Senator James Talent (R - MO)

Statement on the Federal Marriage Amendment
July 13, 2004

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Mr. TALENT. I appreciate that. I very much appreciate the kind words of my friend from Colorado in introducing me. That is probably more than I deserve, and it is certainly better than I usually get when I stand up to speak on the Senate floor.

We are in the midst of another filibuster. I say that because if I didn't say it, given the Senate procedures, it would not be evident to people that that is what is happening. But we are filibustering yet another measure before the Senate. This one has a little twist to it. Those who are filibustering are willing to allow us to go to a vote on the amendment, if we have no amendment to the amendment. In other words, if nobody wants to offer any amendment to change this amendment at all, to try and perfect it, then they will permit an immediate vote. So what we are told is that we must either have an immediate vote without any changes even being considered or no vote at all.

I suspect that the filibuster will be sustained when we vote on it. It is a shame because this is an important measure, and the people are entitled to see who in this body is for protecting traditional marriage and who is not, because nothing less than that is at stake. Members of the Senate should not be mistaken or deceived by discussions of other issues or attempts to restate what this amendment is about or assurances that we don't really need to do anything and everything will be OK.

The courts of this country are engaged in a process by which they are going to force the people, whether they like it or not, to accept a fundamental change in the basic building block of our society. I kind of think that is important. I think it is worth debating. It is a sign of the regard in which marriage is held by some of those who are filibustering that they don't think it is important enough to be worth debating.

Marriage is our oldest social institution. I was thinking about this the other day. It is not older than the impulse to seek God, but it is older than our formal religions. It is older than our system of property. It is older than our system of justice. It certainly predates our political institutions, our Constitution, even our union in this country. And marriage may be the most important of all these institutions because it represents the accumulated wisdom of literally hundreds of generations over thousands of years about how best to lay the foundation of a home in which we can raise and socialize our children.

Every society has to be able to do certain things in order to survive. It has to produce wealth, goods, and services so people can live. It has to resolve disputes so that people don't kill each other over problems that they have. It has to be able to raise children who are reasonably content, reasonably well adjusted, and reasonably committed to the norms of that society. It is possible to do that. I put in that word for those in the gallery who may have

teenagers as I do. It is possible for children to be reasonably content, well adjusted, and committed to the norms of society. And the way that we do that, the way we have decided over the millennia to do that in this country, and, indeed, throughout the world, is through marriage.

It doesn't always work that way, obviously. No human society, no human institution is perfect. A spouse may die. The marriage may break up. The marriage may be so completely dysfunctional that maybe it ought to break up. People sometimes are single when children are born, and very often in those circumstances the person who is raising the child is able to make it work. They act heroically to raise the child on their own.

If a child in that circumstance went to his mom or dad or aunt or uncle or grandma or grandpa or guardian, whoever was trying to raise him or her on his own and said, When I grow up, when I want to have children, would you recommend that I try and find somebody who is committed to raising the child--say it is a girl--if I try and find a man who is committed to me and committed to the home and committed to raising our children in that context, would you recommend that I do that or not? How many of those single moms or dads or grandmas or grandpas or aunts or uncles who have raised kids or are raising kids, how many would say, No, do it the other way? They would say: Do it that way, if you can.

It is hard under any circumstances. But it is less hard if you have a husband or a wife who is there, who is committed, who wants to help. That is what marriage is about. Americans know that as a matter of commonsense. Americans live in this civilization. Americans of all different backgrounds, all different ethnicities, all different religions, all support traditional marriage. They know that, if possible, kids should be raised by a mom and a dad, committed in the context of marriage to their family. Americans know that and have known it. They have built that society and that culture.

The social scientists have figured it out. Here is a representative statement. The Senator from Kansas read a number of similar statements the other day, but this was by Scott M. Stanley who is a Ph.D. at the Center for Marital and Family Studies at the University of Denver, which my friend from Colorado has the honor to represent. He said:

As a result of decades of accumulated data, many family scientists, from the fields of sociology, psychology and economics, have concluded--

Here is the news bulletin--

children and adults on average experience the highest level of overall well-being in the context of healthy marital relationships.

And what is marriage? We are entitled to ask that about all our social institutions. What is it? It is not complicated. In short form, it is one mom, one dad, one at a time. Everybody has the same right to get married. There is no discrimination involved

in a social institution. Everybody has the same right to get married. But nobody has the right to marry anybody they want to. There are certain restrictions. You can't marry a close relative. You can't marry somebody who is already married. Is that discrimination if we tell people, No, you can't marry somebody if they are already married? That is not marriage. And you can't marry somebody of the same sex.

And why? Because marriage is the institution--remember, it is many things; yes, it is an expression of love and commitment between two people and that is beautiful--that we in our society rely upon for raising our children. And it is best for kids, if possible and where possible, to have a mom and a dad. And that is one thing that two people of the same sex cannot give children. They cannot give them a mom and a dad.

It comes down to this: People in this country are free to live the way they want to live. That is one of our cultural norms that, by the way, marriage supports. Marriage is the building block of a society which believes, among other things, that people should be free. And people are free to live the way they want.

The Senator from California talked about two same-sex people who love each other and want to live together. Legally people are free to do that. But that does not mean that they are free to change the basic cultural institutions on the health of which everybody and everybody's rights depend.

We have models of this around the world. In Scandinavia they have changed traditional marriage, legalized same-sex marriage. The result there is increasingly nobody gets married. Fewer and fewer kids are raised outside of that context. It is not good. If you think it is good, come down here and say that. Say that is why you want to oppose the amendment.

