The House passed a bill on Tuesday to protect marriage equality, a direct response to an opinion from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas last month that called for reversing multiple decisions that enshrined LGBTQ rights.
The legislation, titled the Respect for Marriage Act, passed in a 267-157 vote, with 47 Republicans joining all Democrats in supporting the measure. Seven Republicans did not vote.
The measure, which faces a shaky future in the 50-50 Senate, calls for the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), a bill former President Clinton signed into law in 1996 that recognized marriage as “only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife.” The measure referred to the word spouse as “a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife.”
DOMA had passed through both chambers of Congress with bipartisan support.
If passed by the Senate and signed into law, the Respect for Marriage Act would also require that individuals be considered married if they were wed in a state where marriage was legal. The provision, according to the House Judiciary Committee, ensures that same-sex and interracial couples are treated equally to other married individuals at the federal level. --->READ MORE HERE
 |
| Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters |
By a vote of 267 to 157, with 47 Republicans joining the majority, the House has passed a bill requiring all state governments to stick with the redefinition of marriage that the Supreme Court ordered in 2015. The best thing that can be said about this legislation is that it is legislation, not an edict from a judiciary usurping legislative authority. Senate Republicans should nonetheless oppose this bill, because these congressmen are making a mistake.
Or rather, they are making several mistakes. The bill raises four distinct questions for federal legislators. Is the judicially imposed definition better or wiser than the older one? If so, should the federal government insist that states adhere to it? Have the downsides of this specific legislation received sufficient consideration? And given that the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges continues to have the force of law, does passing the bill serve any good purpose? The answer to all four questions is no.
Start with the first question. We do not deny that committed same-sex relationships can and often do have much of great value: affection, mutual caregiving, love. Some same-sex relationships clearly exceed some opposite-sex ones in these important measures. But marriage as an institution, including its governmental dimension, does not exist to award certificates of worthiness on loving relationships. Love needs no license from the state. The stipulation that marriage unites two people, and only two people, does not rest on any official determination that three or more people cannot have the same feelings for one another, provide the same care, and so on — as “throuples” have increasingly insisted that they can since Obergefell.
It rests instead on the biological realities of our sexual dimorphism and complementarity, the economic needs of mothers and children, and the long train of human history, experience, and tradition. The reason it was considered the union of one man and one woman until just yesterday is because such unions, and only such unions, often produce children. Other, varying rules surrounding it — age restrictions, bans on participating in simultaneous marriages, and so forth — built on that basic reality. The Latin word matrimonium spells out that motherhood and the family were at the heart of it, that marriage was meant to foster and support the bonds of the natural family. The laws and rituals around marriage reflect the interest of an entire society in the estate of each marriage, and impose obligations on that society far beyond any normal contract between two consenting adults.
The law never took a purely instrumental view of marriage, one that regards it as worthwhile only insofar as it yields children. But it did regard it as oriented toward child-rearing. It aimed, in a way that grew less coercive over time, to encourage adults to arrange their lives so that as many children as possible are raised and nurtured by their biological parents in a common household.
Same-sex marriage was not the first step away from this model of marriage. Many social trends and legal developments have weakened the links between sex, marriage, and child-rearing. --->READ MORE HERE
If you like what you see, please "Like" and/or Follow us on FACEBOOK here, GETTR here, and TWITTER here.
No comments:
Post a Comment