The U.S. Supreme Court has announced that it will review both state and federal cases about the definition of marriage in the coming months.
The federal case involves a challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), a 1996 law passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton. The second case concerns Proposition 8, a constitutional amendment adopted by California voters in 2008 to protect the definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman after the state Supreme Court ruled that homosexual unions must be recognized as marriages.
This is a significant event in the history of our nation as the Supreme Court determines the future of the very foundation of our culture. Marriage between a man and a woman is an essential institution that serves the common good of our society by uniting children with their mothers and fathers. While critics of the laws contend that they amount to unjust discrimination against homosexual couples and an unconstitutional violation of the equal protection clause, DOMA and Prop 8 have served society by recognizing that the union of man and woman is the fundamental building block of society and plays a critical role in bringing up the next generation.
Nothing is more important to the future of our country than traditional marriage and family life which serve as the very heart of our nation. In more than 30 states, one man-one woman marriage has been constitutionally recognized as such. Unfortunately, recent gains by proponents of homosexual marriage in Maine, Washington state and in Minnesota have emboldened the relentless campaign to redefine marriage across the nation as well as here in Rhode Island. We hope that the nine wise justices in our nation’s capital carefully consider the real threat that redefining marriage is not only to the religious liberty of institutions, but also to the personal conscience of the millions of Americans who do not support the redefinition of the institution they respect, revere and rightly understand as marriage. As the future of our nation may very well rest in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court. Let us commend those justices to our prayers.
