Soapbox

Weapons of Constitutional Destruction

This week President Bush announced that he is officially seeking a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. He says that he is taking this step because he wants to defend marriage and families.

This statement may go down in history alongside “The check is in the mail”, “Of course I’ll respect you in the morning” and “We know Sadaam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction” as a classic lie of our age.

It is a lie to say outlawing gay marriage will defend families when millions of gay people have families. It is a lie to say a DOMA amendment is protecting marriage without any evidence that gay marriage or unions would cause straight couples harm. It is true, however, that study after study shows that divorce damages families and weakens society. The same is true for out-of-wedlock births. Children in these situations often suffer both emotional and economic hardship, which puts a drain on society.

So where is the call to ban divorce? Anybody? Hello! Gosh, the silence from the DOMA advocates is just deafening.

Most people who support a DOMA amendment don’t do so because they want to strengthen families: they do it because they believe their religion tells them that being gay is a sin. That’s all well and good, and they’re entitled to that opinion. But in this country we don’t pass constitutional amendments based on what someone thinks the Bible says! If we did, we’d need a new amendment for stoning adulterers to death, and another for burning witches.

Lawmakers who support DOMA are in a catch-22. If they admit they support it for religious reasons, they have no legal standing; but if they say it’s for sociological reasons, they’re being hypocrites, because they have no evidence. When President Bush calls for a constitutional amendment to ban divorce and extra-marital sex, then I will believe that, although misguided, he is at least sincere in his desire to protect and strengthen families. Since he does not, perhaps he merely wants to protect and strengthen his re-election campaign.

Amending the Constitution to deny civil liberties instead of protecting them is a drastic and dangerous step. It’s been tried once before, with Prohibition, and look how that worked out! President Bush thinks that, because polls say the majority opposes gay marriage, then the majority will support this amendment. My fervent hope is that he will find that he has mis-calculated, and that people on both sides of the marriage issue will be unwilling to support what amounts to yet another Bush administration attack on states’ rights.

It’s now gone beyond a simple pro or con on gay marriage. A vote for this amendment would be a vote to make discrimination the law of the land, to weaken the doctrine of federalism and do an end-run around the full faith and credit clause of the Constitution.

With his miserable record on civil rights, do we want George Bush and friends taking on the U.S. Constitution? You don’t have to be in favor of gay marriage to be against his attempted hijacking of this respected and influential document.

The president and congress should keep their hands off the Constitution and use their time on something that will help people, like fixing social security or health care. Let the people and the states work out the issue of gay marriage, pro or con, for themselves.