Marriage Protection

MARRIAGE PROTECTION -- (House of Representatives - September 29, 2004)

The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mrs. Miller of Michigan). Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 7, 2003, the gentleman from New Mexico (Mr. Pearce) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.

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Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman from New Mexico for be willing to come to the floor so regularly and stand up for the values that are so dear to this country, and I thank him for the opportunity to speak on this issue of marriage tonight.

I would point out that, tomorrow, we will bring the Marriage Protection Amendment to this floor, and we will debate this issue, and it will be debated intensely on both sides. There will be Members on both sides, Democrats and Republicans, who will vote for and against this amendment tomorrow. Those who vote for it will tell us that they do not believe we need to go to this drastic step in order to preserve marriage. What they are really saying when their vote goes up is they do not believe the people should have the opportunity to voice their will, their votes, within their own States in the process that is set up through ratification of our Constitution that is for a constitutional amendment.

The gentleman from Texas pointed out that the courts have overruled the will of the people. And a question I often ask is, how did we get here? What brought us to this point? We, the people of the United States, those of us who see these three different branches of government, those of us who view that they should be balanced branches of government, that it is the job of the people to establish social policy and that it is our job to reflect that here in this Congress and to promote that across this country, it is not the job of unelected, lifetime-appointed judges to direct the society that we live in, and we get into great trouble when we allow that to happen.

We have allowed it to happen for a long time, Madam Speaker, and that long time goes back, by my measure, 42 years, to 1962 when a Supreme Court case, Engel v. Vitale, was brought before the courts. And that is the famous case, Madalyn Murray O'Hair's name comes to mind, where the Supreme Court pulled prayer out of the public schools. I believe they misread our Constitution. The Constitution does not provide that there cannot be prayer in the public schools. It simply provides there cannot be an established religion. And how we got to this point of this separation between church and State being imposed upon pulling prayer out of the public schools is a complicated and convoluted legal argument that cannot be sustained by a reading of the Constitution.

A point was made in the Committee on the Judiciary the last couple of weeks, and I want to credit that to the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Hostettler), who said, when people on the other side are opposed to our amending the Constitution, saying leave it alone, do not amend it, leave it as it is, what they really mean is leave it alone and do not read it. When we read the Constitution, we have a whole different view of the document, that precious and sacred document, than we do when we read the news articles or listen to the arguments on the other side.

But in 1962, prayer was taken out of the public schools by the United States Supreme Court. Then 3 years later, 1965, came a case that we do not talk about very much. It is a case called Griswold v. Connecticut. And that was a case where the State legislature in Connecticut had passed laws that said that there would not be the selling of contraceptives in the drug stores in the streets of Connecticut. In that case, Griswold took it to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court found that there was a right to privacy. The first known sign of a discovered right to privacy supposedly in our Constitution, and that said that married people should have a right to go buy contraceptives and take them back to the privacy of their home and that the general assembly of Connecticut had no business sticking their nose into that privacy between two married people.

How in the world did we get from that right to privacy to where we are today? Incremental steps. The next incremental step was 1973, Roe v. Wade, where the Supreme Court found that this right to privacy was not just a right to go purchase contraceptives if they are married and bring them back to their home, but also a right to determine that that baby that was conceived would not be brought to term because the liberty of the pregnant female and the right to privacy superseded the right to life of that unborn child. An astonishing decision made by a Supreme Court to take that right to privacy and roll it into a right to abortion.

Now, I go to a couple of other cases. Stone v. Graham, 1980. 1962; 1965; 1973, Roe v. Wade; and let us leap to 1980, 7 years later, pulled the Ten Commandments out of our public schools. The gentleman from Texas (Mr. Smith) spoke to that issue somewhat. Then, behind that came 1994, the case of Madsen v. Women's Health Center, Incorporated, and it removed the demonstration rights of people who were pro-life from demonstrating outside abortion clinics. Another right pulled away. It is okay to strike, and it is okay to demonstrate. It is just not okay to do it if it is not in a politically correct fashion, according to the courts.

Then there was a case in 1996, Romer v. Evans, where the Supreme Court overturned a constitutional amendment that was voted on with an overwhelming majority by the people of Colorado that said they will not impose special rights for certain classes of people at any level of political subdivision, and the Supreme Court said that the people of the State of Colorado had no business imposing their will on the political subdivisions.

That had to do with special rights for sexual orientation and gender identity. It removed the right of the people of Colorado, suspended the tenth amendment, because they found another value there that I cannot quite discern. That is 1996.

2002, Newdow v. U.S., that was the ninth circuit, the infamous ninth circuit, that pulled "under God" out of our Pledge of Allegiance. That case correctly did not make it to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court ruled that the gentleman who brought the case, Mr. Newdow, did not have standing.

I think there had to be some relief there, because I have stood in the Supreme Court chambers and I think about what that would be like to reference "under God" in our Pledge or what it would be like for the Supreme Court to rule on a decision on whether there would be the Ten Commandments in school. I do not know how they do that.

I stand in the Supreme Court chambers and I look up and I see Moses on the wall with the tablets. Maybe it does not seem so imposing to the Supreme Court, because the Ten Commandments on the tablets are in Hebrew, but we know what they mean. That was 2002.

2003, Lawrence v. Texas, where the Supreme Court found there was a right to sodomy, a right to homosexual relations. As I read through that decision, and I read it through four times, five times, maybe six times, and my margin notes are in different colored ink and they get heavier and heavier each time I read through there, and I get more chilled by the breathtaking decision of Lawrence v. Texas, not just the simple description I have given; but in that decision it says that the people elected by the citizens of Texas to represent them in the Texas legislature have no business imposing their moral values on the people that elected them.

