September 2011

This post is part of an ACSblog Constitution Week Symposium. By Doug Kendall, President, and Judith Schaeffer, Vice President, Constitutional Accountability Center  

As ACS members know, our Constitution is under attack from tea partiers and other self-professed “constitutional conservatives” who have claimed the document as their own and distorted it to support their ideological agenda. Over the past two years, they have made increasingly extreme, and in some cases absurd, claims about our Nation’s charter. They started with calls to repeal a number of Amendments, including the part of the 14th Amendment that protects citizenship at birth. They progressed to claims that Social Security, Medicare, and portions of the Affordable Care Act are unconstitutional. It’s gotten to the point where it seems that many in the tea party believe the entire 20th Century was unconstitutional. Talk about a bridge to the 21st Century!  The tea party movement seems to want to build a bridge back to the colonial era and the Articles of Confederation.

There is no greater threat to progressive values than this effort to make progress itself unconstitutional. This week, Constitutional Accountability Center and our partner organizations, including the Center for American Progress and People For the American Way Foundation, launched a coordinated effort  -- Constitutional Progressives -- to take our Constitution back and rebut the constitutional fairy tales being peddled by tea party leaders. Our greatest assets in doing so are the text and history of the Constitution itself.

Constitutional Progressives celebratethe Framers for creating the best and most durable form of government in world history, but believe the Constitution today is better than the document ratified in 1789.  Generations of Americans have made our country and our Constitution “more perfect” by ratifying Amendments that have eliminated slavery, protected liberty and equality, expanded the powers of the federal government, and secured voting rights for every adult citizen in America.   

This story of constitutional improvement should inspire all Americans, and we’re asking people across the political spectrum to join Constitutional Progressives by signing the “Whole Constitution Pledge” --  a pledge to support the entire Constitution, including the Amendments adopted over the last 220 years. The Pledge can be signed on line, here. More than 15,000 people across the country have already signed. We’ve made a similar call to all Members of Congress, urging them on Constitution Day to reaffirm their constitutional oath of office -- their pledge to support the whole Constitution, not just the parts they like or find ideologically convenient.

by Jeremy Leaming

Tired rhetoric about the alleged dangers of state recognition of same-sex marriage was, perhaps not surprisingly, heavily bandied about during the North Carolina General Assembly’s debate to place a constitutional amendment before voters next year to make doubly certain that the state cannot recognize same-sex marriage (the state already has a law on the books banning gay couples from wedding).

State House Republican Leader Paul Stam in pushing the bill said if lesbians and gay men were allowed to wed, it would unquestionably diminish marriage as a whole, in part, by dissuading some straight couples from entering into marriages. The debate was also infused with religiosity, as it has been in similar debates nationwide. Supporters of the proposed amendment took to the state capitol grounds to hoist signs reading, “Man + Woman = Marriage God’s Way,” and The Rev. Patrick Wooden of the Upper Room Church of God, as The New York Times reports, tarred gays as leading a “deathstyle.”

This hysterical rhetoric apparently played well in the N.C. legislature which quickly, with no public comment, approved the measure for a spring 2012 ballot.

The measure, if supported by voters, would likely be one of the nation’s most onerous bans against gay unions, as The Huffington Post notes, it would prohibit “legal recognition of any union besides marriage between one man and one woman, including civil unions and domestic partnerships for gay and straight couples.”

University of North Carolina law school professor Holning Lau in a Sept. 12 report debunks much of the argument peddled by opponents of marriage equality. Lau notes in the opening of his paper that Rep. Stam offered no evidence to support his claim that state recognition of gay marriages would “diminish people’s interest in marriage and, as a result, heterosexuals would become less likely to enter and stay in marriages.”

Lau writes, “Marriage rates in states with amendments suggest that the amendments did not change people’s views of marriage in ways that slowed the decline of marriage rates in those states. Meanwhile, the fact that marriage rates did not drop off in states that recognize same-sex unions suggests that the state recognition of same-sex couples did not deter people from getting married.”

He concludes:

There is no support for claims that marriage amendments increase marriage rates or decrease divorce rates. Further, there is no evidence that legal recognition of same-sex couples devalues marriage, thereby deterring people from marrying or encouraging divorce. These results cast substantial doubt on arguments that North Carolina must protect marriage by passing a constitutional amendment. As the debate in North Carolina continues, individuals engaged in deliberation should be skeptical of marriage protection claims.

Lau’s entire report, “Do Marriage Amendments Really Protect Marriage? An Analysis of Data from 2000 – 2009,” is available here.