The Defense Of Marriage Act 1996 - 13 September 1996

A small old man with a cowlick of white hair stood up in the United States Senate the other morning, and held up in a trembling hand, a fat book. To anyone who didn't know him, he might be said to be trembling with anger, but he's in his eightieth year and for some time his hands have had a tremor that is not a symptom of a serious illness. My father had it all his long life, but wrote firm, beautiful copperplate till the day he died.

What Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia was holding – either with difficulty or with passion – was a Bible. "Here," he said, "is a definition laid down thousands of years ago." What was good enough for the Almighty, for Moses and St. Paul was good enough for him. He was speaking in defence of a bill rushed from committee to the floor, to get through before this waning session of the congress dies. We have only two weeks to go.

The bill bears the curious title of The Defense of Marriage Act. Could this be a backs against the wall effort of the old school against the developing habit in the population at large, the chic habit among movie actresses and rock stars, of having children without benefit of clergy. In a word, what we used to call illegitimate? Well no, the vast majority of American people – like the vast majority of Westerners, of Christians and Jews and of Easterners, of Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists, not to mention most agonistics and even atheists – they all accept the same scriptural definition without even thinking much about it.

Marriage, it says here, in one definition of many I've looked up in several dictionaries: "The condition of a man and woman legally united for purpose of living together and usually of procreating lawful offspring." That's the way it's been for countless thousands of years said Senator Byrd, and if he had anything to do with it, it's the way it would be from now till the end of time or the end of this Congress – whichever comes first.

And so said three hundred and forty-two members of the House of Representatives in passing this bill in July, and so, last Tuesday, said eighty-five out of a hundred senators. But how about the other congressmen present and voting in July and the fifteen senators who voted against? They're against marriage? No. They're against the definition I just read? No, they approve of that definition, but they think it's too limited, too exclusive. It's restricted to the legal union of a man and a woman. In some countries, to a man and a female child.

They want marriage to include also the legal union of two people of the same sex with all the rights and privileges, and under the law the benefits of the union: the right to hold joint property, power of attorney, even rearing of children and the blessing of such entitlements as public education, healthcare, employment insurance and all the other unromantic entails that are the first considerations of politicians once they've got over the thrilling or appalling idea of a man and a man, a woman and a woman taking an oath to cleave to each other till death them do part.

This bill, which in a non-election year might have stalled forever in several committees, was rushed with remarkable alacrity through the House and just now, after the summer recess, onto the senate floor and decided with very little debate. In the dying days of the Congress, there's always a lively kick of life, a spurt of legislation simply because so many members – all of them in the House of Representatives – are running for re-election six weeks from now. And if they want to go back for another two years, they'd better have, to show their constituents, something done for them alone. They painfully recall the maxim of the late speaker of the house, Tip O'Neill: all politics are local. The expiring member wants to be able to boast, I got you the new bridge over the Ohio River, who held the government to your soybean subsidy? And so on.

But the rush to judge and bless the Defence of Marriage Act had a more urgent motive. Every survey of popular feeling about limiting marriage to men and women has produced never less than 85 per cent in favour. And the last thing the great majority of congressmen and women want is to go back to an autumnal spurt of campaigning with any of their constituents being in doubt about where they stood when they stood to be counted.

The vote caused no problem, no writhing of conscience for, I should say, the majority of congressmen/women and senators, which seems a good moment to remind you that whereas – I'm told by an authoritative almanac – that in Britain little more than seven or eight per cent belong to an established church, in this country more than half the population declares itself to belong to a church and, moreover, goes to church. Remember one in four Americans is a Roman Catholic. And to the true believer, there resonates quietly in the mind – though I don't believe anyone in either House quoted it – there echoes, there murmurs one line from the Bible that they learned in Sunday school and that, once learned, is hard to suppress: To lie with a man as with a woman, it is an abomination before the Lord. So there must be a large number, an actual majority that is against homosexuality itself. And to them in both houses are the many who accept, condone homosexuality, but are firmly against legalising it in marriage.

