Posted on 03/04/2004 5:57:49 AM PST by Theodore R.
Options For Dealing With Same-Sex Marriage Licenses
Mar. 3, 2004 Phyllis Schlafly
Congress overwhelmingly passed and President Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in 1996, and there it rested peacefully on the law books until this year. Recent events are now placing the monkey squarely on the back of President George W. Bush to do his constitutional duty to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed."
It's not enough that he is "troubled" about the marriage licenses that have been issued to over 3,000 same-sex couples in San Francisco and 26 in New Mexico, and may soon be issued in Massachusetts,or that he is carefully pondering whether to endorse a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution. He should meanwhile enforce existing federal law.
DOMA states unequivocally that the federal government recognizes marriage only as "a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife," and the word spouse only as "a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife." The General Accounting Office compiled a 58-page list of 1,049 federal rights and responsibilities that are contingent on DOMA's definition of marriage.
The GAO report lists these 1,049 federal laws in many categories,including Social Security and welfare, veterans, taxation, federal employees, and private employees. The GAO report states that the man-woman marital relationship is "integral" to the Social Security system and "pervasive" to our system of taxation.
The widespread social and familial consequences of DOMA impact on adoption, child custody, veterans benefits, and sponsorship of a non-American spouse. DOMA's enormous financial consequences include joint income tax returns, survivor's rights to Social Security benefits, and the tax-free inheritance of a spouse's estate.
It is impossible for same-sex couples to apply any equal-protection theories to America's tax or Social Security architecture. Both systems are designed to prefer husbands and wives over single people because of society's consensus that it is right and economical for husbands and wives to raise their children, and for wives to be provided for after their husbands retire or die.
Even in the world of private industry, DOMA has a big impact. A third of Fortune 500 companies offer health insurance benefits to domestic partners, but employees must pay income tax on the value of such partner benefits because that insurance is not recognized by federal law as a deductible corporate expense.
Fathers and mothers are usually in shock when they discover that auto insurance for their single children costs so much more than their parents' rates. But those differences of treatment are based on accident statistics.
Gay activist groups are already starting to instruct same-sex couples to file joint income tax returns, so the Bush Administration should establish procedures right now in order that the bureaucracy will know how to handle the paperwork. The model is already in place.
In earlier times, our friendly Internal Revenue Service used to take our word for how many children we had when we claimed child exemptions, and most kids didn't get a Social Security number until they started their first job. Suspecting some hanky-panky in the matter of child exemptions, Congress required tax returns starting in 1988 to include the taxpayer identification number (usually the Social Security number) of each dependent age five or older.
The age at which a child's Social Security number must be reported was subsequently reduced to age two, then to age one, then to birth.Most children now receive their Social Security number as newborns.
Millions of children disappeared as tax exemptions when the federal forms required this specific information. But everybody's used to it now, and parents don't get income-tax exemptions unless they report their children's Social Security numbers.
The Bush Administration should immediately instruct the Internal Revenue Service to prepare 2004 income tax forms with a line requiring joint returns to include the date and place of marriage, thereby enabling Internal Revenue to identify and reject joint returns claiming fake marriages. But that's just the first step the federal government should take.
President Bush does not have the power to give orders to the San Francisco Mayor. But he should additionally (2) instruct all federal agencies to prepare for energetic compliance with the 1,049 federal regulations impacted by DOMA, (3) investigate whether Internal Revenue will have to reject joint tax returns from ALL couples (same-sex or opposite-sex) who are married in any county, state or country where the legal definitions of marriage and spouse are changed, (4) investigate how federal funds can be withheld from states that permit the travesty called same-sex marriage, and (5)announce his full support of Rep. John Hostettler's bill (H.R. 3313) to prevent the federal courts from overturning DOMA.
Read this column online for related links: http://www.eagleforum.org/column/2004/mar04/04-03-03.html
If YOUR jurisdiction performs fake marriages, then the IRS is ordered not to allow your real marriage to count, because they won't be able to tell the difference.
This would re-orient a lot of soccer moms overnight.
