State Green Party Press Release

St. Joe Valley Greens Oppose Bush Proposal For Constitutional Amendment to Ban Same-Sex Marriages.

Indiana Green Party / St. Joe Valley Greens

February 24, 2004
Contact: Victoria Webb, Media Coordinator, IGP, Coordinator, SJVGreens
574.315.0531 vic@furiousdreams.com
http://www.sjvgreens.org/

The St. Joe Valley Greens in South Bend, IN strongly protest President Bush's support for an amendment to the Constitution to ban same sex marriages. The Constitution provides rights for America's citizens and any amendment should expand citizen rights, not contract them. The institution of marriage which endures across all cultures and religions, to paraphrase the President today, did not always include all citizens of all cultures and religions even in our own country.

In Harvard history professor Nancy Cott's groundbreaking study of marriage, "Public Vows", she 'finds that the foundation for lifelong and exclusive mutual commitment is as much a matter of public policy as it is of romantic love. Cott introduces us to some of the iconoclastic cults, idiosyncratic movements and off-beat personalities that have defied prevailing marital conventions. Free love communities flourished in parts of the United States in the mid-19th century, and the Mormon practice of polygamy, though considered as pernicious as slavery in some circles, continued legally in Utah well past the Civil War. Nonetheless, faithful lifelong monogamy, according to Cott, was the standard set by legislators, clergy and other arbiters of public policy to shape society in prescribed ways. Because it required free consent, it was unavailable to slaves.'

In a Boston Globe interview this year Professor Cott said, "In an attempt to defend white "purity," the majority of American states at one time nullified marriages between whites and blacks -- Asians and native Americans too, sometimes. These bans on marriage across the color line aimed to criminalize the very possibility of certain forms of family, and I think the exclusion of same-sex couples from marrying has a similar aim." And finally, "Many Americans think of the institution of marriage as something solid and unchanging. But if marriage remains a central form of human relations and a "building block" of our society, that is less because it remains the same than because it has been reinvented over time. It's rather like the US Constitution. We are justly proud that our constitution has survived over 200 years -- which would not have been possible if it had not proved supple enough to adapt to changing circumstances."

The SJVGreens would like to remind readers that in colonial America, marriage, in the tradition of English law, subsumed the legal being of the wife into that of the husband. Under this system, called coverture, when a woman married she lost her right to own property or enter into contracts. We urge the president and his administration backing his response to return to the history books for clarity.