U.S. Rep Barney Frank (D-Mass.) says gay marriage advocates are jumping the gun.

Frank supports gay marriages, just not the ones in San Francisco. Those were not legal marriages but acts of civil disobedience, he says, a mass 'spectacle' that accomplished only one thing: increasing support for President Bush's proposed constitutional amendment to limit marriage to unions between men and women.

What they should have done, he says, was do it the legal way and wait for Massachusetts to start issuing licenses to gay couples in May.

That's still too fast.

Efforts continue to craft language on a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, but now perhaps allowing same-sex civil unions.

Outraged opponents of the proposed amendment don't often mention that it would require a two-thirds vote in Congress, and approval by three-quarters of the nation's state legislatures.

As this Reuters story notes.....

Amending the U.S. Constitution is a difficult task. It can take years to win the support of two-thirds of the U.S. House of Representatives, two-thirds of the Senate and ratification by three-quarters of the 50 states.

Gay marriage proponents should welcome the chance to defeat the gay marriage ban amendment, if not in Congress, then by blocking passage in just enough states. They're proposing something pretty radical here; yet the burden of majority support is squarely on amendment supporters. If the amendment won't fly, then state-level attempts to establish gay marriage can proceed, with one big obstacle removed.

Can gay advocates possibly have imagined that the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling in favor of gay marriage, and the subsequent flurry of gay weddings in San Francisco and elsewhere, would NOT invite attempts to sort out the issue more deliberately?

At a Congressional hearing today Rep. Frank spoke out against the amendment favored by President Bush; other Democrats claimed there weren't enough votes to pass it. And then there was this:

Teresa Stanton Collett, a professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minnesota, argued Congress should approve the amendment and then send it to the states for ratification. Three-fourths of the states would be needed.

"It is the people who should determine the meaning and structure of marriage," Collett said.

Right. State by state. Not city by city, or county by county.

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at March 23, 2004 09:33 AM

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