Balkinization

Is the Federal Marriage Amendment A Bait And Switch Game?

I've been thinking about the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment (FMA), whose text is available at the website of the Alliance for Marriage. The proposed text of the amendment reads:

Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this constitution or the constitution of any state, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.

The Alliance for Marriage argues on their website that this language is designed to keep courts from imposing same sex marriage on the states, and to keep legislatures from passing laws authorizing same-sex marriage, but it does not prohibit state legislatures from passing laws creating civil unions for same-sex couples.

I'm not so sure. The text is cleverly and confusingly written: The amendment says that no "state or federal law shall be construed to require" that "the legal incidents of" marriage may be enjoyed by same-sex couples. These legal incidents include a whole bundle of rights in family law, pension law, tort law, property law, and so on. What the text seems to say is that everyone who is sworn to uphold the law, including not only judges, but executive and administrative officials, would be prohibited from construing the law to give same sex couples this bundle of rights or any part of them. Since the law cannot be construed to do this, it cannot be enforced to this effect either. Private employers who give same sex couples benefits simlar to those of married couples would be able to do so, but they would not be permitted to construe any federal or state law as requiring them to do so, and no government official could enforce such an interpretation against private businesses. Thus, California's laws, which now give same sex couples many (but not all) of the same rights as married couples, and Vermont's civil unions law, which gives almost all of the same rights, would probably be made unenforceable by the Amendment's second sentence.

If the FMA had been designed to do what its proponents claim it will do, it should have been drafted as follows:

Section 1. Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this constitution or the constitution of any state, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.
Section 2. Nothing in the first section of this Article shall be construed to prevent either Congress or the legislatures of the several states from providing any other benefits, rights, or privileges, or combinations thereof, to unmarried couples or groups.

Thus, Congress and state legislatures may provide all of the incidents of marital status except marital status itself. As you can see, such an amendment is not particularly difficult to draft. The fact that there is a gap between what the text says and what the Alliance for Marriage says the text will do suggests to me that they are not being entirely forthcoming about the reasons for the Amendment.

Posted 2:34 PM by JB [link]