It is worth asking also how we got here. No legislature has acted on this. I haven't heard about hearings in the State legislatures around the country. No referendum has passed. I served in the legislature for 8 years in Missouri and was proud to do so. I served on the committees that considered family law. We debated a lot of issues involving family law. We changed the law a lot. It has not happened in this country. People have not adopted referendum. In fact, all the actions have been the other way. To the extent that they have passed referendum or laws, they have all been in support of traditional marriage.

So how did we get here?

We got here because a majority of the Massachusetts Supreme Court decided people should have the right to same-sex marriage. Because of the way our Federal system works, it is very likely--whether people want to admit this or not--that other courts will force people in other States to recognize same-sex marriage because one State has. That is the way our system works. It may not happen, but it is quite likely to happen.

When I heard about that decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Court, I asked myself: What about everybody else's rights? What is the most basic political right people in this country, and indeed throughout the free world, have? What is the political right that people in this country have fought and died for for hundreds of years? We see people around the world now heroically fighting for this. The first and most basic right is the right of the people to govern themselves.

The Framers thought that right was so self-evident, you didn't have to argue for it. Maybe we should restate it for the Massachusetts Supreme Court. It means that the only just government is the one that derives its powers from the consent of the governed. That means that every act of any governmental body has to be the result of a process in which the people have, at some time, consented.

In this country, people have to consent to the acts by which they are governed. Typically, they could do that through the process of a representative democracy. They elect people or defeat them, depending on whether they agree with them. We would not tolerate it for a second if a President got up one day and said: I don't like the way our society is functioning; I am going to issue a decree and everybody has to do it differently now.

It would not matter whether we agreed, we would say you don't have the authority to do that. It is because of that basic right of self-government that judges are supposed to construe and apply the law, not invent and impose the law.

Now, the construction may be strict or liberal. Provisions of the Constitution may be vague. But the construction has to be a faithful construction--whether it is strict or liberal--to the proper exercise within the American constitutional system of the judicial power. Even if a provision of the Constitution is so vague that we are not certain what the right answer, the right interpretation is, it doesn't mean there are no wrong interpretations. It doesn't mean there are no interpretations which clearly are outside of the scope of what the people who wrote the document said or intended.

I want to assert this before the Senate now: It is wrong to say the Constitution of the United States, or any of the several States, contains a right to same-sex marriage. It is intellectually dishonest to claim that the Massachusetts decision was one of interpretation and application, rather than invention and imposition. They were not interpreting the Constitution; they were imposing what they wanted on the people of Massachusetts, without their consent.

In this country, you don't do that. I have been around legislative bodies a long time. I have won some battles and lost some. Sometimes I think I have lost a lot more than I have won. Certainly, when I served in the minority in the Congress and in the legislature, I lost more battles than I won. That is the way the system works. I can live with that. But I don't like being told I have no right to participate. I don't like being told my views are such that I cannot petition the representative process to get what I want out of it.

Unless we pass a constitutional amendment, we will allow the courts of this country to disenfranchise tens of millions of Americans on an issue that is of greater importance to them on a day-to-day basis--because it involves the way in which their children and other people's children are going to be raised--than most of the issues we discuss. If we cannot agree in this body on anything else, we can agree on this: Everybody should have the right to advance their point of view in the legislative process on this issue, and that we can trust the good sense of the American people to produce the right result in the end. I am willing to do that, but the only way we can do that is by passing a constitutional amendment. That is what this country is about.

I have just a few minutes. I will deal with some of the arguments that have been raised against this. One is that this is political. Well, I have been in legislative bodies a long time. When people start talking about a bill or an argument being political, they are really saying that we know if we have to vote on this, we are going to vote in a way that people probably don't like back home, and we would really rather not vote on it.

Let me say this. This is not a battle that my friend from Colorado sought when he introduced this amendment. This battle is being forced upon us by the courts of the country. If you don't want to vote on this, get the Massachusetts Supreme Court to reverse itself. We will go back to what we had before, and gladly so.

Another argument is that we are holding up other business. I say to the people who are making that argument, as I said at great length on the floor of the Senate the other day, you are filibustering the other business. If you want to go to other business, stop filibustering it. You filibustered the class action bill last week, the welfare bill, the Energy bill, medical malpractice, and judicial nominations. You can filibuster if you want.

Unfortunately, here we allowed very broad filibustering. But one thing you cannot do is filibuster and then accuse everybody else of being obstructionists. That isn't right. Let the other measures go and we will go with them.

Another argument is that we should show more respect for the Constitution and that we should not amend the Constitution. You know, that is kind of a selective argument. That says basically you can amend it through the courts. The courts can amend it any way they want, without regard to the right of the people to govern themselves; but we cannot amend it through the process that the people have provided to amend it. The argument is kind of cheeky. It says we can get court decisions that exclude you from participating in the normal process, so you cannot pass a law to do anything about it. But then, if you go to the constitutional amendment process, which is the only process we have left open to you, you are not showing any respect for the Constitution.

Look, my time is running out. I see a colleague who may want to add a word or two at the end. You are either for protecting traditional marriage or you are not. There is no way around this debate. The courts are forcing it on us. They have changed the law in Massachusetts. People are getting married there and filing lawsuits in other States to challenge those State laws. This is here. We are either going to do something about it or we are not. You are either for protecting traditional marriage or you are not. It is not about homeland security. It is about whether you really think that marriage, as we have understood it for thousands of years, is important in some sense, even if you cannot explain it, to the kind of society we live in. I think so. I know most of the people think so.

My tone has been one of frustration. I am sorry about that. This frustrates me. It is something that, clearly, we ought to do. I don't know anybody who has come down here and argued against traditional marriage. Let's pass this constitutional amendment, work on it for a reasonable amount of time, get it in as good a shape as we can, and do the business the people expect us to do. Let them make their own decisions about their own culture.

I yield the floor.

I thank the Senate, and I yield the floor.