Oppose Writing Intolerance
Into the U.S. Constitution!
The Alliance for Marriage, a newly formed coalition of religious groups, has launched a campaign to amend the U.S. Constitution to define marriage as strictly between a man and a woman, invalidate all state and local domestic partnership laws and nullify civil rights protections based on marital status. Representative Ronnie Shows (D-MS) has advanced their goal by introducing H.J. Res. 93, the "Federal Marriage Amendment."
In many states, unmarried persons -- including unmarried relatives, heterosexual couples, gay and lesbian couples and even unrelated clergy members -- have some of the same rights as married persons. The proposed amendment would eliminate these protections by nullifying domestic partnership laws in eight states and in more than 100 counties, cities and towns. The proposal would also undermine state adoption, foster care and kinship care laws. If enacted, the amendment would even prohibit state and local governments from making their own decisions on providing benefits to their employees.
The Federal Marriage Amendment would wipe out every single law protecting nontraditional families no matter what their sexual orientation.
Oppose the Federal Marriage Amendment!
This amendment would invalidate all legal protections for unmarried couples -- gay or straight.
By denying unmarried persons all legal protections for any of the "legal incidents" of marriage, the amendment would destroy a wide range of other rights that are important to the lives of unmarried persons. Those legal protections include state and local civil rights laws prohibiting discrimination based on "marital status," state laws protecting unmarried elderly couples who refrain from marrying in order to hold on to their pensions, and even state laws allowing a person, in the absence of a spouse, to oppose the autopsy of a close friend because of the deceased person's religious beliefs.
Amending the Constitution is an extreme act.
The first sentence of the proposed constitutional amendment would bar all same-sex marriages. However, gay and lesbian couples cannot now marry anywhere in the United States. Moreover, Congress already enacted the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, which was an earlier response to the fear of same-sex marriages that have never been recognized.
The Federal Marriage Amendment would reverse the constitutional tradition of protecting, not harming, individual freedoms.
None of the current constitutional amendments restricts individual freedoms. In fact, the amendments to the Constitution have been the source of most of the Constitution's protections for individual liberty rights. The proposed amendment, by contrast, would deny all protection for the most personal decisions made by millions of families.
TAKE ACTION!
If this Amendment passses I am screwed.
You can find the bill at
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z ... res.00093:
)
)