From what I can gather, it was about the 14th amendment, not the 5th amendment.

Like you, I'm not a lawyer and I don't understand all the legalities. But from the few minutes of reading I just did, it seems to me that if a state tries to prevent the spouse of a terminally ill patient to be on their death certificate (the Ohio case that started this snowball), then that sounds to me like it's indeed directly at odds with the 14th amendment's "equal protection" clause.

If I'm interpreting that correctly, then it sounds to me like the supreme court did exactly the thing they were supposed to do: Make a ruling decision between two contradictory laws. It doesn't look to me like anyone invented a reason. That reason was brought *to* them by citizens with a grievance. It took a lot of years and multiple levels of courts to get that far. Sounds like proper due process to me.

Since one of the jobs of the supreme court is to be the final arbiter of constitutional law, and since the 14th amendment was written in the 1800's, I don't think anyone was doing any inventing here. It looks like they were presented a genuine case where a state attempted to deny US citizens some rights, thus being in contradiction to the 14th amendment, and made a ruling.

The bigger picture is really: How, from a legal standpoint, can we say that states can have individual laws at all, as long as the 14th amendment's "equal protection" clause still stands? How far-reaching is that 14th amendment? Today, it reaches a little farther than it did a few days ago. And it's indeed the supreme court's job to decide how far it, and other parts of the constitution, reaches.

Of course the members of the supreme court know full well that they ultimately have made a moral decision as well as a legal one, that's pretty clear in their statements. But that's usually how these things go. The letter of the law gets enforced at all the lower court levels, and anywhere there's ambiguity, the fight goes back and forth until it gets all the way to the top. After all the details of the legalities have already been fought to death and stripped away, all that remains is the really big moral choices. Those end up being at the heart of many SCOTUS decisions, because that ends up being their job out of pure necessity.

But they didn't start this battle, they just ruled on the case that was brought before them. I don't think they set out to strike down DOMA, but someone brought an actual legal case before them which was directly in the crossfire between one of clauses in the DOMA and one of the clauses in the 14th amendment. One of those two clauses had to lose that battle. So now one of the clauses in the DOMA has been indirectly struck down by this decision.

Again, I'm not a lawyer, but that's what it looks like to me on my brief read.