Senate "cheneys" Bush

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A divided U.S. Senate has rejected a bid to amend the Constitution to ban same-sex marriage, likely
killing the measure backed by President George W. Bush for at least this election year.

Proponents failed on Wednesday to muster the needed votes to clear a procedural hurdle raised by Democrats, who accused
Republicans of pushing the proposal merely to rally their conservative base for the November presidential and congressional
elections.

"We all know what this issue is about," declared Senator Edward Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat. "It's not about how to
protect the sanctity of marriage. It's about politics -- an attempt to drive a wedge between one group of citizens and the rest of the
country, solely for partisan advantage."

http://www.swissinfo.org/sen/swissinfo.html?siteSect=143&sid=5085792

TBL says:

"There were only 48 votes for bigotry, out of 100 Senators.

Fifty voted for tolerance.

And two didn't vote. "

------

Republicans vow to keep pressing for amendment
banning gay marriage

DAVID ESPO,
AP Special Correspondent
Wednesday, July 14, 2004

-----

(07-14) 10:05 PDT
WASHINGTON (AP) --

The Senate dealt an election-year defeat Wednesday to a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, rejecting pleas from President Bush and fellow conservatives that the measure was needed to safeguard an institution that has flourished for thousands of years.

The vote was 48-50, 12 short of the 60 needed to keep the measure alive.
Six Republicans joined dozens of Democrats in sealing the amendment's fate.

"I would argue that the future of our country hangs in the balance because the future of marriage hangs in the balance," said Sen. Rick Santorum, a leader in the fight to approve the measure. "Isn't that the ultimate homeland security, standing up and defending marriage?"

But Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle said there was no "urgent need" to amend the Constitution. "Marriage is a sacred union between men and women. That is what the vast majority of Americans believe. It's what virtually all South Dakotans believe. It's what I believe."

"In South Dakota, we've never had a single same sex marriage and we won't have any," he said. "It's prohibited by South Dakota law as it is now in 38 other states. There is no confusion. There is no ambiguity."

Supporters conceded in advance they would fail to win the support needed to advance the measure, and vowed to renew their efforts.

"I don't think it's going away after this vote," Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., said Tuesday on the eve of the test vote. "I think the issue will remain alive," he added.

Whatever its future in Congress, there also were signs that supporters of the amendment intended to use it in the campaign already unfolding.

"The institution of marriage is under fire from extremist groups in Washington, politicians, even judges who have made it clear that they are willing to run over any state law defining marriage," Republican senatorial candidate John Thune says in a radio commercial airing in South Dakota. "They have done it in Massachusetts and they can do it here," adds Thune, who is challenging Daschle for his seat.

"Thune's ad suggests that some are using this amendment more to protect the Republican majority than to protect marriage," said Dan Pfeiffer, a spokesman for Daschle's campaign.

At issue was an amendment providing that marriage within the United States "shall consist only of a man and a woman."

A second sentence said that neither the federal nor any state constitution "shall be construed to require that marriage or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon any union other than the union of a man and a woman." Some critics argue that the effect of that provision would be to ban civil unions, and its inclusion in the amendment complicated efforts by GOP leaders to gain support from wavering Republicans.

Bush urged the Republican-controlled Congress last February to approve a constitutional amendment, saying it was needed to stop judges from changing the definition of the "most enduring human institution."

Bush's fall rival, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, opposes the amendment, as does his vice presidential running mate, Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina.
Both men skipped the vote.

In all, 45 Republicans and three Democrats voted to keep the measure alive.
Six Republicans joined 43 Democrats and one independent in opposition.

The odds have never favored passage in the current Congress, in part because many Democrats oppose it, but also because numerous conservatives are hesitant to overrule state prerogatives on the issue.


[.....]

.....
[For the rest of this AP story,
please go to

http://www.sfgate.com

.......

On Bastille Day, 48 U.S. Senators voted for bigotry,
while 50 voted for freedom.

If Kerry and Edwards had bothered to vote, the result would have been 48 to 52.

I resent the cowardice displayed by "the Johns".

However, I'll probably hold my nose and vote for them in November, because our nation cannot stand four more years of the Bush regime.

-- Tortuga Bi LIBERTY,
San Francisco
14 July 2004
circa 11:20 AM

Fascists may stage another anti-gay vote
in late August or in September,
in the U.S. House of Representatives.

