Antigay constitutional amendment fails to get two-thirds majority

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives failed to pass a proposed constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage Thursday, the latest in a string of conservative pet causes pushed to a vote in the run-up to Election Day. The final vote was 227 in favor of the amendment and 186 opposed, which fell 63 votes short of the two-thirds majority needed to pass a constitutional amendment. "God created Adam and Eve; he didn't create Adam and Steve," said Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, a Maryland Republican, on behalf of a measure that supporters said was designed to protect an institution as old as civilization itself. But even among majority Republicans, the issue generated dissent. Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas was the principal speaker on behalf of the measure, taking a role that is almost always reserved for the chairman of the committee with jurisdiction. In this case, though, the leadership bypassed the Judiciary Committee, and GOP officials said the panel's chairman, Rep. James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, made clear he wanted no part of the debate. His spokesman did not immediately return a call on why he took that position. Critics saw it differently. "We feel love and we feel it in a way different than you," said Rep. Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat who is openly gay. "We feel it with someone of the same sex, male or female, and we look at your institution of marriage and we see the joy it brings. How do we hurt you when we share it?" Another Massachusetts Democrat, Rep. Jim McGovern, quoted Vice President Dick Cheney--who has a gay daughter--as saying, "The fact of the matter is that we live in a free society and freedom means freedom for everybody." "You are on the wrong side of history," McGovern said to the measure's supporters. "It is wrong to take a beautiful institution like marriage and use it as an instrument of division." Added openly gay representative Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat from Wisconsin: "Over the past year, we have seen a lively debate on marriage laws in states from Massachusetts to California and nearly every other state in between. The sky has not come crashing down despite the dire predictions. In each of these circumstances, the state courts and state legislatures have responded to bring about a public political debate and to address these issues in an orderly fashion." President Bush earlier this year asked Congress to vote on the amendment, and Democrats contended that in complying, Republicans were motivated by election-year politics. Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the Democratic whip, accused GOP leaders of "raw political cynicism" and said they hoped to "create the fodder for a demagogic political ad." "The only institution that this amendment is designed to protect is the Republican Party," said Dave Noble, executive director of the National Stonewall Democrats, a gay political group. "At its core it is little more than a political prank. The small minority of Democrats who could not understand that fact and who voted for this amendment do not deserve the support of our community." Whatever the motivation of the House leadership, there was no disagreement that the amendment lacked the two-thirds majority needed to pass, just as it had in the Senate earlier this year, where it was killed on a procedural vote. The Marriage Protection Amendment--known as the Federal Marriage Amendment until it was renamed last week--said marriage in the United States "shall consist only of a man and a woman." It also would have required that neither the U.S. Constitution nor any state constitution "shall be construed to require that marriage or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon any union other than the union of a man and a woman," a provision thought by many legal experts to outlaw civil unions and domestic partnerships. Public polls show strong opposition to same-sex marriage, but opinion is about evenly divided regarding a federal constitutional amendment to ban it. At the same time, voters in 11 states will decide the fate of proposed amendments to their state constitutions this fall, and opponents of bans on gay marriage concede the amendments will be difficult to defeat.