Opinion: A “No” vote on Virginia’s Amendment 2 is more than symbolic

This fall, in addition to electing a U.S. Senator and members of the House, Virginians are also voting on three amendments to the state constitution.

Amendment 1 makes abortion-on-demand throughout pregnancy a “fundamental right” that future legislatures could not regulate. Amendment 3 gives back the vote to convicted felons.

Amendment 2 repeals a 2006 change to the state constitution defining marriage as “a union between one man and one woman” and prohibiting the state from introducing other arrangements, like “civil unions,” designated to approximate marriage. 57.1% of Virginians voted in favor of defining marriage as limited to one man and one woman.

The Democrat majority in the Virginia legislature voted to strip that definition from the state constitution. Their arguments are two: as written, the state constitution is vestigial and discriminatory.

They claim it is vestigial because, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell decision, it is unenforceable. In Obergefell, a 5-4 Supreme Court invented a supposed fundamental right to same-sex marriage under the 14th Amendment. Democrats hope to argue that even those who disagree with Obergefell must recognize the provision is a dead letter that should not longer be cluttering up the state constitution.

That, of course, is a secondary argument. The real argument is that Amendment 2 should be adopted because the state constitution’s definition of marriage as requiring sexual differentiation is discriminatory. “Love is love,” they insist, and the state constitution stands in “love’s” way. And Amendment 2 does not simply repeal the old provision: it explicitly writes Obergefell into the state constitution by stipulating Virginia cannot take sex into account when defining marriage.

They also try to tar the constitution with guilt by association. Virginia’s anti-miscegenation laws prohibited interracial marriage, a ban struck down by the Supreme Court in 1967 in Loving v. Virginia. Differences between the sexes, they claim, are just as arbitrary and discriminatory as differences between races.

I’m voting “no” on Amendment 2. And I don’t consider that “no” vote symbolic, wasted, or a throwaway. I consider it a vote for truth and true democracy.

It’s a vote for democracy because the people also have a right to say what marriage is and not just parrot the Supreme Court. As Abraham Lincoln said in his first inaugural address, responding to the Dred Scott decision, the American people have not ceased to be their own rulers and surrendered their government into that tribunal’s hands. The Court can say what it thinks marriage is; the people do not have to agree.

And I absolutely do not agree that sexual differentiation is irrelevant to marriage. In the history of Western civilization, there is no society before the late 20th century that considered sexual difference to be a merely accidental feature of marriage. It is risible to imagine that, given that marriage is an institution affecting practically every human being over millennia, it took until 2003 in Massachusetts to realize sexual difference had nothing to do with it.

The truth is that sexual differentiation has everything to do with marriage because, in the normal order of things, marriage has a connection to procreation. That doesn’t mean that every marriage results in children. But it does mean that society recognized that marriage was the normal, natural, and best institution within which children should enter the world (and, thereby, society).

Marriage is not just serendipitously useful in having some “separate” task of raising children. In the normal order of things, children enter the world through the one-fleshedness of a man and a woman, given to each other “until death do us part,” whose love finds expression in persons for whose existence they are responsible.

Since the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, Western societies have experimented with “alternate” ways of bringing children into the world, starting with children out of wedlock and “progressing” to children out of sex (surrogacy, artificial reproduction).

The results–especially for both women and children–have been disastrous.

To pretend, then, that marriage has no relationship to procreation is to buy into a legal notion that the two are and should be in principle separate realities, which are solely the concern of the parties involved and none of society’s business. But since society’s continued existence depends on procreation and most Western societies (including America since 2008) have fallen below fertility replacement levels, it is ludicrous to pretend society has or can have no interest in the subject.

So, given the truth of what marriage is, I will vote “no” on Amendment 2.

Race is not just another “suspect category” like sex. Sexual differentiation is essential to understanding marriage’s connection to procreation; racial factors are not. Virginia may have once forbidden interracial marriage because of its history of racism, but race has no necessary connection to marriage.

“But,” you say, “the Supreme Court has spoken.” Fine. I don’t agree with everything people tell me. The Supreme Court also once said blacks were not persons. Nobody said the Court was infallible. Instead of adopting its error, I’ll leave room in Virginia for the Court to get it right. After all, Loving was a unanimous decision, but Obergefell was a sharp 5-4 split.

Advocates of the oxymoron “same sex marriage” have hoped that, over time, people would simply acquiesce in the Court’s dictum. The lesson of Roe should be that such is not necessarily the case. And it’s no coincidence that those who would like a new social order are also trying to write abortion-on-demand into the state constitution this fall.

I’m willing to leave the Virginia Constitution as it is. Article 1.15A, which defines marriage as sexually differentiated, is not vestigial. It is merely dormant. Its continued presence does two things. First, it draws a clear line that “we, the people” have a different idea of what marriage is.

Second, it leaves open the possibility for that idea should Obergefell fall. Adopting Amendment 2 writes same sex marriage into the constitution, straightjacketing Virginia into promoting the idea of marriage as sexually undifferentiated even if the Supreme Court were reversed.

There is no reason for Virginians to handcuff themselves against possible future change. The local Church in Virginia has organized a campaign, “Catholics Vote No,” to vote down Amendments 1 and 2. While Catholics may not be a majority in Virginia, we can be decisive if we stand up for the truth. Let’s vote “no” on Amendment 2.