President George W. Bush has proposed an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would ban same-sex marriage.
Such a proposal could keep the Congress and the state legislatures from taking on more important issues.
An amendment to the Constitution requires approval of two-thirds of both houses of Congress and of the legislatures of at least three-fourths of the states.
That’s hard to do, just as the founding fathers intended amending the Constitution to be.
After Congress and the states added the 10 amendments that we call the Bill of Rights in 1791, they’ve added only 17 amendments in 213 years, that’s one every 12 or 13 years. And one amendment (the 21st) was a repeal of the 18th Amendment, the well-intentioned but hard-to-enforce prohibition of alcoholic beverages. By contrast, some states have amended their constitutions hundreds of times.
If Congress had to deal with an amendment defining marriage as a male-female union, the debate would take a sharply divided Congress away from dealing with the budget deficit, with social-security and Medicare reform and with military forces spread thinly around the world.
If Congress approved the amendment, the states would face pressure from both sides of the issue at a time when almost all face difficult budget problems.
We could expect nine or 10 states to quickly reject a proposed amendment, and 25 or 30 to quickly reject it, leaving fights in the remaining states to get the needed 38 states, diverting the legislatures in the dozen or so battleground states from vital public questions.
The history of Constitutional amendments have been to expand people’s rights, abolish slavery (13th Amendment), protecting citizenship rights (14th), barring discrimination in voting based on race and other factors (15th), electing senators directly (17th), guaranteeing the vote to women (19th), shortening the time between election day and inauguration (20th), giving presidential votes to the District of Columbia (23rd), barring poll-tax requirements for voting (24th) and guaranteeing voting rights to everyone over 18 (26th).
The proposed marriage amendment would be the first to restrict the rights of a group of Americans.
President Bush says that we need the amendment to preserve the sanctity of marriage, but I see no way that denying marriage to same-sex couples would make any heterosexual marriage – good or bad – better. Some say that such an issue is better decided by votes of our elected representatives than by the courts, but is it what we should be discussing in an election year?
The “qualifying” primary
By a 28-20 vote Tuesday, the state Senate passed what is now called a “qualifying” primary election scheme, leaving the House of Representatives a week to agree or to come up with an alternative to present to a House-Senate conference.
The qualifying primary would give us a primary ballot that would look like the one we’ve had with the ballot primary for 68 years. All registered candidates would appear on a single ballot, but instead of choosing party nominees, the new system would “qualify” the top two vote-getters for the November general election.
House members will face pressure from the Democratic and Republican organizations, both of which want partisan primaries in which each voter is limited to voting on one of four ballots: Democratic, Republican, Libertarian or independent.
This pressure was so strong in the Senate that the measure was passing 29-19 until one Eastern Washington senator who favored the bill changed his vote because he wants party support for a run for Congress.
The pressure will be even greater on House members, all of whom will have to go to their local party organizations this fall for both endorsements and money.
The Senate-passed bill allows candidates to use political party names but the parties have said they would sue to prevent anyone they don’t authorize from using party names. State officials believe they can defeat any such suit but in case they can’t the measure includes a substitute clause that would allow the candidates to use three words of identification.
We’d like to know what you think. If you have a comment send it to
The Enterprise
P.O. Box 977
Lynnwood, Wash. 98036
E-mail: entopinion@heraldnet.com
Fax: 425-774-8622
Evan Smith is the Enterprise Forum editor.
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