There's been a lot of news about the Senate passing a "same sex marriage bill", and on Wyoming Senator Lummis voting in favor of the bill, thereby aligning her vote with that of Congressman Liz Cheney.
Did the Senate actually pass a bill expressly protecting same-sex marriage?
Well, not really.
Here's the statute:
Shown Here:
Placed on Calendar Senate (07/21/2022)
Calendar No. 449
117th CONGRESS 2d Session |
To repeal the Defense of Marriage Act and ensure respect for State regulation of marriage, and for other purposes.
Received; read the first time
Read the second time and placed on the calendar
To repeal the Defense of Marriage Act and ensure respect for State regulation of marriage, and for other purposes.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
This Act may be cited as the “Respect for Marriage Act”.
SEC. 2. REPEAL OF SECTION ADDED TO TITLE 28, UNITED STATES CODE, BY SECTION 2 OF THE DEFENSE OF MARRIAGE ACT.
Section 1738C of title 28, United States Code, is repealed.
SEC. 3. FULL FAITH AND CREDIT GIVEN TO MARRIAGE EQUALITY.
Chapter 115 of title 28, United States Code, as amended by this Act, is further amended by inserting after section 1738B the following:
Ҥ 1738C. Certain acts, records, and proceedings and the effect thereof
“(a) In General.—No person acting under color of State law may deny—
“(1) full faith and credit to any public act, record, or judicial proceeding of any other State pertaining to a marriage between 2 individuals, on the basis of the sex, race, ethnicity, or national origin of those individuals; or
“(2) a right or claim arising from such a marriage on the basis that such marriage would not be recognized under the law of that State on the basis of the sex, race, ethnicity, or national origin of those individuals.
“(b) Enforcement By Attorney General.—The Attorney General may bring a civil action in the appropriate United States district court against any person who violates subsection (a) for declaratory and injunctive relief.
“(c) Private Right Of Action.—Any person who is harmed by a violation of subsection (a) may bring a civil action in the appropriate United States district court against the person who violated such subsection for declaratory and injunctive relief.
“(d) State Defined.—In this section, the term ‘State’ has the meaning given such term under section 7 of title 1.”.
Section 7 of title 1, United States Code, is amended to read as follows:
“(a) For the purposes of any Federal law, rule, or regulation in which marital status is a factor, an individual shall be considered married if that individual’s marriage is valid in the State where the marriage was entered into or, in the case of a marriage entered into outside any State, if the marriage is valid in the place where entered into and the marriage could have been entered into in a State.
“(b) In this section, the term ‘State’ means a State, the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, or any other territory or possession of the United States.
“(c) For purposes of subsection (a), in determining whether a marriage is valid in a State or the place where entered into, if outside of any State, only the law of the jurisdiction applicable at the time the marriage was entered into may be considered.”.
If any provision of this Act, or any amendment made by this Act, or the application of such provision to any person, entity, government, or circumstance, is held to be unconstitutional, the remainder of this Act, or any amendment made thereby, or the application of such provision to all other persons, entities, governments, or circumstances, shall not be affected thereby.
Passed the House of Representatives July 19, 2022.
Attest:Well jeepers Yeoman, you may be thinking, there's no mention of same-sex marriage or homosexuality in there at all.
That's right, there isn't.
So what's up with those claims?
Well, those who have read the Dobbs decision know that Justice Thomas made a comment to the effect that Dobbs implicitly suggests that other areas where the Supreme Court has legislated on the topic of marriage may be just as invalid as when it did on abortion in Roe v. Wade. To some extent, at least in the case of Obergefell, he's correct. I'd submit that this does nothing to the holding in Loving v. Virginia, on interracial marriage, but some people fear that Loving will now fall as well. It is clear that if Thomas had his way, Obergefell would be reversed.
But if it were reversed, that would mean that a Dobbs like result would occur. States would be free to allow for same gender unions if they wanted to, and some would, and some would not.
All this statute does is apply full faith and credit to the topic, to achieve the same result that the Wyoming Supreme Court did when same gender unions were not a thing in Wyoming. If contracted elsewhere, the Wyoming Supreme Court held, full faith and credit would cause them to be valid here.
This statute achieves the same result.
Does that mean that this legislatively secures same sex unions across the nation?
Well, not directly, but maybe indirectly. After all, if you can cross state lines to contract the union, you can still get there.
Years ago, that wasn't actually quite as clear, but it has been, except in the case of homosexual legal unions, for many decades. At least in Wyoming, it became clear that this was also the case before Dobbs.
Lummis might point out, I suppose, that the statute also does the same thing for interracial marriages, but those aren't under any lingering threat anywhere.
