The Chronicle editorialists continue to agitate against the gay-marriage constitutional amendment that goes to Texas voters later this year:
This November, Texans will vote on Proposition 2, a proposed constitutional amendment that would silence further reflection on these important issues. The referendum language defines marriage as the union of one man and one woman. Texas law already outlaws same-sex marriage. Should voters approve this amendment, it would change nothing in the law. It lacks any purpose other than to enshrine bigotry in the Texas Constitution.
The first of those three bolded sentences is frequently cited by the minority that favors same-sex marriage as a major reason a constitutional amendment is unnecessary.
They can repeat themselves as much as they would like, but the fact is that constitutions and statutes are not the same thing at all.
As my mentor on constitutionalism and political philosophy has noted, one of several purposes of a constitution is to lay out the values (and aspirations) of the people of the polity (in the case of state constitutions, the state). There was never any reason to define marriage in most constitutions because most citizens simply understood marriage to be between a man and a woman. In recent years, however, there’s been quite an effort to redefine marriage. Unsurprisingly, majorities in most states do continue to reject that redefinition, and some states have chosen to amend their constitutions to make clear the prevailing view of the citizenry on the matter.
The editorialists are simply wrong when they contend that the constitutional amendment lacks any purpose because there are related statutes on the books. The purpose of the amendment, should it pass, will be to commit to the state’s fundamental governing document the values of a majority of Texans regarding marriage, values that only recently have even been challenged (and therefore never needed such codification in the constitution). Because one purpose of a constitution is to enshrine the values of the people, the amendment does have a broader purpose than related statutory law, however redundant it may seem to the Chronicle editorial idealists.
The Chronicle disagrees with what is likely to be the majority view this November (and likely a large majority of its readership), and so it shrieks about “bigotry” and shows a lack of understanding of constitutionalism and popular sovereignty. One would expect better from worshippers of Plato’s ideal state.
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