According to a recent USA TODAY article, Matt Daniels believes same-sex marriages are “a continuation of a path to destroying marriage.” Matt serves as head of the Alliance for Marriage, the organization that advocates the adoption of the Federal Marriage Amendment.
Daniels claims his campaign “is not organized around homosexuality,” and that he, himself, is not anti-gay. “[My] mission,” he says, “is to see that more kids are raised in a home with a married mother and father. And the legal status of marriage as between a man and a woman,” he feels, will guarantee this happens more often.
There is, of course, a huge hole in his logic: with the exception of the past few months, legal marriage in America has always been limited to heterosexual couples. The situation Daniels so desperately hopes to codify into the Constitution has been the legal reality for thousands of years, yet the rosy-hued vision of the Alliance for Marriage — a Mommy and Daddy together forever — has not been achieved.
Daniels claims to be motivated by the events of his own childhood. Abandoned by his father and raised by a physically disabled mother, he claims his own story would have been completely different had his father “been around.”
Would Daniels’ life have been different had his father remained home? No one can say. What we can know is this: had the Federal Marriage Amendment existed during Daniels’ youth, it would not have changed his situation at all.
Here’s why: the Federal Marriage Amendment does not compel fathers to stay with mothers. It does not eliminate divorce. It does not levy stiff penalties on fathers who abandon their families. It makes no effort to preserve or strengthen existing families. In the end, it protects neither parents nor children.
Instead, the Federal Marriage Amendment is an effort to protect an idea, a concept, a naive and nostalgic definition of marriage. It blithely ignores realities of modern life. Worse, it assumes that limiting marriage in a way that it has always been limited will somehow revive and strengthen it.
I received an automated phone survey call from the “marriage amendment yes alliance.” It asked 3 questions about the proposed amendment. Each question was followed by strongly qualified explanations of why you should vote yes for the amendment. The explanation associated with the 3rd question (something like “…so by saying yes to this you are saying you favor abandoning children” or something ridiculous like that) so infuriated me that I couldn’t even answer. I am concerned that this group will try to use responses to their biased & unscientific survey to influence the media to believe that most people support their cause. Who can I contact to protest this?
Randy — some of your answer depends on where you live. What state do you live in?