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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.
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.
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| 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 ...
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