There's no chance of the amendment getting approval from two-thirds of the House this year.
This vote would be another election stunt, aiming to influence the November election.

--- TBL

At a July 4 campaign stop in West Virginia, Vice President Dick Cheney delivered his stump speech attacking John Kerry and touting the "conservative values of the heartland." Conspicuously absent from the list, however, was White House support for the Federal Marriage Amendment (FMA), which has become a staple of the Bush-Cheney campaign's appeal to its religious conservative base.

The omission was no coincidence. Smiling at the vice president's side was his beloved daughter, Mary, a lesbian who is director of vice presidential operations for the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign.

The proximity to her father is hardly unusual for Mary, who is said by friends to be exceptionally close to Cheney and to her mother, Lynne. Father and daughter have bonded during frequent hunting trips and other family outings.

This deep sense of family loyalty, however, has earned Mary Cheney, 34, the enmity of gay activists, who accuse her of betraying the movement for an administration generally hostile to gay causes. DearMary.com, a Web site devoted to attacking Mary Cheney, depicts her pony-tailed head on a milk carton under the words, "Got Mary?" and encourages visitors to write Mary and demand that she "stand up to Dick."

Yet the crushing July 12 defeat of FMA in the Senate -- and the critical role the Cheney family played in it -- warrants a second look at Mary Cheney's political acumen and courage. By avoiding a public spat with her father and playing the insider's role of the loyal opposition, she may have helped bring down an amendment that proposes to write anti-gay animus into the nation's founding document.

Mary Cheney has declined all interview requests, so it is difficult to precisely gauge her role in the FMA debate. Cheney's critics point to her relative silence since 2000, when she left her post as the Coors Brewing Company's liaison to the gay community. She has carefully guarded her private life, much of it spent at a home in an undisclosed location near Denver that she shares with her partner, Heather Poe.

In 2002, Mary Cheney joined the Republican Unity Coalition, an advocacy group that assembles a broad array of Republicans hoping to make gay rights a "nonissue" within the party. Cheney abruptly quit last year when she accepted the reelection campaign post.

But her fingerprints on the Senate FMA debate are easy to discern. On the eve of the Senate debate, Lynne Cheney appeared on CNN's "Late Edition." The show led with a clip of Dick Cheney during the 2000 campaign, arguing that gay "people should be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to enter into. It's really no one's business in terms of trying to regulate or prohibit behavior in that regard." In an apparent reversal early this year, Dick Cheney said that he would support the president's position on FMA.

Asked to comment on her husband's original position, Lynne Cheney declared that "the formulation he used in 2000 was very good. ... People should be free to enter into their relationships that they choose ... When it comes to conferring legal status on relationships, that is a matter left to the states."

In three terse sentences, Lynne Cheney had undermined the conservative argument for FMA. Over the next two days, even some of the most conservative senators came out against the bill on identical grounds. FMA is "antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans" because it violates states rights, declared Arizona Sen. John McCain.

Bob Witeck, a Washington, D.C., public relations executive, got to know Mary Cheney while serving as a business consultant to Coors. "Lynne Cheney reminded the country about Dick's original comment about the need to respect same-sex relationships," he says. "I think she spelled where the family truly stands on FMA. And it was a risky thing to do, because they had to know that Democrats would seize on it."

Indeed, Democrats immediately leapt at the opening she had handed them. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., read Dick Cheney's comments on the Senate floor, imploring other Republicans to follow suit.

The Cheneys are among the few prominent Republicans who can afford to publicly stray from GOP orthodoxy. Dick Cheney is considered the administration's ambassador to hard-core conservatives. He is a favorite of the religious right, and it showed. Anti-gay lobby groups lambasted McCain, but left Cheney unscathed.

Mary Cheney's critics are not backing down, however. A founder of DearMary.com, Robin Tyler, compared Mary unfavorably to her mother. "I respect Lynne Cheney and what she did," she says. "It took courage to do this, and to be a good mother of a lesbian. But now it's time for Mary to grow up and speak for herself."

But far from the political limelight, few are privy to what Mary says to her father when they find themselves alone in a hunting blind. Whatever the impact on her father's politics, Americans witnessed, for a moment at least, a prominent conservative family in which love is blind.

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