Vigilance urged on Marriage Protection Amendment
- Oct 15, 2004 - comment
Leaders of the effort to ratify a constitutional amendment protecting marriage urged vigilance after Congress failed to approve such a proposal.
The House of Representatives voted 227-186 for the Marriage Protection Amendment (MPA) Sept. 30 but fell well short of the two-thirds majority needed for an amendment. The Senate failed to support a similar measure in July.
After the vote, ERLC President Richard Land said, “It is now up to the people in each House district to decide whether their representative is representing them on this issue and to make their voices heard both by calling, emailing and faxing their congressperson and by the exercise of their constitutional right to vote the first Tuesday in November. If representatives who voted against this amendment lose and representatives who voted for it win, we’ll see a significant jump in the numbers of representatives voting for this amendment in the next Congress.
“To quote Winston Churchill, ‘This is the end of the beginning.’ The Marriage Protection Amendment is on its way,” Land said.
It is only the beginning of what will be a lengthy effort, Land and others said.
“[W]e’re in this thing for the long haul,” Prison Fellowship Founder Charles Colson told tens of thousands of people at the Mayday for Marriage rally Oct. 15 on the National Mall in Washington. “This is not going to be a one-year or two-year or three-year fight; it’s going to be fought until we prevail.
“It doesn’t turn on one election; it doesn’t turn on one vote. It’s got to be a gradual process of educating the American people.
“Don’t quit,” Colson said. “Don’t get discouraged. Don’t despair. Despair is a sin because it denies the sovereignty of God.”
The MPA defines marriage as only between a man and a woman. It seeks to prevent courts from requiring states to legalize same-sex “marriage.”
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