GOP Must Wed Values to Politics

In the 1980s and 1990s, the Republican Party became known as the party of “family values.” Why this label became popular so late in GOP history is a bit of a curiosity because the Republican Party was founded on family values.

Its first platform stated, “it is both the right and the imperative duty of Congress to prohibit in the Territories those twin relics of barbarism -- polygamy, and slavery.” Polygamy destroyed families, diminished women and confused children. Slavery, aside from being a moral evil, tore children from parents and husbands from wives, forced “breeding” -- the list goes on.

The GOP was morally right to condemn these kinds of relationships, and it is to the party’s credit that it was the first to address them in its political founding.

Today, however, the Republican Party may be about to taint this legacy.

A few years back, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher asked me, “What is this I hear about a movement for gay marriage?” After I described the emerging cultural debate, she leaned forward and said, “Well, you know, it’s quite impossible; marriage is a man and a woman.”

What neither Thatcher nor I knew was how quickly her common-sense understanding of the issue, one that had girded human civilization from its beginning, would be changed by the American judicial and legislative branches.

A family -- any family -- can form only from a mother and father. It may not always end with a mother and father, but it cannot begin without such a union.

In 1996, when the gay marriage movement was finding its sea legs, the House and Senate passed, and the president signed, the Defense of Marriage Act. For purposes of federal law, the act stated that “marriage” meant one man and one woman as husband and wife. It also asserted that while a state might enact some form of legal recognition of homosexual unions, no other state, under the “full faith and credit” clause of the Constitution, would be forced to recognize that union.

But two court opinions last year threatened these protections and initiated the dissolution of the institution of marriage as we have known it.

In Lawrence vs. Texas, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Texas statute that criminalized private homosexual behavior. One could have agreed with Justice Clarence Thomas’ dissent, in which he contended the Texas statute was “uncommonly silly” and urged the Texas Legislature to eliminate it. But the court went a great deal further.

In its majority opinion, it stated, among other things, that “freedom extends beyond spatial bounds. Liberty presumes an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression and certain intimate conduct. The instant case involves liberty of the person both in its spatial and more transcendent dimensions.” Citing an earlier decision, the court noted that “marriage, procreation, contraception, family relationships, child rearing and education” are among “the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime,” and it asserted that “persons in a homosexual relationship may seek autonomy for these purposes just as heterosexual persons do.”

John Marshall was not interpreting James Madison’s Constitution any longer.

In his dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia warned that the majority opinion paved the way toward a constitutional right to gay marriage, for which he was mocked by the other justices. Yet when the court can say “persons in a homosexual relationship may seek autonomy for these purposes,” there is nothing to stop persons in other relationships from seeking the same autonomy. Already, polygamist rights organizations are using the language of Lawrence to justify their claims to autonomy and legally recognizable plural unions.

Five months after Lawrence, the second court decision came down. The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, in Goodridge vs. Department of Public Health, ruled that barring gay marriage violated the state Constitution. The majority cited Lawrence in its opinion. While Massachusetts certainly has a right to determine its own customs, mores and laws, the implications of its court’s ruling are national in scope.

Why? The provision in the Defense of Marriage Act giving states the right not to recognize another state’s homosexual union arrangements will probably be struck down because of Lawrence’s broad due-process language. It won’t be long before other states will be forced to recognize gay marriages in Massachusetts under the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Constitution’s guarantee that “full faith and credit shall be given in each state to the public acts, records and judicial proceedings of every other state.” Any congressional attempt to limit “full faith and credit” -- also permitted by the Constitution -- would be an easy target for the court’s due-process sledgehammer.

The GOP-sponsored Federal Marriage Amendment would do little to preserve the institution of marriage because it would leave to state legislators the option of creating civil unions.

Civil unions are, in law and parlance, marriages by a different name. In Vermont, the first state to recognize the arrangement, all state laws pertaining to “marriage” inhere in “civil unions.” Partners to a civil union exchange rings, are called “spouses” and, in Vermont’s case, cannot be blood relatives. In short, the distinction between a civil union and a marriage is no greater than that between slavery and involuntary servitude, both of which were outlawed, for good reason, by the 13th Amendment. Following the logic of the Federal Marriage Amendment, involuntary servitude would have been left up to state legislatures after the Civil War.

States should be able to grant individuals in a relationship of mutual responsibility certain benefits, privileges, rights and immunities “based on need,” as Robert P. George of Princeton has put it. But those benefits and rights should not be based on sex and should not force people to engage in sex as a condition of receiving them -- if a state decides to grant some benefits to those who are not married.

They should be allocated as needed, without discrimination and without privileging homosexual relations. Because these benefits and rights would inevitably involve interstate commerce, the federal code should allow for them and states should be able to grant them if they wish.

The party of Lincoln would be within its charter to support such a law, or laws.

Protecting the “one male, one female” understanding of marriage is more than a game of definitions; it is the cornerstone of society, the building block of civilization.

As political theorist Hannah Arendt put it, “Men are not born to die but in order to begin.” And marriage is the institution best designed to carry out that mission.

Marriage is about many things, but it primarily ties together three purposes: protecting women, domesticating men and raising children. These purposes should not be subjected to a laboratory experiment, and they should not be redefined out of existence.

Whatever the ultimate identifying label -- be it “marriage,” “domestic partnerships” or “civil unions” -- protecting the family and preserving marriage is a legacy the Republican Party should be proud of, not one it should whittle away with half-measures justified by a faulty notion of states’ rights or unrestrained individual autonomy.

Those may become the legacies of the Democratic Party. They should not become the legacies of the Republican Party that first saw threats to the family as “twin relics of barbarism.”