The Marriage Law Project at The Catholic University of America

TOP6NEWS - October 6, 2004

1-NEWS: LA judge throws out m amendment

2-NEWS: Canadian ssm bill before Supreme Court today

3-NEWS: SSM in VP debate last night

4-NEWS: OH petition issues now a criminal probe

5-OP-ED: The FMA is bad for business

6-OP-ED: OR m amendment will hurt kids

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1-NEWS: LA judge throws out m amendment

Same-sex marriage ban is nullified
Judge says one vote covered two issues
Wednesday, October 06, 2004
By Ed Anderson
NO Times-Picayune Capital bureau
http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/news-2/109704586449110.xml
BATON ROUGE -- A recently adopted constitutional ban on same-sex marriage was thrown out Tuesday by a state judge who said lawmakers improperly passed the measure last spring.

An appeal of East Baton Rouge Parish District Judge William Morvant's ruling is expected to be filed with the 1st Circuit Court of Appeal in Baton Rouge by Monday. Seventy-eight percent of the state's voters approved the amendment Sept. 18.

Morvant, a Republican, said the amendment is flawed because, while the state Constitution prevents a law or constitutional amendment from having more than one purpose or objective, it contains two "objects":

-- Defining what a legal marriage is by specifying that it can exist only between one man and one woman while constitutionally prohibiting same-sex marriages.

-- Preventing the state from recognizing "a legal status identical or substantially similar to that of marriage for any unmarried individuals."

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2-NEWS: Canadian ssm bill before Supreme Court today

Same-sex marriage a justice issue, government argues
By ALLISON DUNFIELD
Globe and Mail Update with Canadian Press
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20041006.wsame1006/BNStory/National/
Lawyers for the federal government launched their argument before the Supreme Court of Canada on Wednesday that same-sex marriage is a justice issue — the beginning of a process that may forever change the institution of marriage in Canada.

The country's highest court began hearing arguments Wednesday morning in Ottawa on the federal government's proposal to allow same-sex marriages.

A total of 28 groups are scheduled to speak at the three-day hearings.

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3-NEWS: SSM in VP debate last night

Gay Marriage Hits Personal Note in Campaign Debate
October 6, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-campaign-debate-gay.html
CLEVELAND (Reuters) - In Tuesday's vice presidential debate marked by sharp personal attacks and exchanges, the one kinder and gentler moment centered on Mary Cheney, the lesbian daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney.

As Cheney and his Democratic challenger Sen. John Edwards disagreed about a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, Edwards praised Cheney and his wife Lynne for his public expressions of love and support for Mary, one of Cheney's two adult daughters.

"You can't have anything but respect for the fact that they're willing to talk about the fact that they have a gay daughter, the fact that they embrace her. It's a wonderful thing. And there are millions of parents like that who love their children, who want their children to be happy," he said.

Cheney replied, "I appreciate that very much."
But on policy, the two disagreed.

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4-NEWS: OH petition issues now a criminal probe

Posted on Wed, Oct. 06, 2004
Sheriff will probe petition problems
Paid circulator may have forged signatures on gay marriage issue
By Stephen Dyer
Ohio Beacon Journal staff writer
http://www.ohio.com/mld/ohio/news/9847795.htm
The look into potentially forged Summit County petitions to get an anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment on the Ohio ballot is now a criminal probe.

The Summit County Board of Elections turned over information -- that 20 to 30 signatures appear to be forged -- to Summit County Sheriff Drew Alexander's office Tuesday morning.

It isn't the first time this election season that circulators hired to gather Ohio signatures have faced criminal probes of questionable petitions.

Two circulators who worked a Florida initiative are facing nearly 100 counts of fraud there.
Summit County Sheriff's Inspector Keith Thornton said the office is taking the Summit County claims seriously.
``It affects this unbelievable democracy we enjoy and goes right to the heart of the Constitution,'' Thornton said of the allegations. ``I take it really seriously.

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5-OP-ED: The FMA is bad for business

The Federal Marriage Amendment Is Bad for Business
Howard Paster, The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 5, 2004
http://www.hrc.org/Template.cfm?Section=Center&CONTENTID=23241&TEMPLATE=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm
In addition to principle and morality, there are sound business reasons why members of the House of Representatives were right to vote down the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment last week. (Depending on where you stand on the issue, you'll be happy or unhappy to know that the vote was 227 to 186 in favor of the amendment -- far short of the two-thirds required to adopt it.)

It's good to see that members of the House and the Senate, which rejected the amendment in July, are gradually catching up with corporate America, which has been recognizing a growing number of gays and lesbians in the workplace for more than two decades. Indeed, American businesses have been changing their workplace policies, adding domestic partner benefits and rethinking their corporate cultures since the early 1980s. In some cases the issues were raised by gay employees, diversity managers or the human-resources department. But, in all of these cases the changes were made with a strong business rationale.