The Lawrence decision, a six to three decision written by one of the Justices, really said "do not impose your moral values in any case whatsoever." If the Supreme Court does not approve of the values you bring to the legislative process, they might just throw it out on that basis alone. Breathtaking. It is not a constitutionally founded decision; it is a will-of-the-courts decision; it is a legislative type decision. And in fact that was 2003.

But I recall sitting in also in 2003, the date was April 19, 2003, Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger, the affirmative action cases at the University of Michigan. I went in and sat in on those two cases.

For 2 hours and 30 minutes, I went to sit in the place where I could hear the most profound constitutional arguments, the United States Supreme Court. As I listened to those arguments, I heard legislative arguments.

I know what a legislative argument is. I have sat in on them for 8 years in my public life. We weigh unintended consequences. We weigh the result of a policy. But the Court's job is to weigh the constitutionality and the letter of the law and the congressional intent, not the result.

So the only constitutional argument I heard that day was from Justice Scalia, who said, "If we rule against you and it results in one minority in your school, 100 percent minorities in your school or no minorities, what possible constitutional difference can that make?" Thank God there is at least one Justice that asks a constitutional question. We are here with a constitutional question before this Congress tomorrow.

But the real question brought before us is under Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, Massachusetts Supreme Court, a four-to-three decision that imposed same sex marriage on the State of Massachusetts.

Now, anybody that has read Lawrence v. Texas and read the dissenting opinion that said "if this says it does not have to do with same sex marriage, do not believe it," would be an exact quote from the dissenting opinion, I did not believe it before I got to that point in reading that particular case; and I do not believe today that Lawrence v. Texas does not address same sex marriage.

I believe it set the stage. I believe they knew it was setting the stage. I believe that Goodrich v. Department of Public Health in Massachusetts that imposed same sex marriage in that State was a logical follow of Lawrence v. Texas. And we have 10 or so States or more that are bringing these cases through the courts working their way to the Supreme Court, where I believe the Supreme Court is poised to find a constitutional right to same sex marriage.

If that happens, we cannot put the toothpaste back in the tube. The courts will have taken us from removing prayer from the public school in 1962, right to privacy in 1965, right to abortion in 1973, I will read the rest of these years quickly: 1962, 1965, 1973, 1980, 1994, 1996, 2002, 2003, 2003, 2003, 2003. Do you get the pattern? This is accelerating on us.

This demise of our civilization is going far faster than it did for Rome. It took 200 to 300 years for Rome. I do not think it can take two to three generations in this country.

It is time for us to pass a constitutional amendment and slow down this activism of the courts and then save marriage, the very cornerstone of civilization. And then we can get to work with the hard work of winning back our schools, our educational institutions, and also our media in this country, so that we have good solid people grounded in solid constitutional values growing up in this country and taking over these roles that we are performing here tonight.

I thank the gentleman for yielding. I appreciate the opportunity to speak before this country.

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Mr. KING of Iowa. Madam Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to pick up on some of the things that I did not address in my earlier talk.

I think we need to go back and look a little bit at the argument that there is a civil right or a constitutional right. I believe the courts are poised to either declare full faith and credit from the Massachusetts marriage to all 50 States in the Union; and, if they do not rule on that, I think they have got also a chance they could rule with the full faith and credit, but also the equal protection clause. Either one of those imposes same sex marriage on all the States, even though a vast majority of the States have passed marriage protection language, either in their constitutions or statutorily; and some of them have done both.

But a different way of thinking about this too is the argument is made that marriage is a civil right; therefore, you could not deny it to consenting adults.

I want to argue that marriage is not a civil right. It is not a civil right for a man and a woman, it is not a civil right for two consenting adults, and, in fact, it is not a right whatsoever. It is a privilege.

The reason I declare marriage to be a privilege is because we grant a marriage license. A license is something that gives you a permit. It is a permit to do that which is otherwise illegal.

So we grant a marriage license, or we grant a license to drive a car or to fish or hunt or whatever it might be, because we want to promote a certain kind of behavior and we want to regulate a certain kind of behavior. And certainly it is discriminatory in favor of those activities that we license.

So for the same reason, we grant a marriage license, a permit to do that which is otherwise illegal. It is not discriminatory, except that it is constructive because this cornerstone of civilization has been proven since the beginning of time to be the very element, that cornerstone of civilization through which we procreate, we pass along our religious values, our moral values, our work ethic, our very culture and civilization, all of the things that come through the marriage.

The children learn from a father and a mother. Say, for example, a little boy falls down and skins his knee, and he runs to his mom and she says, Come here, honey. I will kiss it and make it better. That is a mom's role in a case like that.

And the father says, oh, come on, son, you are going to have to be a man one day. You are going to have to tough this one out. That is the other message. They are not really conflicting messages; they are messages that need to come from the ideal circumstances between a man and a woman in holy matrimony.

Madam Speaker, so much of our history, so much of our culture, and so much of our civilization and our respect for our ancestors flows through marriage, and we know the things we learn there, because we revere our ancestors, we also want to be worthy of that respect from our descendants. Those values are taught through marriage, through the family, through the ideal way of raising children as a man and woman in the home, and that is the point I think is important to make, and I would be happy to conclude and yield back to the gentleman from New Mexico.

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