A controversial constitutional amendment banning homosexual marriage is very likely to be defeated in the United States Senate on Wednesday, forcing Republicans to circle their wagons and hope the political fall-out will not affect the upcoming presidential election.
Republicans were hoping the amendment would give them a boost among conservative voters ahead of the November 2 polls, but, facing dissent even within their own ranks, they appear to have shifted their focus to damage control.
”This issue is not going away,” Senate majority leader Bill Frist said on Tuesday after it became clear those in favour of the amendment were well short of the required two-thirds of the Senate to carry the motion when it comes to a vote on Wednesday.
President George Bush urged Congress in his weekly radio address on Saturday to vote for the amendment to protect ”the most fundamental institution of civilization and to prevent it from being fundamentally redefined”.
”This difficult debate was forced upon our country by a few activist judges and local officials, who have taken it on themselves to change the meaning of marriage,” Bush said.
”When judges insist on imposing their arbitrary will on the people, the only alternative left to the people is an amendment to the Constitution, the only law a court cannot overturn.
”A constitutional amendment should never be undertaken lightly — yet to defend marriage, our nation has no other choice,” he declared.
The Massachusetts Supreme Court has already allowed same-sex marriages. Lawsuits in Florida, Nebraska, New Jersey and Oregon seek to do the same.
Thirty-eight US states already have banned homosexual marriage and voters in at least eight states are poised to put constitutional amendments to a vote later this year, according to the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.
A constitutional amendment must be approved by a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress before it is submitted to ratification by three-fourths of the state legislatures.
Proponents of the constitutional amendment, meanwhile, fear that the US Supreme Court will end up ruling that the 1996 federal Defence of Marriage Act outlawing same-sex marriage is also unconstitutional.
California Democrat Dianne Feinstein charged that the amendment is being used to ”drive a division into the voters of America, into the people of America — one more wedge issue at a very difficult time to be used politically in elections”.
”Everybody in this body knows they are nowhere close” to securing the 67 votes needed for the amendment to pass, she said.
So far, they have managed to muster just about 40 votes in the 100-seat Senate.
Massachusetts Democrat Ted Kennedy said the proposed amendment has made the religious right look ”ridiculous”.
”My guess is that their strategy will boomerang and that vastly more Americans will be turned off by this appeal to stain the constitution with their language of bigotry,” he said.
Analysts agree with Kennedy.
”When you look at the polls, a lot of people agree with the Democratic ticket, and their position is against gay marriage and also against the amendment,” said Allan Lichtman, a politics expert at American University.
Bush’s Democratic challenger for the White House, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, told the Washington Post in an interview published on Sunday that he and his running mate, Senator John Edwards, will return to the US Senate to vote against the proposed amendment.
”Both John and I believe firmly and absolutely that marriage is between a man and a woman. But we also believe that you don’t play with the Constitution of the US for political purposes and amend the Bill of Rights when you don’t need to, when states are adequately addressing this issue,” Kerry told the daily.
Indeed, in pressing for a vote against gay marriage, Republicans run the risk of alienating even moderate conservatives, whose votes will be essential to winning the presidency in November.
But on the other hand, there is a real risk that ultraconservative Christian voters could be turned off by what they perceive to be insufficient efforts on the part of Republicans to defend marriage. — Sapa-AFP