U.S. Senator Mark Dayton today delivered the following remarks regarding the Federal Marriage Amendment (S.J.Res.1), which is currently before the Senate.

“Mr. President, I am honored to follow the great Senator from Massachusetts and join with him and others in opposing this proposed Constitutional amendment. I do so because it is un-American, un-Christian, and unnecessary. Let us be clear that this proposal is not about protecting marriage in America. Marriage may need more people to practice it, but it does not need the United States Senate to protect it.

“The founders of this great nation exercised tremendous wisdom by designing a system in which government would stay out of the private lives of its citizens, and a system in which government would stay out of the province of religion. This amendment would violate both. This country was founded on the principle that all men and women are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

“To secure those rights, our founders wrote a Constitution which guarantees every law-abiding American citizen the same equal rights and protections. Our country's founders were not perfect. In fact, they were highly discriminatory. They initially denied those full and equal rights to women and to African-Americans. This country's social progress has been highlighted by removing those Constitutional discriminations based on gender or race or anything else.

“Now, for the first time in our nation's history, the proponents of this amendment would add discrimination to our Constitution. They would tell one group of people—a social minority—that equal rights and equal protections do not apply to them. Not only by the laws which exist today, federal and state laws which ban gay marriages, not only by the social conventions which deny their recognition, but by an unprecedented amendment to the United States Constitution, which targets gays and lesbians alone, which says that of all the social practices in this country, theirs alone are supposedly so abhorrent, theirs alone are supposedly such a threat to our social order that they must be singled out for this unique form of discrimination.

“Unfortunately, the proponents of this Constitutional amendment have it mixed up. It is the Constitution that needs to be protected from them. It is the foundation of our democracy that needs to be saved from them.

“The foundational principle of a democracy is its tolerance of individual differences. Even the most repressive, totalitarian government in the world allows individual behaviors that it agrees with. The true test of a democracy is the government's allowance for differences.

“That doesn't mean that we agree with those differences. It doesn't mean that we like them. It doesn't mean that we would choose them for ourselves or wish them for our children. In fact, the opposite. We can disagree with them, dislike them, and reject them for ourselves and our children. But if we are a democracy—if we are a democracy—we allow other citizens to be different from ourselves, to be unlike us. We grant them the liberty to pursue their own form of personal, private happiness, so long as it does not interfere with our own. And which other adult American adults are attracted to, want to live with, to commit to are their business and their right, and not the business of 100 politicians in the United States Senate. That's why this amendment would not only alter the United States Constitution; it would alter our democracy in a way that is destructive to both.

“In addition to being un-American, this amendment is also un-Christian. Now, I hesitate to bring religion into this debate. I'm highly skeptical of politicians who do so. Giving a Bible to a politician is like giving a blowtorch to a pyromaniac. However, I reread the New Testament in preparation for this debate, and I cannot find a single instance in any of the four Gospels in which my Savior, Jesus Christ, speaks a single word against same-sex marriages or even same-sex relationships. He intones six times against divorce, and 12 times against adultery. Yet, I am not aware of any Constitutional amendments to ban either of them, nor would I support them.

“But I also know that he preached for love and acceptance and against hatred and discrimination. He said the great Commandment was to love God and the second was like unto it, to love thy neighbor as thyself. Not just your family member, not just your friend, but to love your neighbor, whoever happens to be living beside you, as you would yourself. There is no love in this Constitutional amendment. There's discrimination and underneath discrimination lies judgment and hatred. Jesus said also to beware of the false prophets and charlatans, the fake good-doers, and he said the way to tell the difference is that the true believers practice love, while the false prophets preach hate. And that's why this amendment is un-Christian.

“It is also unnecessary. There's no rampaging threat to the institution of marriage as the amendment's proponents portend. There are no rabid, activist judges raging unchecked across the legal landscape. They are figments of unchecked imaginations or clever contrivances by master public manipulators who have conjured up some nonexistent threat and now present themselves as the saviors of civilization.

“And we are spending three days on the floor of the United States Senate to indulge their political pandering. We haven't spent three days debating the war in Iraq during this entire session of Congress, nor Iran's development of nuclear weapons, nor this year, the gasoline price crisis afflicting our citizens. No, the Senate's Republican leadership is avoiding the real threats to our country, and focusing instead on the divisive, destructive, nonexistent ones. Existing federal law—the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act—defines marriage nationwide as between a man and a woman and states that no state need recognize a same-sex marriage. My State of Minnesota is one of 45 states who have passed similar state restrictions. This proposed Constitutional amendment is unnecessary overkill. It is predatory politics, preying—that's p-r-e-y-i-n-g—preying upon a minority of American citizens in our society. I don't understand why this United States Senate would want to exploit the prejudice, and even hatred, which still exists in our society against GLBT men and women.

“I am not a psychiatrist. I'll leave it to them to explain why homophobia trumps racism, sexism, nationalism, and religious intolerance—but it does. The discrimination against people because of their sexual orientations that they were born with or acquired indelibly early in life is vicious, ugly, and cruel. It is immoral and it should be illegal. And it should not be practiced here in the United States Senate.

“I sympathize with the many decent-minded, well-intentioned, and religiously devout Americans who struggle with their personal feelings toward homosexuality. Many have grown in understanding and acceptance. They want to do what is right, even if it doesn't feel entirely right to them. They and their feelings are being unnecessarily used in this charade. But I have no sympathy and I have no respect for the charlatans who are using them for their own self-serving political purposes, who are spreading prejudice and discrimination, who claim the moral high ground while they reach into their emotional cesspools and hurl their slime at decent and innocent human beings who are trying to live their private lives as God created them and under the promises of this American democracy.

“What we ought to do is leave marriage up to God. The religious marriage services of my faith, the minister says that marriage is an institution created by God. Thus, we should leave the definition of marriage to those ordained by God, the leaders of the respective organized religions, and we should redefine the legal term for marriage to civil union or some other words and make that legal contract with its rights, protections, and responsibilities available equally to any two adult citizens as the equal protection clauses of our Constitution require. That would be an American, a Christian, and a just resolution to this situation, one that elevates and enlightens us, one that continues the progress in our country toward acceptance and understanding, one that honors our common humanity. Those are the reasons that I urge my colleagues to oppose and defeat this cruel amendment.”

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