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Betrayed Again
Just when I started to believe that the Republicans in Congress might actually be ready to act boldly, they have betrayed us again. It’s difficult for me to determine whether I am angrier with the Democrats for proposing this deceitful bill, the Respect for Marriage Act, or with the Republicans for lining up behind them. This Act further damages and weakens our religious liberties, in particular our support of traditional marriage, and it reminds us that the Progressive Left will never stop infringing on our rights and freedoms.
So what’s the big deal? A dozen Republicans have decided that they want to cozy up to the Democrats, or are too lazy or foolish to study the real intentions of the bill, or simply don’t care:
The 12 Republicans who voted yes on Wednesday were Susan Collins of Maine, Rob Portman of Ohio, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Mitt Romney of Utah, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Dan Sullivan of Alaska, Roy Blunt of Missouri, Richard Burr of North Carolina, Joni Ernst of Iowa, Todd Young of Indiana and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.
For anyone who wants to read the bill, go here.
What are the real dangers built into the bill? Mike Lee and several of his Senate colleagues wrote to their peers about the potential dangers and solutions in the legislation:
Instead of subjecting churches, religious non-profits, and persons of conscience to undue scrutiny or punishment by the federal government because of their views on marriage, we should make explicitly clear that this legislation does not constitute a national policy endorsing a particular view of marriage that threatens the tax exempt status of faith-based non-profits. As we move forward, let us be sure to keep churches, religious charities, and religious universities out of litigation in the first instance. No American should face legal harassment or retaliation from the federal government for holding sincerely held religious beliefs or moral convictions. My amendment would ensure that federal bureaucrats do not take discriminatory actions against individuals, organizations, nonprofits, and other entities based on their sincerely held religious beliefs or moral convictions about marriage by prohibiting the denial or revocation of tax exempt status, licenses, contracts, benefits, etc. It would affirm that individuals still have the right to act according to their faith and deepest convictions even outside of their church or home.
Although several supporters of the bill admitted it had problems, Mike Lee’s amendment wasn’t supported. In fact, no amendments were considered, although several were submitted.
Other possible attacks on religious institutions may be on the horizon:
H.R. 8404 abandons all current limits in federal law requiring marriage to be the union of only two persons. Under H.R. 8404 all it takes is a single state to recognize a polygamous or other unusual union as a marriage and the federal government must automatically recognize it for all federal purposes, including tax deductions, welfare benefits, immigration status, and federal employee benefits.
And as outrageous as polygamous marriages may seem, they also have the potential for being legalized:
There are upwards of 60,000 people practicing polygamy without legal recognition in the United States today. Public support for polygamy has more than tripled since 2010 to nearly one in four people today. In 2020, Utah reduced the criminal penalties for living in polygamous relationships to infraction status. Organizations such as the Polyamory Legal Advocacy Coalition, with support from Harvard Law School, are pushing for legalization of polyamorous unions. Two cities in Massachusetts, Somerville and Cambridge (home to Harvard University) have recently granted official Domestic Partnership status to plural unions. Nothing in Obergefell prohibits any state legislature in the country from following Cambridge’s lead, nor does it prevent a state Supreme Court from imposing polyamory or polygamy by interpretation of its state constitution.
And one other outcome that will make individuals and organizations vulnerable:
Anyone merely alleging a harm would be able to sue under H.R. 8404. Activists will argue that faith-based foster care providers, state-funded religious social service organizations. and religious organizations and businesses that provide services under contract with the government are acting “under color of State law” to, at the very least, impose costs on and harass institutions that seek to live their beliefs about man-woman marriage without having to withdraw from civic or public life.
* * * *
Some people will see these concerns as overreactions or extremes. Ten years ago, we wouldn’t have believed there would be social support for gender mutilation surgery, CRT, taking away control from parents for their children’s education, border invasions or censorship by the media. I think the House Freedom Caucus sees the future clearly:
‘This vote is about more than culture. It is about affirming the self-evident truth that marriage is a natural institution that predates government,’ the letter reads. ‘Republicans must stand united in defense of that truth and the institution of marriage which forms the backbone of a healthy society. There can be no compromise on this question.’
Unfortunately, I doubt that the Republicans are listening.
Published in Politics
Or hold up a silver cross…
Nicely said!
I have no idea how Trump would act with this particular bill. He is not who we were talking about.
But since we are, The establishment in the Senate has let us down waaaaaay more, Charlie, than Trump did.
Trump has earned the right to let me down (and he does). These Senators not so much.
Had these bozos delivered Repeal and Replace to Trump, he would have signed that.
Has Trump offered a position on the legislation? You are comparing two different things.
No, if the question is purely limited to this bill, then that’s an entirely fair complaint. But the original post was not just about that, because, inter alia, it said:
In the comments, there was some griping about the Senate, and the GOP, that went beyond this particular bill. So I wondered why Trump got a pass from the criticism, given that he most certainly has not “affirm[ed] the self-evident truth that marriage is a natural institution that predates government,” and he has been routinely happy to “compromise on this question.”
Sure it is. People run from being “Establishment” in America. They always have. They always run as an outsider. It is because they know that Americans tend not to trust insiders.
Trouble is, they are almost all insiders.
I agree with the gist of your post, but if Trump both adopted a position in support of this legislation, and persisted in this hypothetical support in the wake of base objections over the religious freedom and plural marriage issues, it would become a disqualifier for me.
