6-06-06, 9:14 am
In order to distract voters from the burning issues like ballooning gas prices, the degenerating situation in Iraq, Republican corruption in Congress, a slowing economy, and declining US credibility around the world, Bush and congressional Republicans have announced their support for extremist policies, say civil rights activists. We saw them make that move on the immigration reform debates last month. Now, they want to rewrite the Constitution with a discriminatory amendment aimed at gay and lesbian people.
This political maneuver has angered a number of civil rights organizations. According to the Leadership Council on Civil Rights (LCCR), a coalition of labor unions and civil rights organizations, the promotion of a Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage and civil unions, ironically called the Marriage Protection Amendment (formerly known as the Federal Marriage Amendment), is an attempt 'to galvanize the Republican base' in the face of growing internal party divisions and President Bush's declining approval ratings.
At a recent press briefing, Wade Henderson, executive director of LCCR, blasted the Republican push for this amendment. 'This is a civil and human rights issue of the first magnitude, and the Constitution cannot be used as a tool of exclusion,' he stated.
In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee last month, Henderson argued, 'there are right and wrong ways to address the issue of same-sex marriage as a matter of public policy.' Henderson expressed concern 'about any proposal that would alter our nation's most important document for the direct purpose of excluding any individuals from its guarantees of equal protection.'
Joe Solomonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), an organization that promotes equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) people echoed Henderson’s comments. 'Senator Frist (R-TN) and his right-wing allies can’t credibly campaign for re-election on real solutions to America’s real problems.' Solomonese said, 'because they have no solutions and they created the problems.'
'Instead,' Solomonese charged, 'Frist and his right-wing friends are playing politics with the Constitution and bashing a single group of Americans.'
Solomonese accused the Republicans of failing to address the public’s top priorities. 'The American people know that marriage has absolutely nothing to do with the high cost of gas, the war in Iraq or the prohibitive price tag on health care,' he added.
'The consequences of immoral leadership are a one-two punch. As they scapegoat hardworking Americans and try to put discrimination in the Constitution, the challenges facing our nation go unanswered – it’s shameful,' Solomonese concluded.
This weekend, the White House announced plans to support the anti-gay amendment. Under pressure from far-right religious groups, President Bush openly broke with moderate elements in the Republican Party that seemed to oppose another attempt to pass the anti-gay amendment. Laura Bush and vice presidential daughter Mary Cheney (among others), in recent comments, appeared to oppose reviving last year’s failed amendment banning gay marriage for political purposes.
Radio personality James Dobson, an outspoken Republican Party advocate and raging homophobe, demanded support for the anti-gay amendment. On a recent radio show, Dobson claimed that the right of gay people to marry would destroy marriage itself. Condemning supporters of equal rights for LGBT people as being in league with Satan, Dobson spat, 'Marriage is under vicious attack now. I think from the forces of hell itself.'
Dobson further blamed people who believe in equal marriage rights for the decline of Western civilization. 'I believe with that destruction of marriage will come the decline of Western civilization itself.... We’re really in a crisis point, right now, right now...where the family is either going to survive or it’s going to fall apart and it will happen in the next few years,' he wailed hysterically.
Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force last week accused Republican Party leaders and Bush of adhering to the hate speech of people like Dobson rather than the true interests of the American people. 'James Dobson’s statement this week that those fighting for marriage equality are coming ‘from the forces of hell itself’ is not what’s appalling – what’s appalling is that the president and leaders in Congress will do his bidding whenever he cracks the whip.'
In a response to Bush’s Monday speech announcing his support for the anti-gay amendment, Foreman criticized Bush’s alliance with Dobson and other extreme elements in the Republican Party. 'It is pure hypocrisy,' Foreman noted, 'for the president to say that all Americans deserve to be treated with tolerance, respect and dignity, while he cozies up to these bigots.'
Rev. Bill Sinkford, president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, also rejected Dobson’s claims on a recent Air America Radio show hosted by Rev. Welton Gaddy, head of the non-partisan advocacy group The Interfaith Alliance. Same sex marriage, Sinkford remarked, 'poses no threat to other marriages and no threat to the institution of marriage.'
At a press conference held Monday by the group Clergy for Fairness Dr. Kenneth Samuel, pastor of the Victory for the World Church in Stone Mountain, Georgia, urged opposition to the Marriage Protection Amendment. Invoking the civil rights struggles of the past and the memories of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King, Dr. Samuel described equality for LGBT people as 'a human rights issue.'
'We cannot allow bigotry to continue to live without being challenged, and certainly we cannot allow bigotry to continue to flourish in the name of God,' contended Samuel.
Other civil rights and liberties organizations challenged the Republican Party’s goal of rewriting the Constitution to include an amendment that codifies inequality.
'Instead of encouraging debate on real issues, like the promising field of stem cell research, the President has once again caved to this extreme minority, hoping to rally support for a White House plagued by ever dropping approval ratings,' said Jessica Smith, director of the Campaign to Defend the Constitution (DefCon).
Duke University Law professor and DefCon advisory board member Erwin Chemerinsky brought some historical perspective to the question of changing the US Constitution. 'In 219 years,' he remarked in a recent DefCon press statement, 'the Constitution has been amended a mere 27 times and only once as the result of a social attitude – prohibition – which was later regarded as a huge mistake. In the case of limiting the freedom of gay and lesbian Americans, an amendment would not only be a huge mistake, it would be un-American.'
Gabriela Lemus, director of policy and legislation for the League of United Latin American Citizens, at a press briefing held by the Coalition against Discrimination in the Constitution last month, suggested that the anti-gay amendment posed a grave threat to all civil rights legislation and minority groups. While gays and lesbians are the target of this measure, 'Who’s next?' she wondered.
--Joel Wendland is managing editor of Political Affairs and can be reached at