Or at least it can be argued that this is the case, and that seems to be the case to me. I.e., I don't think Dobbs endangers interracial marriages in any fashion. Others, including a speaker at the Wyoming Bar Convention, apparently, maintain otherwise, which is right about the point that Harriet Hageman walked out of the convention room and into the hall, although she didn't silence herself, apparently.
Well, not everyone was happy with this in the state. The state GOP sent out this email:
Dear Wyoming Republicans and County Leaders,
Yesterday’s vote on the “Respect for Marriage Act” sadly saw our own Senator Lummis vote aye. This act threatens religious liberties and is opposed to the Wyoming Republican Party Platform which was ADOPTED UNANIMOUSLY at the May 2022 Republican State Convention by more than 400 delegates from across the state.
Well, this is interesting.
Lummis came back into D.C. in the 2020 election, during which she cozied up to the far right. Prior to her running there was serious speculation that Liz Cheney was going to run for the same office, and in fact Lummis' early announcement may have been timed to jump the gun on Cheney and get in position first. If that was her goal, it was a smart one, as Cheney ultimately decided to run again for the House, which she did, getting around 75% of the Wyoming GOP vote. But there did seem to be some bad blood between the two, and frankly I can't quite blame Cheney for being upset, if she was, about losing, probably permanently, the chance to be in the Senate.
As soon as Lummis rolled back into town, she joined the Trumpsters in her vote to question the election, and seemed to be getting on the Ted Cruz Party Car. I frankly wondered if she saw Cruz as the heir apparently to Trump, and Cruz seemed to view himself that way, throwing out candy to the far right with his position on the 2020 election.
Then came 2022. If Lummis really held bad blood towards Cheney, she got her revenge as the inside baseball is that she's the one who told Il Duce that he ought to bestow knighthood upon Harriet Hageman, which he did. Lummis later publicly endorsed Hageman, an extraordinary thing for a Senator to do against an incumbent of her own party.
Then came the 2022 election and the only red wave was the hemorrhaging of GOP hopes for the election. In spite of his helping the GOP to turn in a really bad performance in 2022, and losing in 2020, and helping the GOP to lose both the House and the Senate in 2018, and being the President only due to the lunacy of the electoral college in 2016, Il Duce announced his renewed March On Rome last week.
But even before that, like a bloodhound sniffing the trail of a distant fugitive, Lummis sniffing the political winds endorsed Ron DeSantis as the head of the GOP.
And now she's joined Cheney in a vote which is contrary to the state GOP's platform, an act which in recent years has resulted in declarations of expulsion for improper thought.
Lummis has proven to be pretty savvy. She gave the State Bar the middle finger salute in 2020, and she's basically giving the GOP Central Committee the middle finger salute right now.
In the meantime, if a Republican columnist and sort of gadfly is correct, the hypocrisy problem that we've pointed out of the Illiberal Democrats in the GOP may have exhibited itself. He came out with a column that goes after the Wyoming GOP with both barrels. Indeed, with both barrels and all six cylinders. It's really brutal.
I'm not going to repeat what he wrote there, as he's claiming real inside baseball knowledge that I certainly don't have and which is pretty personal. But what it does point out is the really hypocritical nature of the Illiberal Democracy positions taken by the GOP, or at least Wyoming's GOP, at the present time.
I'm a social conservative, and I think Obergefell was wrongly decided. I think Justice Thomas was right on that in Dobbs, and I think that Senator Barrasso's no vote on this bill was correct.
But I also think that in order to understand why you are or against something, you need to have that grounded in the existential and metaphysical. And that's a really uncomfortable thing, particularly in the area of sex and marriage.
I don't expect everyone who olds the traditional views to be saints, far from it. But I do expect people to be intellectually honest.
Indeed, that's why two French figures are so interesting in my point of view. One I can unfortunately not recall by name. He was a parish pastor who had numerous affairs with women of his parish, but when asked to renounced his faith during the French Revolution, he went to this death rather than do so, noting publically that he was "a bad Priest", not a non-believer.
Another example was Charles Péguy, the tortured French poet who had been a non-believer who came round to being a devoutly believing, but non practicing, Catholic, as he felt himself so burdened by his sins that he mistakenly could not overcome them.
Both of these examples are not to be followed. Péguy should have gone to Confession and fully practiced. But their intellectual honesty when it mattered is what really counts here.
Does Lummis have any? While I disagree with Cheney's vote too, I know that she does. She's paying for it now. And what about the Wyoming GOP? Having cited to traditional values, will those who have not exhibited them in their personal lives now stop proclaiming themselves as the moral standard-bearers and retrace their steps to where they departed from the narrow path, or do they regard themselves as somehow personally exempt?
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