Wednesday, April 14, 2004

Same-sex marriage alters rights without amendment

President Bush and other conservatives have been accused in recent weeks of seeking to “put bias in the Constitution” by endorsing an amendment that would define marriage as solely the union of one man and one woman. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The truth is, the Constitution is going to be altered one way or the other. Either that change will come from unelected, unaccountable judges intent on creating a right of homosexual couples to marry when the Constitution grants no such right; or it will come from the American people through this amendment to preserve marriage as it has served society for the millennia.

Amendment opponents have also turned to an emotional argument in asking. “How does one couple’s gay marriage threaten anyone’s heterosexual marriage?”

This question misses the point: The goal of gay activists isn’t the individual relationship of any two people, despite such statements. It is the revision of national policy to say that gender, especially in child rearing, is inconsequential, even though research indicates children do best when raised by a married mother and father.

These and other distortions of the truth must be resisted, because marriage and the benefits it brings must be protected. This aggressive campaign to undermine marriage, as it’s always been known can be defeated, but only if we all stand up to support the Federal Marriage Amendment.

Jeff Durham

Fayetteville, Ga.