An amendment to the constitution of the United States is a difficult thing to achieve. The bill must pass both chambers of Congress by a two-thirds majority. Afterwards, a three-fourths majority of the states must ratify it. Most efforts, such as the Equal Rights Amendment, have failed. So, the chances the Right will prevail in its efforts to make marriage mean only the union of a man and a woman are not promising.
However, the conservatives have quite a pitcher on the mound. George W. Bush is leading the assault on gay marriage.
WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush says legalizing gay marriage would redefine the most fundamental institution of civilization and that a constitutional amendment is needed to protect it.
. . .Leading the chorus of support for an amendment, Bush said, ``If courts create their own arbitrary definition of marriage as a mere legal contract, and cut marriage off from its cultural, religious and natural roots, then the meaning of marriage is lost and the institution is weakened.''
His remarks follow the opening of Senate debate Friday on a constitutional amendment effectively banning gay marriage.
The difficulty of the amendment process is a bulwark against amending the Constitution lightly. A revisitation of the national exercise in hypocrisy known as Prohibition is unlikely because of it.
The so far Right she must walk crooked legal columnist at WorldNetDaily, Jane Chastain, agrees with me about the unlikelihood of Congress passing the amendment barring gay marriage.
I take no pleasure in telling you that the vote on the constitutional amendment designed to protect the sanctity of marriage between a man and woman will fail next week in the U.S. Senate.
Chastain's reason for believing the amendment will fail is quite different from mine. I believe the issue of gay marriage is not of such magnitude that it needs to be addressed by the Constitution. We already have the Fourteenth Amendment. States already have similar protections in their constitutions. They can take if from there. If the resolution denies equal protection in some states, the judicial process is the next step. Chastain says the amendment will fail because her bogeymen of choice, gay activists, have poisoned the well. Her views are remarkable for their extremism.
Article comments
1 - Michael Croft
"While we were sleeping?" Jeebus, I thought that during the eighties, they were busy trying to convince the Reaganites to provide some quid pro quo and that during the nineties, they were taking over local school boards so that they could prevent the scientific community from arrogantly dismissing "creation science" as crap.
Now she tells me that they were doing that in their sleep? Scary. It makes one wonder what they could have accomplished during the eighties and nineties if they hadn't been unconscious.
2 - boomcrashbaby
All I remember of the 80's was a disorganized, panicked, upset and angry community that was trying to get the world to see the beginnings of a plague in it's midst.
I have known a high percentage of gay, mostly closeted teachers though, in my life. But priests too. In some professions, it makes more sense from a survival standpoint if you stay in the closet. This was especially true at the onset of AIDS. It was less important to be in the closet if you were a hairdresser or bartender. Gay people can be found in every company, organization and club though. I'm sure it's always been that way. I can see how, for the paranoid, the closet can be seen as an infiltration, but that's misguided because the closet is far more destructive inward than outward.
I'm not sure if gay people control the NEA as much as liberal people do though. And personally, I think it's a good thing. They are people more focused on science and logic and likelihood, rather than emotion and belief. Having such a viewpoint will make it more likely that they are more tolerant of differing orientations.
3 - Shark
Record deficits, massive unemployment, 40 million Americans w/out health insurance, schools going broke turning out illiterates, USA isolated and hated by the rest of the occupants of Planet Earth, pollution increasingly affecting health and weather, enviornmental rape by corporations promising "jobs" and delivering cancer, more "terror threats", Iraq and Afghanistan have become twin towers of Disaster (but who cares; nameless dead American GIs have been relegated to the 'crawl' section of FOX & CNN), and WHAT IS YOUR PRESIDENT DOING?
HE WANTS A CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT to keep gay people from some having some basic human/civil rights.
Fuck that divisive, unelected bastard and his evil minions.
4 - Mike Kole
Time to get government out of the business of regulating and licensing marriage.