Ill. Rep.: Same-Sex Couples 'Disordered'

Rep. Jeanne Ives

As the Illinois House of Representatives prepares to consider a marriage equality bill, one rep says she’ll vote against it because same-sex relationships are “disordered.”

“It’s a completely disordered relationship and when you have a disordered relationship, you don’t ever get order out of that,” Republican Jeanne Ives of Wheaton, a conservative suburb of Chicago, said in a recent radio interview with the Catholic Conference of Illinois, available via Good as You. “So I’m more than happy to take a no vote on the issue of homosexual marriage.

“What they’re trying to do is not just redefine marriage, they’re trying to redefine society,” she continued. “They’re trying to weasel their way into acceptability so that they can then start to push their agenda down into the schools, because this gives them some sort of legitimacy. And we can’t allow that to happen.… It’s the natural right of the child to be with both parents, either in an adoptive nature or in a biological nature. To not have a mother and a father is really a disordered state for a child to grow up in and it really makes that child an object of desire rather than the result of a matrimony.”

The marriage bill has been passed by the state Senate, but its fate in the House is uncertain. Gov. Pat Quinn has pledged to sign it into law. It would make Illinois the 10th state with marriage equality.