Why the federal marriage amendment is needed, redux

Someone just drew my attention to a year-old e-mail exchange with a conservative colleague who, to my dismay, opposed the Federal Marriage Amendment, on states’ rights grounds. (He has since been quiet on that front, so perhaps he was persuaded.) In this conversation he had said that there are “good grounds to believe that marriage is not in the proper scope of the Constitution. Should there be a constitutional amendment for water chlorination?” To which I replied:

Ok, now you’re going to the substance of the issue. The question is not, is marriage a federal, constitutional matter, but should marriage be a federal, constitutional matter?

Fortunately, the answer is not terribly complicated. Marriage is the fundamental institution of society. It literally forms human society. Everything else branches out from it and is made possible by it. It is as key to society as DNA is to an organism.

Marriage didn’t have to be protected federally in the past, because it wasn’t being challenged. Now it is. The combination of what the judges did in Massachusetts, plus a likely overturning of the Defense of Marriage Act by the U.S. Supreme Court, means the instant nationalization of homosexual marriage. There is no viable way, I repeat, no viable way, to stop this other than through a federal amendment.

Nota bene: this is not my preference, at all. If conservatives had been serious, the American people would have started impeaching out-of-control judges at least as far back as Roe v. Wade, or the Congress would have reined them in, and that would have stopped the judicial usurpation. But we didn’t go that route. And now an amendment is the only way to stop homosexual marriage from being imposed.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 19, 2005 12:30 AM | Send