-House Speaker Net Gingrich, and, of course, it could not have become law if Pres. Clinton hadn’t signed it. We later learned that both Gingirch and Clinton were engaged in extramarital affairs at the time DOMA was being debated.

Barr also doesn’t mention the other huge problem with DOMA. It is unconstitutional on its face. He does admit that it was intended to abrogate the Constitution’s full faith and credit clause, which guarantees that contracts, marriage and otherwise, created in one state must be recognized in another. But DOMA — like every anti-gay marriage law on the books — also upends the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution which states, “no state shall … deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Whether an “equal protection” clause can be amended to remove the protection of rights of gays — which logic says would thus void protective “equality” — is one of the issues that the California Supreme Court will be debating this spring when it rules on the Proposition 8 amendment, which prohibits the state from protecting the marriage rights of just one group: gay people.

It would have been nice if Barr had copped to the hypocrisy in DOMA, but gay-marriage advocates are generally grateful for support for any reason, and Barr’s rationale — getting the federal government out of the marriages of American citizens — is as valid as any.