In Need of an Amendment
Defending the valued institution of marriage.

By NR editors
July 23, 2001 Issue

or all the progress that homosexuals have made in public opinion, "gay marriage" remains deeply unpopular. In 1996, the federal Defense of Marriage Act — defining marriage as a union of a man and a woman for purposes of federal law, and allowing states not to recognize gay marriages formed in other states — passed the House with 342 votes and the Senate with 85. Polls find solid majorities against same-sex marriage. Even in socially liberal California, a ballot initiative to block gay marriage passed with 61 percent of the vote last year.

Yet gay marriage may be on its way whatever the people think. Gay activists are working through the courts to force gay marriage on an unwilling public. Their game plan is perfectly clear: Get a court somewhere, anywhere — in Hawaii, in Vermont, wherever they can win — to impose gay marriage. Then use courts to force other states to recognize that state's same-sex marriages. Then get states that recognize out-of-state gay marriages to start letting such marriages be formed in-state.

Politicians seeking to avoid controversy — including, notably, Dick Cheney in last year's vice-presidential debate — have pretended that whether gays should be allowed to marry each other is a matter that can be left to individual states to determine. But this is willfully naïve. There is no popular demand for gay marriage in any state. What is going on is an attempt to use the judiciary of any state to override the wishes of the people of that state, and then of the entire Union. It is an attempt that should be stopped by a constitutional amendment.

Constitutional amendments are not to be proposed lightly. The Constitution, wisely, makes them difficult to enact. Conservatives, in particular, favor stability in the nation's basic law. But the judicial campaign for same-sex marriage leaves constitutional amendment as the only sure way to prevent a harmful and antidemocratic revolution in American law. Thirty-four states have passed laws that seek to preserve the understanding of marriage as the union of a man and a woman — enough to call a constitutional convention for the purpose of an amendment, and close to enough to ratify one. To defend a valued institution, an institution the importance of which can hardly be overestimated, from what amounts to an ideological attack is a cause that all conservatives should support.