MARRIAGE PROTECTION AMENDMENT HURTS MARRIAGE MORE THAN IT HELPS

MPA Naively Trades Civil Unions for Marriage

July 17, 2006 Washington, DC – The Traditional Values Coalition is urging members of the House to vote against a so-called Marriage Protection Amendment (H.J. Res. 88) because it does little for marriage and enshrines in the Constitution the right to homosexual civil unions and domestic partnership.“There is a net loss if this amendment ever becomes law,” said TVC Executive Director Andrea Lafferty. “Protection of this sort would kill traditional marriage because it trades civil unions for marriage. Civil unions are homosexual marriages by another name.

“This is a poorly written resolution with an even worse sense of timing. We have just won several important court decisions in the past few weeks but the MPA proponents are still playing ‘Let’s Make a Deal’ with the liberals and the homosexual lobby.

“It is unlikely that the MPA will pass, and that is a good thing for traditional marriage. We need a real amendment which actually protects marriage and bans all the cheap imitations of marriage like civil unions, domestic partnerships and whichever new term the liberals concoct. And we need to involve grassroots America in this debate because activists who are fighting this battle every day are unlikely to want to horse-trade with the Left.”

Mrs. Lafferty cited a list of problems she says she and other religious conservatives have with the Marriage Protection Amendment:

Civil Unions = Homosexual Marriage – Matt Daniels, the Chairman of the Alliance for Marriage and the author of the amendment, told Time magazine in February, 2004, the amendment was written to preserve the right of the states to enact civil unions. “The amendment would limit marriage to opposite-sex couples, but it would not outlaw civil unions, which Daniels believes should be available to all states,” the Time article reported.

Several courts have now established the constitutionality of state statutes which uphold traditional one man/one woman marriage while barring civil unions, domestic partnerships, etc. In Nebraska, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a lower court decision which struck down legislation as “too broad” which upheld marriage and barred civil unions. A similar decision in July by the New York Court of Appeals up held the state’s one man/one woman law. A Georgia court reinstated a marriage protection ban on homosexual marriage there and a Tennessee court ruled that voters in that state should be allowed to vote on the issue.

The definition of marriage must be written into the Constitution because no one state should be permitted to impose recognition of homosexual marriages on all other states under the Full Faith and Credit clause of the Constitution. By either constitutional amendment or statute, 45 states have now taken action against same-sex marriage.

Some pro-family leaders have led the American people and Congress to believe that the MPA “fixes the problem” and “stops homosexual marriage” and its counterfeits. They know this is untrue and that the amendment would allow for civil unions, domestic partnerships and any other innovative synonym for marriage.

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