Michael Brown - Mr. Clinton, You Are Wrong About Overturning DOMA

Dear Mr. Clinton, with all respect to the office of the president which you held for 8 years, I must say that it is not just ironic that you are now asking the Supreme Court to overturn the legislation you signed into law 17 years ago. It is downright tragic.

In your March 7th editorial for the Washington Post, you wrote that although it “was only 17 years ago” when you signed the Defense of Marriage Act, “it was a very different time.”

May I ask you, sir, if 17 years have changed the nature of men and women, of mother and fathers and children, of the essential elements of a family? Have 17 years changed multiplied thousands of years of human history? Have 17 years changed fundamental faith values embraced by several billion people worldwide?

You explain that, 17 years ago, “In no state in the union was same-sex marriage recognized, much less available as a legal right, but some were moving in that direction.”

In point of fact, since 1996, 32 states have voted to define marriage as the union of a man and a woman (the majority of them since 2004), including my current home state of North Carolina, which just last year overwhelmingly wrote natural, organic marriage into the constitution by a vote of 61% to 39%, despite a strong majority of Democrats statewide.

It is true that, for the first time, several states voted in 2012 to redefine marriage, but those were heavily blue states where traditional marriage proponents were outspent by as much as five-to-one, and even then, the voting was close.

Can you really claim some kind of mandate when 9 times out of 10 (32 states out of 36), when the people have been given a right to vote, they have voted against genderless marriage? The mandate is actually against your position, sir, not for it.

In your editorial, you offer a transparently weak justification of your signing of DOMA, which leads me to ask: Mr. Clinton, did you have no conscience when you signed that bill into law? Did you have no gay or lesbian friends? Had you not met any upstanding gay or lesbian couples, working hard to raise a family? I’m sure that was not the case, sir, and with all candor, your justification for signing DOMA in 1996 while asking the Supreme Court to overturn it in 2013 smacks of political correctness more than dispassionate conviction.

You wrote that when DOMA comes before the Court on March 27, “the justices must decide whether it is consistent with the principles of a nation that honors freedom, equality and justice above all, and is therefore constitutional. As the president who signed the act into law, I have come to believe that DOMA is contrary to those principles and, in fact, incompatible with our Constitution.”

Do you honestly believe, Mr. Clinton, that any of the framers of the Constitution countenanced a day in our great nation when men would be marrying men and women marrying women, and in the name of the Constitution, at that? And since when did our Constitution guarantee the government’s endorsement of all romantic attractions and sexual behaviors? And are you genuinely unaware that redefining marriage is just the tip of the iceberg of a massive societal transformation in the name of LGBT rights, including the undoing of gender distinctions?

And with your brilliant legal mind, sir, are you oblivious to the fact that polygamists and polyamorists, too numerous to be ignored, are also appealing to “freedom, equality and justice” in the pursuit of their “rights”? What will you say to them, especially given the fact that their lifestyles are now being mainstreamed by the very same media that has so shaped American thinking on homosexual issues?

You wrote, “Because Section 3 of the act defines marriage as being between a man and a woman, same-sex couples who are legally married in nine states and the District of Columbia are denied the benefits of more than a thousand federal statutes and programs available to other married couples.”

But what does this have to with the radical redefinition of marriage? What does this have to do with sanctioning an institution that will guarantee that a child has either no mother or no father? What does this have to do with rendering marriage genderless, to the point that marriage certificates could be reduced to Partner A and Partner B, along with birth certificates being reduced to Parent A and Parent B? (In this context, I should mention the Florida judge who “approved the adoption of a 22-month-old baby girl that will list three people as parents on her birth certificate – a married lesbian couple and a gay man.”)

Mr. Clinton, if marriage is simply the union of two people and not the union of a man and a woman, can you give me one solid intellectual reason or one compelling social argument why marriage cannot involve more than two consenting adults? What is so special about the number “two” if it does not consist of a male and female, with their unique biological and social compatibility and, in normal circumstances, their ability to produce children whom they will raise for the next generation?

You claim to know now that DOMA not only provided “an excuse for discrimination,” but that “the law is itself discriminatory.” Surely you must realize that polygamists, polyamorists, and others will find your current position “discriminatory.” More importantly, the sanctioning of same-sex “marriage” will mean that multiplied tens of millions of God-fearing Americans will be codified as bigots, surely the height of ugly discrimination.

Mr. Clinton, you were right before. You are wrong now. I pray that God will give you another change of heart.

Dr. Michael Brown

Michael Brown holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures from New York University and is the author of 20 books. He has served as a professor at a number of seminaries and hosts the nationally syndicated, daily talk radio show, the Line of Fire.

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