Well that is part of the give and take of who we do and do not support.
Would that change if the Senate adopted Mike Lee’s amendment?
Okay, but at the same time, Trump is not advocating for this legislation, nor has he ever said or implied he was against gay marriage, so the issue of ‘betrayal’ does not apply for those who care strongly about that aspect of the issue; it was already part of the bargain within the Trump coalition. The bargain between Senators and their voters is another matter.
Could you provide a link? I know what the current legislation lacks, but I don’t know whether Mike Lee’s amendment is robust enough.
That’s a fair point.
Sure. It’s here: https://www.lee.senate.gov/services/files/CB39DE23-EF22-4CDC-B645-BF756A5F94D1. I ask because I’m thinking this through myself.
Good way to put it
I certainly can’t see anything wrong with it after a quick perusal (not that I have the requisite qualifications to fully anticipate all the legal questions or understand the context of all the legal language), so I’m leaning toward ‘yes’ provided that the legislation could not be advanced without the amendment, and no trusted sources notice any loopholes that Leftist could exploit in search of the infamous penumbras.
I think that’s my view, too.
It is more of a should they than could they, and the federal government should not be legislating free association. No business would do that today because it would fail quickly. No law is needed.
We don’t need more federal laws.
Done.
Please read Mike Lee’s letter; the link is in the OP. He assumes those on the Left will abuse unclear portions of the law. And I agree with him.
From what I read, there is also a pernicious provision that provides each state must honor all marriages legally contracted in every other state . . .so if the voters by initiative in, say, Oregon, approve polygamous or even more extreme “marriages,” the members of such legal unions will get to force recognition of them by all the other states like, say, Texas and Oklahoma, with the power of the federal government backing them up.
That is one more reason the GOP senators who voted for this ought to bear significant political consequences, as I doubt they paid much attention to the details of what they were voting on.
That was true, but the bill was subsequently amended so that it now reads:
It’s certainly better than what is in the bill itself. Question though, should it limit protections just to people who believe that marriage is one man and one woman, or should it include protections for anyone who has a religious view of marriage. For example, under this current amendment, a Muslim who believes that the proper form of marriage is one man, and four wives would not be protected. There is a slippery slope potential issue with people like the Pastafarians or the Church of Satan advocating for some form of marriage, but this Amendment would simply mean that the gov’t could not go after them for advocating for something odd.
Edited to add: I looked up what speech fora was since I had never seen that before. It would still allow say Facebook from banning a person from their platform. It only protects you from gov’t discrimination. While this seems good for now, the future battle is still looming, and I don’t know how we can fix that problem.
I generally agree with this. In this case, however, I think it’s more complicated. I would much rather have a federal law recognizing gay marriage—and, indeed, 50 state laws recognizing gay marriage—than have Obergefell. Obergefell was a lie. It was a pernicious, deliberately corrupt lie. And it was a lie about the most important law in America: the U.S. Constitution.
The reason this particular federal law has been proposed is that, post-Dobbs, progressives are worried that the Court will start chipping away at the scaffolding underneath that lie, which is the doctrine of “substantive due process.” At the moment, that is unlikely to happen, if just because the reversal of all the cases that were wrongly decided using SDP would yield outcomes the justices probably wish to avoid. But if those questions were resolved legislatively . . . well, then the Thomas concurrence in Dobbs could plausibly become a reality, which would be a great thing for the law and for the integrity of the Constitution.
So, given that gay marriage isn’t going anywhere, I can, in this limited circumstance, see a virtue in a federal law passed by Congress, rather than a federal law passed by activists on the Supreme Court.
“Federal recognition” and “state recognition” are not the same thing. If a common law property state like Oregon adopted some definition of marriage that allowed more than two marital partners, then when that group of spouses move to a community property state like Washington, they become entitled to acquire “community property” because the state is required to honor such a marriage. Nothing federal about that, but hugely upsetting to the longstanding property laws. Just one example.
But if a state recognizes polygamy, those polygamists could move to another state and I believe that second state would be forced to recognize it .
I agree with this. If you want to recognize SSM, then pass a law that does so. Legislation from the bench tends to be messy and ill formed, not to mention, not how we should be making laws because the Justices aren’t accountable to the voters. Obergefell was a terrible bit of law, much like Roe was, that removed the ability for the State to regulate the form of marriages if the members of that marriage wanted it to exist. Once that happened, the best that the State can do is recognize any and all marriages in an attempt to at least record them so that the participants are protected if/when the arrangement collapses.
Yes, but in this case the term “federal recognition” is the whole game, because the legal mechanism by which one state would be obliged to respect the laws of another under this law is the federal Congress’s invocation of the Full Faith and Credit Clause. This amendment to the law makes it clear that the federal government is permitted to demand reciprocity only in such cases as the marriages in question are between two individuals.
If states have their own recognition/reciprocity statutes, they would obviously be unaffected by this amendment, but . . . well, that was also the case before this law was ever proposed.
I agree; my post was about Mike Lee’s proposed amendment to the legislation, where he tries to address those concerns- he seems to do a thorough job, though there could be something he missed. This was a hypothetical question regarding if the amendment was attached to the legislation; if its already too late for (only) an amended version of the legislation to be put forth, its a moot point.
Well, I guess we shall have to wait and see.