The rush to have a federal law against this practice is due entirely to the present session of a court in Hawaii, which is considering – and by the time you hear this may have approved – the application of two men to enter into a legal marriage. There are in attendance in that court, two young women with the same application pending.

So the point of the federal rush to judgment is this. There is an article in the United States Constitution which says: "Full faith and credit shall be given in each state to the public acts, records and judicial proceedings of every other state".

The idea of this marriage bill was to give, in a federal law, a federal government guarantee that no state was obliged to recognise Hawaii's new law, if it has one. However, there's already a tough minority in the senate that is ready to cite and uphold that article about giving full faith and credit. We could be in for a mighty constitutional battle if it were not for the undeniable fact that 85 per cent of Americans are flat out against sanctioning same sex marriage.

The Republicans had been hoping that President Clinton would align himself with the liberal wing and threaten to veto the bill. I must say any Republicans who held that hope mustn't have been paying much attention lately to Mr Clinton's newfound habit of robbing the Republicans of all their favourite issues. He's saying, in effect, our views on crime, imprisonment, drugs, education, terrorism, even Saddam Hussein, they're not issues, we agree. And he might add, under his breath, if you think you're going to catch me out again over the gays, you have another thing coming.

The first, literally first executive act of Mr Clinton when he got into the White House, was to propose making it legal to recruit gays into the military. It was, he now admits, the dumbest act of his presidency. He was practically suffocated in the whirlwind of criticism and abuse that came his way. And on this marriage bill, Mr Clinton was prompted to say, once the bill went through the House by a margin that reflected the weight of popular feeling, that he would sign it. And so he will.

You'll all have heard by now that Mr Dole's campaign is said to be in a sorry state. He keeps changing advisers. All he has to proclaim as a revolutionary anti-Clinton measure is a 15 per cent tax cut. But they had that with Reagan, and since he never compensated by slashing spending, he left President Bush with a massive deficit.

President Clinton does assert, correctly, from time to time, that he has halved the deficit. The economy is throbbing along, as at no time in twenty years. Inflation is under the stranglehold of the Federal Reserve chairman, practically expiring. Mr Clinton can boast of ten million new jobs as against less than three million created by Mr Bush.

Mr Dole can, and does, point out correctly, that while most middle class families are more comfortably off than they were, they earn their comfort by having two jobs and paying daycare for the children. A vast number of young middle-aged American families get along well enough, but on an astonishingly high combined income.

The Republicans had been hoping for a juicy Clinton scandal and they got one. Not just a presidential adviser but the adviser, the man who urged the president to retreat from the left and barnstorm from the centre, who urged him to promote family values, it turns out this man not only had been having an affair with a prostitute for a year or more, but allowed her to listen in to private conversations with the president. That should have fixed Clinton, should it not? It seems rather, to have induced sympathy for a president betrayed. Anyway, Mr Clinton, who was only eight or nine points ahead after the Republican Convention, is now twenty-two points ahead.

It all sounds too good to be true. Wall Street is actually worried at the pace and consistently high-flying economy and the surge of the stock market this week to just about an all-time high. It all reminds me of the late President Hoover and a sentence he spoke a month or two before the deluge: "This country has finally, it appears, solved the problem of poverty."

Well time to baton down the hatches and submerge. Literally. I mean go to the bunker – an idea I picked up actually from Adolf Hitler. We at the end of Long Island, breathed again when Edouard swerved away. We sighed for the billion dollar wasteland created in the Carolinas by Fran. And now we hear that Hortense is headed our way. I wonder, incidentally, who had the idea of naming hurricanes by French names. About twenty years ago, all hurricanes were female: Alice, Beatrice, Carol, Donna, Edna. At some precise time, all that changed. They now have to alternate between male and female names. The perception that males too can wreck havoc in nature is one of the finest, most hard won achievements of women's lib.

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