Dec 05, 2003  |  By: LOU CHIBBARO JR.  | COMMENTS     

Disagreements surfaced among supporters of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage last week as five Republican lawmakers introduced a version of the amendment into the Senate identical to the one introduced earlier this year in the House.

Gay civil rights attorneys said the House and Senate proposal — called the Federal Marriage Amendment — would wipe out all of the nation’s domestic partner laws and Vermont’s civil unions law as well as ban gay marriage.

But a coalition of religious right groups said the proposed amendment was not strong enough. The coalition, calling itself the Arlington Group, after holding its first meeting in Arlington, Va., proposed a more harshly worded version that specifically bans states and the federal government from offering marriage related benefits or rights to people in “non-marital sexual relationships.”

Meanwhile, Matt Daniels, president of the Alliance for Marriage, a bipartisan coalition that drafted the version of the amendment introduced in the House and Senate, said the coalition’s intent was to define marriage in the Constitution as a union only between a man and woman. According to Daniels, coalition members never intended to ban gay civil unions or domestic partner benefits, and they don’t believe their amendment would do that.

However, in response to assertions by gay civil rights attorneys and other legal experts, Daniels has said the coalition is working on a more narrowly worded version of the amendment. The soon-to-be-released amendment would make it clear that civil unions and domestic partnership arrangements created by legislative bodies would not be invalidated, Daniels told the Washington Post last week.

Christopher Anders, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Lesbian & Gay Rights Project, said the version of the amendment introduced in the House and Senate would effectively overturn all domestic partner and civil unions laws. Anders said the amendment, while not directly repealing such laws, would render them null and void by preventing a court from upholding them if they come under legal challenge.

The proposed constitutional amendment states, “Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this constitution, nor the constitution of any state, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require the marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.”

Anders called the second sentence of the proposed amendment a sweeping prohibition that would invalidate virtually all of the domestic partner laws passed in dozens of cities and states. He said it would also invalidate Vermont’s civil unions law.

Arlington Group wants tougher law
The Arlington Group, a social conservative organization, has called for retaining these two sentences while adding a third, which it says is needed to prevent the creation of a “substitute marriage” for gays without providing a similar arrangement for straights.

The group’s proposed add-on sentence states, “Neither the federal government nor any state shall predicate benefits, privileges, rights or immunities on the existence, recognition or presumption of non-marital sexual relationships.”

Charles Colson, a former Nixon administration official and member of the Arlington Group, told the Post the sentence proposed by the group would allow state legislatures to establish civil unions if they provide the same civil union benefits to “any two people who live together,” including “an unmarried heterosexual couple or two old spinsters.”

The Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest gay political group, says it remains hopeful that backers of the Federal Marriage Amendment or any of the other proposed amendments will be unable to obtain the two-thirds vote needed in the House and Senate to pass such an amendment.

Winnie Stachelberg, HRC’s political director, said informal headcounts conducted by HRC and its congressional allies indicate supporters have yet to line up enough support to pass a constitutional amendment in either the House or Senate.

Anders said gay U.S. Reps. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) have conducted their own survey of House members and found more than one-third of House members expressed opposition to a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

Sen. trong>Wayne Allard (R-Colo.) is one of the lead sponsors of a constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriage. Some legal experts say the amendment would also prohibit government-issued civil unions and domestic partner benefits.

Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) said he supports the idea of a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, but said Congress should wait until the Defense of Marriage Act is tested in the courts before moving ahead with a constitutional ...