One month after the Senate failed to approve the Marriage Protection Amendment, the measure likewise fell short of the two-thirds majority needed to clear the House, as well. The proposed 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution defined marriage as the “union between a man and a woman.”
The votes in Congress on the proposed ban on same-sex marriage came as state constitutional amendments and statutes governing traditional marriage were upheld by a number of courts.
A total of 45 states have approved laws or amended their constitutions to bar gay marriage. The 1996 U.S. Defense of Marriage Act allows states to refuse to recognize gay marriages performed elsewhere.
As for the Marriage Protection Amendment, the White House said its backers were forced to take action to try to stop what it termed “activist judges” from redefining traditional marriage.
“The administration believes that the future of marriage in America should be decided through the democratic constitutional process, rather than by the court orders of a few,” the White House stated.
The Alliance for Marriage, which drafted the MPA, said that given a recent flurry of lawsuits challenging state marriage laws, an amendment to the U.S. Constitution is clearly the “only hope” for the American people to determine the future of marriage under our laws.
AFM President Matt Daniels, said, “Most Americans believe that gays and lesbians have a right to live as they choose. But they don’t believe they have a right to redefine marriage for our entire society. Americans want our laws to send a positive message to children about marriage, family and their future.”
Daniels’ sentiments were echoed by a number of pro-family groups, including Family Research Council.
FRC President, Tony Perkins, expressed frustration with the MPA’s rejection on Capitol Hill.
“When the issue is brought at the state level, citizens overwhelmingly vote to define marriage as the union between one man and one woman. Yet both houses of Congress have shown again that they are willing to defy the wishes of their constituents and allow a handful of activists to redefine our oldest and most fundamental institution.
When this measure is before the people, the average popular vote exceeds 71 percent. It is time for state and local officials to stand on this issue and listen to the voice of their constituents and not allow radical judges and homosexual activists to redefine this fundamental institution.
The Marriage Protection Amendment is still needed to ensure that all 50 states employ a common and consistent definition of marriage.
Amending our federal Constitution is a measure that should not be taken lightly. The U.S. Constitution will be amended. The only question is whether it will be amended by the people through the ratification process or amended by fiat by activist judges,” Perkins said.
Dr. James Dobson, chairman of Focus on the Family Action, said, the vote on the MPA shows how lawmakers are “out of touch” with America.
“Once again, men and women representing their constituents in Washington have betrayed those who put them in power. Like the Senate did before them, the House has refused to protect the institution of marriage from activist judges bent on redefining it,” Dobson said.Dr. Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, said, we need only to look to European countries that have legalized same-sex marriage to realize that the expansion of marriage “devalues the institution altogether.”
“In these countries, heterosexual couples are increasingly choosing to cohabitate rather than marry, and out-of-wedlock births are escalating. In Denmark and some regions of Norway, rates of out-of-wedlock births for first-borns have risen to 60 percent and 80 percent, respectively.
Same-sex marriage could undermine religious freedom as well. Religious liberty scholars–including both opponents and advocates of same-sex marriage–acknowledge that legalization of marriage in the United States between two homosexuals could pose a threat to religious freedom. They suggest that discrimination based on sexual orientation could be treated like racial discrimination. In other words, scholars believe it is not a far-fetched idea that churches who oppose homosexuality could lose their 501-3 tax exemption status for exhibiting so-called discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation,” Land said.
Americans United for Separation of Church and State applauded the defeat of the MPA.
AU Executive Director, the Rev. Barry Lynn, said, “The marriage amendment would have wedded religion and government. This was an unwise attempt to enshrine in the Constitution one religious definition of marriage.”
Traditional Values Coalition, which is against same-sex marriage, also opposed the MPA, but only because of the way of its wording.
TVC Executive Director, Andrea Lafferty, said the MPA does “little for marriage and enshrines in the Constitution the right to homosexual civil unions and domestic partnerships.”
“There is a net loss if this amendment ever becomes law. Protection of this sort would kill traditional marriage because it trades civil unions for marriage. Civil unions are homosexual marriages by another name.
We need a real amendment which actually protects marriage and bans all the cheap imitations of marriage, like civil unions and domestic partnerships,” Lafferty said.
On a related note, a Connecticut Superior Court judge ruled that homosexual and lesbian couples have not been harmed by the state’s decision to legalize same-sex civil unions rather than grant them full marriage rights. The judge said, the state constitution requires equal protection and due process of law, not “equivalent nomenclature for such protection and process.” The decision stemmed from a request by eight gay couples to marry in Connecticut.
Courts in Nebraska and Georgia recently upheld state constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage.
In the Nebraska case, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reaffirmed the state’s ban on gay marriage that voters approved by a 70-percent margin in 2000. In doing so, the court overturned a ruling last year that found the ban to be too broad in scope and deprived same-sex couples of participation in the political process.
The Georgia Supreme Court upheld the state’s ban on gay marriage that was approved by 76-percent of the voters in 2004. The court overturned a trial court opinion that determined the ban was unconstitutional because it combined two issues–same-sex marriage and civil unions. The trial court said the two issues should have been addressed separately.
In New York state, there were two recent court decisions that reaffirmed traditional marriage. The New York Court of Appeals upheld the state’s longstanding law defining marriage as the union between a man and a woman. The same court, the state’s highest, subsequently refused to hear an appeal filed by the village of New Paltz and its mayor, to legalize same-sex marriage. The court ruled that the mayor and village had no authority to violate state law by performing gay marriages there.
The Tennessee Supreme Court has dismissed an effort to keep a proposed state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage from appearing on the November general election ballot. The challenge was filed by the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, over a technicality. Tennessee already has a law on the books banning same-sex marriage, but lawmakers who support the amendment say it’s needed in the event that statute is overturned.
The First District Court of Appeals in San Francisco recently heard arguments on a lower court decision that struck down the state of California’s ban on gay marriage. In 2000, California voters approved Proposition-22 by a 61-percent margin, that declared marriage as the union between a man and a woman. In March of last year, a San Francisco Superior Court judge found the law served “no rational purpose” and that it violated the state constitution’s guarantee of equal protection. A ruling by the appellate court is expected in October.
Ironically, in Massachusetts, the same court that legalized first-in-the-nation gay marriages, and which resulted in a flurry of challenges to traditional marriage in other states, has paved the way to allow voters to decide the issue.
In 2003, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court issued its landmark decision that required the commonwealth to allow “marriage” between persons of the same sex. The ruling went into effect the following year, and since then some eight-thousand gay couples have legally wed in Massachusetts.
However, the high court recently voted unanimously to shut down a legal challenge to a proposed state constitutional amendment defining marriage as a union between one man and one woman. The court ruled that the proposal does not violate the state constitutional prohibition on improper use of the initiative process to intervene in a court case to reverse the verdict.
In order to be put before voters in Massachusetts as early as 2008, the state legislature must first approve the amendment in special session this year and next. Lawmakers decided to postpone a decision on the measure in a constitutional convention until after the November general election.
Although upset with the delay on the amendment vote, Massachusetts Family Institute President Kristian Mineau was upbeat over the state supreme court’s decision.
“We are very, very excited, elated and pleased with the SJC ruling. All I can say is, justice is alive in Massachusetts,” Mineau said.
"And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh." Genesis 2:23 & 24
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