The Republican Party has sold us out to well-heeled, articulate, Inside DC gays: the Log Cabins, the Human Rights Campaign, and this bunch, of whom Dubya's advance woman Mary Matalin is a founder:
http://www.republicanunity.com/hbm.htm
Also, do a metasearch on "Mary Matalin +GOP +gay" and pull out the other stories from the 2000 campaign, in which Bush came down firmly on the side of including gays in the GOP.......at parties and fund-raisers where the faith-based conservatives, "the ones who brung ya", were absent.
Read it and weep, y'all.
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Anybody know more about this bill?
And that basing the defense of marriage on either that bill, or DOMA, before this Supreme Court, after their demonstrated lunge into activism in Lawrence, is playing chicken with a Supreme Court that loves to play chicken.
Lose one SCOTUS case, and you lose absolutely everything.
That's why I reluctantly conclude that an amendment to the federal constitution is the only way to restrain this turbulent Court.
The Social Security Agency, the IRS, and other agencies should be firmly instructed that same-sex marriages are not legal.
Even in the world of private industry, DOMA has a big impact. A third of Fortune 500 companies offer health insurance benefits to domestic partners, but employees must pay income tax on the value of such partner benefits because that insurance is not recognized by federal law as a deductible corporate expense.
'Domestic Partnerships': An unfair tax break for the (gay) rich
I reluctantly conclude that an amendment to the federal constitution is the only way
Both of these points lead me to think this issue will be a good point of focus for the culture wars -- a sort of mind-changing 9/11 event on this front, not to mention a premature tactical blunder by an overconfident enemy.
The activists are outnumbered on this, they have a very tenuous hold on the framing of the issue, and they are very in-your-face about it -- vulnerable to overreaching. Beyond the legal reasoning, this is a good time to go to the mat with an Amendment so these people know they are in a serious fight. An amendment is not a general solution to all the attempts these whackjobs will make on other issues, but it could be very useful in putting them on the defensive, and in coalescing energy from normal Americans on these issues.
This may be a little too much to hope for, but if the libs want to disingenuously open the box on federalism and widen the scope of equal protection and gov't benefits....I wouldn't mind that box getting its lid ripped off.
These libs invented the game of 'jump through the hoop for the gov't preference', now they want to remove the hoop for their favorite constituency. Let's talk about removing the hoop, period.
Yes, our side needs a break, and overconfidence may supply it. I think it will be something, unfortunately, involving kids and the GLSEN projects. That is going to make the Catholic scandal sound like small potatoes. The press are already hastening to bury the Catholic scandal, since Uncle Bob Bennett has apparently discovered that gay priests are the culprits, and that they've got a hell of a lot of them.
The activists are outnumbered on this, they have a very tenuous hold on the framing of the issue, and they are very in-your-face about it -- vulnerable to overreaching.
I disagree about the tenuous hold -- their hold on the press looks like an iron grip to me. The local paper, the Houston Chronicle, has changed, under the guidance of Editor Jeff Cohen, from a typical Chamber-of-Commerce cheerleading section 15 years ago to a down-the-line pro-gay, religion-trashing newspaper. At least one of their senior editorialists is gay (Alan Bernstein), and possibly a couple more are closet cases.
The press has worked hand-in-glove with the Human Rights Campaign and GLAAD (the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, their werewolf agitprop unit that tries to tell the press what vocabulary to use in discussing "our" issues) since the early 1990's. TIME and Newsweek did a very propagandistic, coordinated attack in 1994, keying on the release of Philadelphia, which both of them put on the cover. John Leland wrote a particularly wormy piece for Newsweek, in which he slimed a New England couple who were leading a grass-roots fight against a pro-gay ordinance that was slipped through the gay-friendly, liberal city council in Lewiston, Maine. Leland murmured that this couple seemed normal until they began talking about how gays would soon be demanding gay marriage and the right to adopt -- by such claims, we could tell, you see, that they were full of bigotry, which came oozing to the surface with such outlandish claims. Leland was particularly slimy in that, when he wrote those words, seven recruited gay couples had already been in court in Hawaii for nearly a year, suing the state for marriage licenses in a case that later came to be styled Baehr v. Lewin (searchable online), which became one of the first vehicles that Lambda Legal and Evan Wolfson tried to use to force all 50 states to recognize homosexual marriages under the Full Faith and Credit Clause. And in the same issue (Feb. 14, 1994) was a sidebar article......about gays adopting.
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