60-40 NATION:

Without the Consent of the Governed: Without a Federal Marriage Amendment, the gay marriage movement is threatening to overturn one of our bedrock legal principles: that all laws stem from the consent of the governed. (Hugh Hewitt, 03/25/2004, Weekly Standard)

Had the proponents of gay marriage taken their cause to state legislatures, they would have been rebuffed, at least today and in the foreseeable future. Across the country, even in the liberal precincts of California, supermajorities continue to believe that marriage is the union of a man and a woman, and presented with the question on ballots, have continually affirmed the millennia-old standard. And off course the Congress has already passed, by supermajorities in both houses, the Defense of Marriage Act.

FACED WITH THIS WALL OF RESISTANCE, proponents of a radical new view of marriage wish to bypass the consent of the governed and impose their vision. Andrew Sullivan has taken to branding opponents of gay marriage as "theocrats," but of course those seeking to impose their own vision of society--without even a single instance of elected officials acting in legislative bodies to endorse their view--are acting in the tradition currently on display in Iran, where the reigning mullahs do everything in their power to prevent majorities from electing legislatures to represent their own desires and views. The theocrats of the gay marriage movement have set their goals above the consent of the governed.

THE MARRIAGE AMENDMENT is a necessary, indeed urgently required antidote to such a radical assault on the bedrock of the American experience. If imposition of new norms can be accomplished without even one law anywhere ever having being passed, then it can happen again and again whenever willful minorities can persuade robed elites to act without conscience against the idea that all law proceeds from the people.

Mr. Sullivan is right, those who believe in morality are theocrats.

MORE:
Senate Passes Bill On Harm To Fetuses: Critics Say Measure Defines Start of Life (Helen Dewar, March 26, 2004, Washington Post)

The Senate gave final approval yesterday to legislation that would make it a crime to injure or kill a fetus during the commission of a federal crime of violence, overriding critics' claims that the bill defines the start of human life in a way that could undermine abortion rights.

The 61 to 38 vote to approve the measure came after a vote of 50 to 49 to reject an alternative favored by abortion rights advocates that would have imposed the same penalties without reference to the legal status of a fetus.

The Unborn Victims of Violence Act, given new impetus by the killing of Laci Peterson and her unborn son in California more than a year ago, was passed by the House last month and now goes to President Bush, who strongly supported its passage.

It was the second narrowly focused initiative by antiabortion forces to pass in the past two years, fulfilling a strategy aimed at incremental gains in the absence of a congressional majority to ban abortion outright. It follows approval last year of legislation to ban a specific procedure, called partial-birth abortion by its critics.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 25, 2004 11:14 PM