Recent events in Iowa, Vermont and New York highlight why it’s necessary to amend the U.S. Constitution to define marriage as a one-man, one-woman institution.

As Jennifer Roback Morse pointed out in her excellent article for the Register (published yesterday here on the Daily Blog), homosexual activists are employing a divide-and-conquer strategy to implement their same-sex “marriage” agenda.

These homosexual activists know they could never win support of a majority of Americans for this false redefinition of marriage. They know too that this is equally impossible in most individual states.

So, they scan the country for jurisdictions where same-sex “marriage” might be advanced by sympathetic courts or legislatures against the will of the majority. Once a local target is identified, the homosexual-rights lobby pours vast sums of money into court battles or legislative lobbying, in hopes of securing a state court decision or the passage of state legislation that redefines marriage to include same-sex couplings.

Then, the homosexual lobby cites such court decisions or legislation as allegedly binding precedents that must be imposed across America.

Pro-marriage advocates will continue to fight with unflagging determination to defend a sane understanding of marriage in each and every one of these individual court and legislative battles. And, we’re happy to report, it’s our Catholic bishops, the national and state Catholic bishops’ conferences, and Catholic organizations like the Knights of Columbus who are leading the way in doing this.

But the only way to win this costly and time-consuming fight completely is to amend the U.S. Constitution to legally enshrine the traditional, heterosexual-only definition of marriage.

Not only is this the best way to proceed tactically and strategically, the definition of marriage is far too fundamental and important to American society to be allowed to degenerate into a peculiar patchwork of “local option” definitions — definitions that over time might expand further to incorporate other damaging redefinitions such as polygamy.

That’s why the U.S. bishops have been staunch supporters of the drive for a federal marriage amendment that would anchor the institution in American law as exclusively a one-man, one-woman institution.

Bishop William Skylstad of Spokane, Wash., addressed the matter in a letter he sent to all U.S. bishops in April 2006, in his capacity as the then president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

The letter was written in support of the proposed Protection of Marriage Amendment, which states, “Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution, nor the constitution of any state, 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.” 

Wrote Bishop Skylstad, “Today there is a growing sense shared by many people, including a wide range of religious leaders, that a Marriage Protection Amendment is the only federal-level action that ultimately will protect and preserve the institution of marriage.”

That was very true in 2006. As the recent events in Iowa, Vermont and New York demonstrate, it’s even more true today.