Amendment defeated
In happy news entirely unrelated to the debate, the US House of Representatives has voted down the anti-same-sex-marriage amendment.
5 Responses to “Amendment defeated”
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Vera Nazarian
Yaaay! 🙂
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Tonya L
There’s some hope in the world, eh?
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Benjamin Rosenbaum
I hate to rain on the parade, but my understanding is it was designed to be voted down, and then used as election campaign fodder. “*I* tried to save marriage, but my opponent…”
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Jed
Yah—I should’ve provided more detail. The amendment failed in the Senate a while ago; I’m not sure where that leaves things. Tom DeLay is saying that they’ll keep re-introducing the amendment every year until it succeeds. It’s also worth noting that, unfortunately, the amendment did receive a majority of the votes in the House; it just didn’t receive the two-thirds supermajority it needed to pass. (The Hawaiian news story that says that “Hawaii’s two congressmen voted with the majority today” in voting against the amendment is misusing the word “majority.”)
However. I still consider it heartening that it didn’t pass. I’m also pleased to see that the vote was not strictly along party lines: there were 27 Republicans who voted against it (though there were also 36 Democrats who voted for it).
So, yeah, we can largely chalk this up to political maneuvering in an election year, and something like 11 states have state-level anti-same-sex-marriage votes coming up on the ballot in November. The amendment’s defeat in the House isn’t a huge step forward.
But given that the amendment was introduced, I’m a lot happier to see it fail than to see it succeed.
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J. Erik Lundberg
Yay! I did a little dance when I heard the news.
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