Gay Marriage Amendment Blocked in Senate

From Bloomberg...

June 7 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Senate blocked a proposed constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage as a Republican-led election-year drive fell short of clearing a procedural hurdle.

The Senate voted 49-48 to shut off debate on the measure, 11 votes shy of the 60 needed to force the proposal to a final vote. Supporters said they took some solace from the fact that the measure got a public airing and picked up one more vote than the 48 who backed it in a similar procedural test in 2004.

``The people around this country who care passionately about this issue have the right to have their voices heard,'' said Senator John Thune, a South Dakota Republican.

Proposed amendments to the Constitution require the support of two-thirds of the members of the House and Senate -- 67 votes in the Senate -- and then passage by three-fourths, or 38, of the 50 state legislatures.

Now we all knew they were going to fail and fail badly, so what exactly was the point of this?

To create an issue to energize the base for November.

By yet again returning to the gay-bashing trough for votes, Republicans show exactly what their values are and that they care more about cultivating fear than they do about families.

For years, Republicans have claimed the the Liberal's "War on Poverty" was just a ruse. An attempt to make poor people dependant upon Democrats for government funds, and creating a permenent underclass of loyal Democratic voters.

Of course this argument is difficult to support when you look at the great success of Democrats at moving people out of poverty and growing the size of the middle-class when compared to Republians and Conservatives who've seen the ranks of the poor expand -- but it does allow us a window into the conservative mindset. Trying to help and protect people is bad because they might grow to expect if from you?

Frist vows to continue the fight...

Everyone knew it was going to fail and it did. So there was no surprise that the Senate voted this morning 49-48 to essentially keep debating a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, the Senate's way of giving a piece of legislation the kiss of death.

But death in the Senate does not mean the demise of a gay marriage amendment as an issue. Sen. Bill Frist, (R-Tenn.,) the Senate Majority Leader and a presidential hopeful, indicated this is an issue he intends on keeping alive through a statement his office issued after the vote.

"For thousands of years, marriage -- the union between a man and a woman -- has been recognized as an essential cornerstone of society," Frist is quoted in the statement as saying.

Ok, So what then can we say about this entire "Defense of Marriage" business when the people putting forth the idea knew from the beginning that it never had a chance? Most likely, that the goal has nothing to do with protecting marriage at all.

Just as was beautifully displayed by Jon Stewarts debate with Bill Bennett, the ultimate issues here involve the question of Freedom and the Human Condition.

The one thing I found a striking admission was Bennett's statement that..."When you start to define it out... and say anyone who loves each other can be married, you can have serious problems".

But seriously, what is wrong with a marriage being Based on Love? And exactly who is to define which pair of persons love is legitimate or not?

Stewart makes the point that the natural progression of America, is towards freedom. He generalizes, but specificaly there was a point in time when marriage between people of different races was prohibited by law. They were called the anti-miscegenation laws.

In the 18th, 19th, and early 20th century, many American states passed anti-miscegenation laws, often based on controversed interpretations of the Bible, particularly the story of Phinehas. Typically a felony, these laws prohibited the solemnization of weddings between persons of different ethnic groups and prohibited the officiating of such ceremonies. Sometimes the individuals attempting to marry would not be held guilty of miscegenation itself, but felony charges of adultery or fornication would brought against them instead; Vermont was the only state to never introduce such legislation. The constitutionality of anti-miscegenation laws was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1883 case Pace v. Alabama. In 1965, Virginia trial court judge Leon Bazile sentenced to jail an interethnic couple who got married in Washington, D.C., writing:

Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.

In all honesty, is this arguement all that different from what's recently been said on the floor of the U.S. Senate by Republicans?

This decision was eventually overturned in 1967, 84 years after Pace v. Alabama, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Loving v. Virginia that

Marriage is one of the 'basic civil rights of man,' fundamental to our very existence and survival.... To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law.

Just as the Fourteenth Amendment, which states that all persons within jurisdiction of the states will be afforded the equal protection of the law was eventually extended to including the rights of Women and Black, so too will it eventually include the rights of gays to love who they will, and indeed to consecrate that love via marriage and the creation of that essential value that Republicans and Conservatives claim to treasure most -- Family.

Vyan