Robert George, chairman of the anti-gay
marriage group National Organization for Marriage (NOM), argues that
marriage bans are not rooted in anti-gay animus.
George, who co-authored the Federal
Marriage Amendment (FMA) in 2001, makes his claims in the latest
episode of PBS's Constitution USA.
Kristin Perry and Sandra Stier, one of
the two couples behind the case challenging the constitutionality of
Proposition 8, California's gay marriage, tell host Peter Sagal that
the Constitutional's 14th Amendment should allow them to
marry.
“It's about equal protection,”
Stier says. “Because whether it's marriage or something else, we
should have the same right to drink out of a water fountain, to drive
a car, and to marry each other that anybody else does. So that's
what we're really, really fighting for. That's what our case is
based on.”
Separately, George disagrees, saying
that unlike anti-miscegenation laws, marriage bans are not rooted in
discrimination.
“You had a fundamental problem with
anti-miscegenation laws and that's they were just rooted in a system
of racial subordination and oppression,” George says. “The whole
purpose of 14th Amendment was to undo that kind of racial
discrimination, and that's why the Court was entirely right in my
view in using its 14th Amendment powers to overturn state
anti-miscegenation laws.”
“The reason that doesn't work
[extending the analogy to marriage equality] is that they're helping
themselves to the very conclusion that they need to prove. It's true
that sometimes you have laws that are clearly rooted in bigotry, and
we should be able to say that that's true when that's true. But
people who have conservative ideas about sex and marriage are not
bigots. No one cooked up the conjugal conception of marriage, which
emerges from a deep history, and in many traditions, on the basis of
bigotry. That's just false to the historical facts. And now, they
can have a view, that's fine. They can compete for their view, and
if they can win a majority of their fellow citizens in a fair debate,
then their views should prevail. But people on the other side have
exactly the same right. And if they can persuade a majority of their
fellow citizens, then they should prevail. What we shouldn't be able
to do, Peter, either side, is to go into court to short-circuit the
democratic process.”
It should be noted that the case
against Proposition 8 does not claim that the institution of marriage
is discriminatory but that the amendment banning gay couples from
entering such unions is. The Supreme Court is expected to rule on
the case sometime this month.
(Watch
the entire episode at PBS.)