WITH HIS reelection campaign underway and his conservative base demanding a blood sacrifice, President George W. Bush sunk to a new low last week, announcing his support for a constitutional amendment that would outlaw gay marriage. Citing a need to clarify the meaning of marriage and protect that hallowed institution from the pernicious rulings of activist judges, Bush declared that the voice of the people must be heard, and that his proposed amendment was their last resort.
The reasons for opposing this perversion of the Constitution are so many and so varied that it is best to address them one by one.
The first problem with Bush's proposal is his suggestion that homosexual unions are the primary threat to the sanctity of marriage, for if that institution is, indeed, under attack, straight couples are leading the charge. According to the National Center for Health Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly half of all marriages now end in divorce, while 20 million children live in single-parent homes where they are less likely to receive a proper upbringing than their two-parent peers. If Bush is truly intent on preserving the institution of marriage, he would do well to drop his proposed amendment and set his moral sights on America's straight couples, who end their marriages with a reckless abandon unique in the industrialized world.
To his credit, Bush has recently acknowledged the decline of marriage among straight couples, promising to spend $1.5 billion on marriage promotion activities over the next five years. But before embarking on such expensive and intrusive social engineering projects, Bush ought to acknowledge the legitimate aspirations of those gay couples who are ready to marry without any federal encouragement.
The second problem with Bush's proposal is the suggestion that a constitutional amendment is the sole recourse for those upset by the recent advances of gay marriage. In his address, Bush declared ominously that marriage licenses have been issued to same-sex couples in San Francisco and New Mexico, while in Massachusetts, the supreme court has ordered the state to begin issuing such licenses by May 1. But Bush did not mention that in each of those places, state governments are addressing the legal and social issues of gay marriage with little help from the federal government.
In Massachusetts, the state legislature has taken up a proposal to ban gay marriage by an amendment to the state constitution. In California, the state supreme court has agreed to review the legality of the same-sex marriage licenses issued by the city of San Francisco. And in New Mexico, the attorney general has invalidated the gay marriage licenses issued by Sandoval County and ordered sheriff's deputies to prevent the county clerk from issuing any more.
To the extent that the voice of the people demands the prohibition of homosexual unions, that voice is being heard fairly by state and local governments. And in the face of such competent local action, any federal action to halt the advance of gay marriage is unjust and unnecessary. The Constitution has never been used to solve local problems or coerce local governments, nor should it be now.
Indeed, the nature and history of the Constitution provide the most compelling reasons for opposing Bush's amendment. In his address last week, Bush described the union of man and woman as the most fundamental institution of civilization, and a majority of Americans seem to agree with this conception of marriage. But the Constitution was never intended to express the will of the majority so much as to protect the rights of the minority. Indeed, on the one occasion when the Constitution was used as the instrument of popular morality (by the Eighteenth Amendment, which prohibited the sale of alcohol from 1920 until its repeal in 1933), the result was a miserable failure.
The Constitution has always been a forward-looking document, pointing the way to freedom in a nation whose founding values are occasionally obscured by the passions of the political moment. And since its ratification in 1789, the Constitution has been amended to expand the legal rights of women, blacks and young people, among others. At its heart, Bush's proposed amendment is offensive precisely because it would abandon the Constitution's historic mission and write discrimination into a document that has long served as a beacon of equality.
Conservative Americans may attempt to brandish the Constitution as the ultimate weapon in their small-minded culture wars, but the president has a special responsibility to see that America's founding document is not rewritten lightly. And given America's long history of constitutional egalitarianism, the prohibition of gay marriage by constitutional means would be a great leap backward, less the courageous act of a principled president than a meaty bone for his bigoted base.
Alec Solotorovsky's column appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at asolotorovsky@cavalierdaily.com.
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