Marriage Protection Amendment--Motion to Proceed--Continued

MARRIAGE PROTECTION AMENDMENT--MOTION TO PROCEED--Continued

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, my friend from Alabama has just called for the Senate to vote and the House to vote, two-thirds majorities to vote to send to the States the question of whether or not our U.S. Constitution should be amended with respect to marriage being only between a man and a woman. Actually, in my State and in 45 other States around the country, we have had the opportunity to debate this issue, to consider this issue, and to pass laws with respect to marriage as between a man and a woman.

Personally, I believe that it is. As Governor of Delaware, a number of years ago I signed into law the Defense of Marriage Act in my State that says marriage is something that occurs between a man and a woman. Not only did I sign that law, but I supported the Federal law which was enacted here, signed by former President Clinton, which said States like my own and those other 45 States, to the extent that we define marriage as being between a man and a woman, our State law, respective State laws, cannot be violated by the actions of some other State.

I will give an example. If we have a same-sex couple in Delaware who decide to go to another country or another place where same-sex marriages are allowed, and then that same-sex couple comes back to Delaware and claims they are married, they are not married in my State. It is not a marriage that we recognize. In fact, for the over 200 years that we have been around as a country, States such as Delaware or California or Georgia or Alabama or Kansas have set the rules for marriage. We don't say to the Federal Government: You determine who can get married, at what age people can get married, or what kind of waiting period there has to be, or can first cousins marry or second cousins; we don't say what the rules of the road are with respect to divorce, with respect to alimony, with respect to child support. For over 200 years we have left those issues to the States.

Today we have said very clearly in my own State, marriage is between a man and a woman, a view that is reflected in almost all of the other States in this country.

If we get to the point where our ability to maintain that position in my State or in the other 45 States that have adopted similar laws, where those laws are threatened or basically rendered ineffective, then I think the idea of visiting a constitutional amendment is something we may want to do. But I don't know that it is needed. I am not convinced that it is needed for us to amend the Constitution to do something that I believe we already have done by changing our own State laws, and those State laws are protected by a Federal law.

We have not amended the Constitution a whole lot of times. We have amended the Constitution 17 times; since 1791, 17 times. I am 59 years old. We have amended the Constitution just six times in my own lifetime. We have amended the Constitution for good and valid reasons. We have amended the Constitution to protect our freedom of speech, to protect our ability to worship God as we see fit. We have amended the Constitution to ensure that we have the right to bear arms, to ensure the right of a trial by a jury of our peers. Other constitutional amendments have been to protect us from unlawful searches of our homes and have guaranteed our rights to assemble in Washington and in Dover and across this country to present our grievances to those who serve us. Constitutional amendments have abolished slavery. They have provided women the right to vote. They have provided 18-year-old young men and women with the right to vote, and they have limited our Presidents to serving only two terms. They decided through a constitutional amendment that if we don't have a Vice President for some reason, how one would be selected. All of those are important, and some would say urgent, pressing needs that have been addressed and have been put into our Constitution.

I am not convinced given the actions of my own State and 45 other States, the actions of the Congress and former President Clinton signing the Defense of Marriage Act, that we need to enshrine in the Constitution today what we have already enshrined in State laws and Federal laws with respect to the fact that marriage is between a man and a woman.

I do know what some would say: that this is election year politics. We do this every 2 years, and it happens sort of coincidentally like 5 months, 4 months before an election, and it is through the efforts of one party or the other to try to energize their base.

I don't know if that is part of this. I do know this: There are plenty of other important issues that we need to be addressing.

We have a war in Iraq where the going is tough. We are losing people, including some young men from my own State just last month, and we are suffering tragic and sad losses of life. We have a situation in Afghanistan which is not going as well as some of us would like and had hoped for. We are a nation today where almost 60 percent of our energy depends on foreign sources, a lot of it controlled by people who don't like us very much. And we aren't convinced that when we take our money to fill up our tanks with gas that they will not use our money to hurt us.

Our dependence on foreign oil continues to grow, not abate. The cost of health care is killing us in terms of our ability to compete. As a nation, we spend more money--companies such as General Motors--on health care than is spent on all capital investments around the world. We have people who are sick and dying from asbestos poisoning, and they are not getting and their families are not getting the money they deserve. Meanwhile, other folks who have been exposed to asbestos but don't have asbestosis and have never had it, will never have it, they get money. We live on a planet where the air is becoming warmer, and we are threatened by more hurricanes, tougher and stronger hurricanes and typhoons and cyclones as we have ever seen in recent years.

We have a Tax Code where literally, last year, $290 billion was owed in taxes. We know who owes it, and we know how much they owe, but it wasn't collected. Federal agencies made over $50 billion of improper payments last year, most of those overpayments. We have government-sponsored enterprises such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that don't have the kind of regulation they need. We have data breaches where the Veterans' Administration is literally turning over to unscrupulous people data for 25 million, 26 million of our veterans. We have a passenger rail system in this country which is, compared to the rest of the world, just sad, and we aren't doing anything about it. We have legislation that passed 93 to 6 last year to reauthorize and improve passenger rail service and nothing has happened to it. Nothing has happened to it. We have a postal system that literally is a relic of the 1970s trying to operate in the 21st century. We have plenty to do. We have 45 legislative days ahead of us to do all of that, and we are spending 3 of those legislative days on this.

I know there is a need that some Republicans feel to bring up this issue again, and I respect the fact that you are in the majority; it is your right. I understand later this month we will deal with some other contentious issues. I have had the opportunity to meet with the Republican leadership. Some of us have had the opportunity to meet with the Republican leaders. We are self-described centrists. I call us the flaming moderates. But we have sort of reached out to the Republican leadership to say there is a whole list of things that we need to focus on: deficit reduction, budget deficit reduction, trade deficit reduction, energy independence, you name it. There is a whole long list of what we ought to be doing, and we should be focusing on that agenda, not just on this.

That is not to say marriage isn't important; it is hugely important. It is the basic building block of our society. We know families are in trouble and hurting in a lot of ways. One of the things I would like to see us do and put a lot more emphasis on is ratcheting down unwed mothers and teen pregnancies. We ought to do a heck of a lot more in childhood education to reduce the likelihood that young women will bring children into the world and that young guys are going to impregnate them. We need to do a whole lot more in that regard. That is the kind of agenda that we need to be working on and looking to across the aisle.

That having been said, I have used my time. I will close with this: In my view, marriage is between a man and a woman. In Delaware's view, marriage is something that is between a man and a woman. We passed a law that says that. We are not the only State that did that. Forty-five other States did the same thing. We have a Federal Government, this body, the House of Representatives, and the former President who signed a Federal law that said what we have done in Delaware and 45 other States is good and is not going to be overridden. It is not going to be just pushed aside. Until that happens, I am convinced that the proper thing for us to do is to uphold marriage, to honor marriage, and to continue to work as we have in our States to pass good State laws affecting marriage, affecting the raising of our children, but not necessarily to ask the Federal Government to do that because until I am convinced and until most of us are convinced that, frankly, we need Federal intervention, then I think let's stick with what has worked for us for over 200 years, and that is allowing the States to do this.

I yield the floor.

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