House Kills Gay Marriage Ban
WASHINGTON, Oct. 1 – The Republican-controlled House yesterday soundly rejected a proposed amendment to the Constitution that would define marriage solely as the union of a man and a woman.
The 227-186 vote, which capped an exhausting 2 1/2-hour debate, was 63 votes short of the necessary two-thirds majority needed to pass a constitutional amendment on to the states for consideration. The Senate rejected its version of the amendment in July.
All 10 House members from Massachusetts, the only state in the nation to recognize same-sex marriages, voted against the amendment.
Proponents of the Marriage Protection Amendment said they were defending the sanctity of traditional values and argued that the measure was necessary because “activist” judges pre-empt lawmakers by legalizing gay marriage. Many members of Congress specifically bashed the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s same-sex marriage ruling.
Critics called the debate a diversion from policy issues that Congress should address before the November elections and an effort by Republican leaders to write discrimination into the Constitution. Many also argued that the same-sex marriage issue should be left to the states.
“Can anyone really say with a straight face that a constitutional amendment beating up on gay people is more important than funding our homeland security?” asked Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., the first opponent to address the amendment.
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, who opponents say pushed the vote forward to further divide the electorate, said that most of his colleagues would prefer not to have the debate but that Congress has a responsibility to interfere with judges “who feel a greater responsibility to their own political ideology than the Constitution.”
Thirty-nine states have statutes or state constitutional provisions in place that limit recognized marriages to those between men and women. In the last two months, Missouri and Louisiana voted in favor of constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriages, while 11 other states will vote on the same issue in November.
President Bush supports an amendment to the Constitution to ban same-sex marriage while his Democratic opponent, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, wants individual states to decide the issue.
Ray McNulty, spokesman for the Massachusetts Family Institute, a conservative family values group, said the decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court forced this issue from the states into the national arena.
“It’s something that ought to be approved on the national level to prevent activist judges to take the same action that was taken in Massachusetts,” McNulty said, “and we feel the only way that can be done is to amend the U.S. Constitution.”
Public polls show strong opposition to gay marriage, but opinion is about evenly divided regarding a federal constitutional amendment to ban it.
Proponents of the amendment fear that federal judges might rule that marriages recognized by one state must be valid in all others.
Steve Schwadron, spokesman for Rep. William Delahunt, D-Mass., agreed with McGovern that yesterday’s debate and vote was a political distraction.
“When most people on Cape Cod woke up this morning, their first thought wasn’t, ‘Is there a gay married couple in the community?’ ” Schwadron said. “Their first thought was whether their job was secure, whether they have health insurance and whether their sons and daughters serving in Iraq were safe.”
Material from The Associated Press was used in this report.
