(COMTEX) B: On Law: Stop and smell the Constitution ( United Press
International )
WASHINGTON, Jan 28, 2005 (United Press International via COMTEX) -- Life is
short. Every once in a while you have to stop and smell the culture wars.
Not that they smell all that good.
In fact, they're less like roses than putrefying boils on the body politic. But
they have to be taken care of, they have to be lanced, if this county is ever to
be healed of its persistent divisions.
And when it comes to divisiveness, few cultural battles evoke more gut emotion
than the issue of same-sex marriage.
Red State types feel a profound anger at the elitists who seem intent on
dismantling our country's values to accommodate the homosexual interest groups
and Hollywood liberals. Blue State people seem to feel an equally profound
contempt toward those yokels who, emboldened by the rise of President George W.
Bush, are trying to turn this country into the theocracy it never was.
It's a lose-lose situation. No matter how the issue is resolved, one side or the
other is going to end up outraged with the taste of bitter bile in its mouth.
Yuck. Anyone got a breath mint?
Never mind. You'll recall that something titled the "Marriage Protection
Amendment" went down in flames last year in Congress. The amendment couldn't
even muster the requisite two-thirds vote in the House, which is much more
conservative than the Senate.
Now, with Republicans gaining a larger congressional majority in the 2004
elections, Senate leaders have promised to reintroduce the constitutional
amendment as a priority for the 109th Congress.
The amendment would define "marriage" as the union of one man and one woman.
Meanwhile, a gay conservative group called the Log Cabin Republicans says it is
outraged by a New York Times report.
The report said a coalition of conservative, or "far right," organizations known
as the "Arlington Group" is threatening to withhold support for Bush's proposal
to let younger workers invest part of the money that would have gone to Social
Security taxes if the president does not go all out to support the Marriage
Protection Amendment.
Log Cabin President Patrick Guerriero released a statement saying, "The radical
right has once again revealed their true motives -- they want to divide the
American family by pushing an already defeated constitutional amendment, instead
of uniting behind the Republican reform agenda."
The Washington Post says the Arlington Group was formed in an apartment in the
Virginia suburbs of the nation's capital after the Massachusetts Supreme Court
installed gay marriage in that state. The group includes a "broad array" of
religious groups and political activists, the Post said, and is pushing hard for
a constitutional amendment to cut gay marriage off at the pass but is having
trouble reaching consensus on what the wording of the amendment should be.
Excuse me? What fairyland are these people living in? (No pun intended.)
OK, if we credit the talking heads on television, the issue of gay marriage did
as much as anything in the 2004 election to keep Bush in the White House. And 11
states enacted amendments banning gay marriage. But 11 states do not a
constitutional amendment make.
Like Justice Clarence Thomas, I keep a copy of the Constitution handy at all
times.
Article V says it takes two-thirds of both the House and the Senate to get any
constitutional amendment off the ground.
The Marriage Protection Amendment failed far short of this goal the first time
around, and Republican gains in the House and Senate are not enough to make up
the difference, even assuming that all new Republicans would vote to approve the
proposal.
If Congress won't act, then an amendment can be introduced by two-thirds of the
state legislatures. Bush took 31 states -- just less than two-thirds -- in 2004,
but that doesn't mean the legislatures in those states would buck public opinion
to propose the constitutional amendment.
Polls consistently show the public opposed to gay and lesbian marriage, but
those same polls also consistently show a majority of the public is opposed to
cracking the Constitution for that purpose.
Which means the amendment would be dead on arrival.
But let's assume by some miracle the amendment gets off the launching pad.
Then, in order for the proposal to become part of the Constitution, it still
would have to be ratified by three-fourths of the state legislatures. Again,
that's an almost impossible row to hoe with a controversial proposal.
It's hard, isn't it? It's supposed to be hard. The founding fathers purposely
made it hard. They wanted the country to have something approaching a consensus
before amending the Constitution. They wanted a united country before changes
are made to the seminal document of the Republic.
We simply don't have that now. We are almost equally divided, on this and on
many other issues.
If the president really wants to spend his political capital on a fight to
ratify the Marriage Protection Amendment, he should settle in for the long haul.
And he shouldn't plan on getting much else done while he fights this fight.
--
(Mike Kirkland is UPI's senior legal affairs correspondent. He has covered the
Supreme Court and other parts of the legal community since 1993.)
--
(Please send comments to nationaldesk@upi.com.)
By MICHAEL KIRKLAND, UPI Legal Affairs Correspondent
Copyright 2005 by United Press International.
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