Oppose The Federal Marriage Amendment

Oppose the Federal Marriage Amendment! 




 This amendment would invalidate all legal protections for unmarried 
couples -- gay or straight.
By denying unmarried persons all legal protections for any of 
the "legal incidents" of marriage, the amendment would destroy a wide 
range of other rights that are important to the lives of unmarried 
persons. Those legal protections include state and local civil rights 
laws prohibiting discrimination based on "marital status," state laws 
protecting unmarried elderly couples who refrain from marrying in 
order to hold on to their pensions, and even state laws allowing a 
person, in the absence of a spouse, to oppose the autopsy of a close 
friend because of the deceased person's religious beliefs. 

 Amending the Constitution is an extreme act.
The first sentence of the proposed constitutional amendment would bar 
all same-sex marriages. However, gay and lesbian couples cannot now 
marry anywhere in the United States. Moreover, Congress already 
enacted the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, which was an earlier 
response to the fear of same-sex marriages that have never been 
recognized. 

 The Federal Marriage Amendment would reverse the constitutional 
tradition of protecting, not harming, individual freedoms.
None of the current constitutional amendments restricts individual 
freedoms. In fact, the amendments to the Constitution have been the 
source of most of the Constitution's protections for individual 
liberty rights. The proposed amendment, by contrast, would deny all 
protection for the most personal decisions made by millions of 
families.