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The proposed Federal Marriage Amendment could label any benefit that employers extend to same-sex couples -- from group health insurance to family leave to bereavement leave -- as unconstitutional. Forty percent of Fortune companies and countless thousands of others could lose their ability to define their own benefits plans in terms that support their business operations. Even if private plans were not affected, the amendment would continue the IRS policy of taxing health-insurance premiums and jeopardize equal tax policies in Vermont, California and Massachusetts.

And legal marriage has its upsides, too. Not just because newlyweds take a lot of pictures, buy a lot of flowers and go on honeymoons. One unexpected consequence of the legalization of gay marriage in Massachusetts is that small businesses are actually more competitive. Now that gay partners who marry meet the definition of "spouse," smaller employers no longer have to wrangle with insurers and struggle to make benefits available to their employees that large self-insured companies have always done with ease. The result is that smaller firms are better positioned to compete for talent against larger firms that can entice gay employees with fully comparable benefits plans.

Similar measures at the state and local level are equally ill-conceived. Imagine an employer who wishes to transfer an employee from Massachusetts to such a jurisdiction. Is that employee likely to want to dissolve their marriage to keep their job? These bills create regional inequities that diminish employers' competitiveness compared to peers in neighboring states without laws that restrict benefits availability.

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Corporate America is one sector that does not need to be protected from marriage for same-sex couples. We do need protection from anti-business legislation in Congress.

Mr. Paster is executive vice president of WPP Group and former chairman and CEO of Hill & Knowlton.

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6-OP-ED: OR m amendment will hurt children

Measure 36 dangerous to Oregon kids
Wednesday, October 06, 2004
David Sarasohn , Oregonian
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/david_sarasohn/index.ssf?/base/editorial/109706375235160.xml
The backers of Measure 36, the initiative to put a gay marriage ban in the Oregon constitution forever and ever, say the issue is all about children.

They're right, but not in the way they claim.
The real issue is whether it's better for kids if the people raising them are legally obligated to their kids and to each other.

Most people think it is.
Voters are being warned that Measure 36 is about whether children should be raised by gay couples -- and, as the initiative's Web site throbbingly warns, "The research is overwhelming; children with a married mother and father consistently do better in every measure of well-being."

Except the people who do the research say it's not true.
And besides, we've already made the decision about whether gay Americans can raise children.
Gary Gates of the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., points out that 150,000 same-sex couples in the United States are now raising 250,000 kids, according to the 2000 census -- which probably understates the number.

About a third of female same-sex couples and a fifth of male same-sex couples are raising at least one child -- which in Oregon adds up to several thousand children.

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Nobody seriously proposes doing anything to change this reality. Nobody wants to separate parents and kids, and nobody -- even people to whom it's been revealed that gay people shouldn't be parents -- wants to deal with a quarter-million kids.

But that's a lot of kids to leave legally unprotected, or to dismiss as collateral damage of the culture wars.
Despite what backers of Measure 36 claim, research doesn't show that children of straight parents do better. What it shows is that children of married parents do better than children of single parents; whether the single parent is straight or gay, she's likely to be outnumbered. In fact, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, there is "a growing body of scientific literature that suggests that children who grow up with gay or lesbian parents fare as well in emotional, cognitive, social and sexual functioning as children whose parents are heterosexual."

But who are you going to believe: pediatricians or talk show hosts?
And it's not like there's no drawback to being raised by gay parents.
"The fact that gay and lesbian parents can't marry does put their kids at some disadvantage," says Lee Badgett, an economist at the University of Massachusetts. "Gay parents have to go through hoops. Kids may not have access to health insurance if they're not the child of the legal parent."

Worse, kids with same-sex parents have even less protection than others if one parent just decides to clear out.
"You already have de facto same-sex divorce, except instead of laws, it's just a jungle," says Stephanie Coontz of Evergreen State College and the Council on Contemporary Families. "The parent who's not biologically related just has the freedom to wander away."

As Gates points out, kids are the ones hurt most by the lack of legal protection for gay relationships -- except, of course, the elderly, who have all kinds of problems with medical care, estate planning and survivor benefits.

Whatever the Measure 36 backers threateningly claim about the academic research on gay parents, the people who actually do the research say the kids' problem isn't that their parents are gay.

It's that their parents aren't legal.
So Oregonians insisting that the state should never, ever consider gay marriage can claim that homosexuals make them nervous, or that religion tells them how everybody's life is supposed to be, or that they don't like the Multnomah County Commission. (Get in line.)

But they really should leave several thousand Oregon kids out of the conversation.
Which is, after all, where we've always left them.
Reach David Sarasohn at 503-221-8523 or davidsarasohn@news.oregonian.com