Senate Civil Rights Subcommittee Debates Same-Sex Marriage
Feature Story by civilrights.org staff - 9/22/2003
At a recent hearing on Capitol Hill, senators were divided over the prospect of permanently defining marriage only as a union between a man and a woman.According to Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), chairman of the judiciary committee’s subcommittee on the Constitution, civil rights and property rights, the purpose of the hearing was to gather information on the steps needed to “safeguard the institution of marriage” by defending the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996 (DOMA) and considering the possibility of enacting a Federal Marriage Amendment in light of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence v. Texas.
DOMA deemed marriage as a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife and defined “spouse” as only a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or wife. The proposed Federal Marriage Amendment (H.J. Res. 56) takes DOMA further by altering the Constitution to declare marriage as only legal between a man and a woman. Moreover, it would nullify any civil union laws enacted by states.
A majority of the witnesses at the hearing favored the proposed Constitutional amendment, saying that marriage is a sacred institution that needs to be “safeguarded."
One witness, Rev. Dr. Ray Hammond II, pastor of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Boston, Mass., said that allowing same sex marriages “weakens the legal status of marriage in America.”
But several senators spoke against the proposed amendment, including Sen. Russell D. Feingold (D-Wisc.), ranking democrat on the subcommittee, who said passing the amendment would mean writing discrimination into the Constitution for the first time in history.
“Our Constitution is an historic guarantee of individual freedom,” Sen. Feingold said. “We should not seek to amend the Constitution in a way that will reduce its grandeur.”
Other senators who spoke in opposition of a federal amendment were Sens. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), ranking democrat on the full Senate Judiciary Committee.
Testimony also was submitted by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), which currently is coordinating "Million for Civil Marriage" – a petition that aims to collect one million signatures from people in support of civil marriages for same-sex couples.
“In a country where all people are created equal, it seems intellectually dishonest and deeply unfair that some people cannot have the legal rights and protections for their relationships that most others take for granted,” HRC Executive Director Elizabeth Birch wrote in her testimony.
Professor Dale Carpenter from the University of Minnesota Law School testified that the amendment is “unnecessary, radical, anti-democratic and an overly broad departure from the Nation’s traditions and history.”
A letter from the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights also urges senators to oppose an amendment.
“The proposed amendment seeks to deprive gay families of fundamental protections such as hospital visitation, inheritance rights, and health care benefits, running afoul of basic principles of fairness,” LCCR Executive Director Wade Henderson said in the letter. “The Constitution was designed to expand and protect individual liberties, not to take away or restrict them.”
