Massachusetts Lawmakers Expected to Turn Away Pro-Marriage Amendment
by Jim Brown
September 14, 2005
(AgapePress) - A Massachusetts pro-family activist says it's a foregone conclusion that state lawmakers will vote down a proposed constitutional amendment that would ban same-sex "marriage" but allow homosexual civil unions.
Lawmakers in the Bay State will decide today (Wednesday) whether the compromise amendment will be placed on the 2006 ballot. The amendment was put together in response to a decision by the state's Judicial Supreme Court in May 2004 to legalize homosexual marriage. According to conservative activist Brian Camenker with the group Article 8 Alliance, the amendment was never popular in the first place. It was panned, he says, by both conservatives and pro-homosexual activists.
"It's really not news that this amendment isn't going to pass," says Camenker. "The thing that makes it so bad is that it does away with gay marriage, and [in the same paragraph in the constitution] creates civil unions that are the exact replica of gay marriage .... So we don't like it, and the gays don't like it."
Camenker predicts the amendment will overwhelmingly fail, as will a constitutional amendment he wrote that does away with homosexual marriage and completely prohibits homosexual civil unions. He says that amendment -- which could not appear on the ballot until 2008 -- will likely fail because many Catholic lawmakers in Massachusetts do not want to protect traditional marriage. According to Camenker, the Catholic Church in Massachusetts is in a state of moral disarray.
"Historically, most of the legislators who have been pro-abortion have also been Catholic, and that's been a huge embarrassment to the Catholic Church," he says. "However, the Catholic Church has also gotten behind this new amendment that was just approved this past week, that would do away future gay marriages but would grandfather in all current gay marriages up to 2008."
Today's bill would need the vote of at least 101 of the state's lawmakers to get on the 2006 ballot. An Associated Press poll indicated earlier this week that 104 were planning to vote against the measure, which passed last year 105-92. However, one Democratic state representative told AP that while he does not oppose same-sex marriage, he was planning to vote in favor of the amendment because he wants the state's voters to decide the matter.
Last weekend Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey, a Republican, voiced public support for the concept of homosexual civil unions.
Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
