The Daily Signal - Polygamy Seen as Possibility Under House-Passed Respect for Marriage Bill

Episode Date: July 26, 2022

House Democrats—with the assistance of 47 Republicans—on July 19 passed the Respect for Marriage Act. The bill would federally recognize any marriage if it is legally performed in any of the 50 states, and would allow the attorney general to file civil action lawsuits against states that refuse to recognize marriages from other states. The bill, which would formally repeal the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, now goes to the Senate, where it will require 60 votes to overcome a likely filibuster. While recent polling data suggests that Americans overall are more in favor of gay marriage than generations prior, Heritage Foundation research assistant Jared Eckert warns that the House-passed bill could have dire consequences if passed by the Senate and signed into law by President Joe Biden. “If one state—just one state—recognizes polygamy as a legitimate marriage or legal marriage, then basically, the federal government has to do that,” says Eckert. Eckert joins the show today to discuss that and other possible unintended consequences of the Respect for Marriage Act, and what states can do to ensure their rights aren’t trampled on. We also cover these stories Biden is reported to be “on the mend” from COVID-19, even as Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., says he has contracted the virus. Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., proposes raising the mandatory age for commercial pilots to retire from 65 to 67 years old. New polling data suggests 2 in 3 Americans favor term limits for Supreme Court justices. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Tuesday, July 26. I'm John Pah. And I'm Virginia Allen. House Democrats and some Republicans have successfully passed the Respect for Marriage Act. The bill would federally recognize any marriage if it was legally performed in any of the 50 states and would allow the Attorney General to file civil action lawsuits against states that refuse to recognize marriages from other states. While recent polling data suggests that a Americans overall are more in favor of gay marriage than generations prior, Heritage Foundation Research Assistant Jared Eckert argues this bill could have dire consequences if passed. Eckert joins the show today to discuss the unintended consequences of the Respect for Marriage

Act and what states can do to ensure their rights aren't trampled on. But before we get to Doug's conversation with Jared Eckert, let's hit today's top news. President Joe Biden has nearly made a full recovery from COVID-19. That's according to White House physician Kevin O'Connor. O'Connor says Biden's only remaining symptoms are nasal congestion and minimal hoarseness. But COVID is continuing to spread in the government. West Virginia Democrat Senator Joe Manchin has also tested positive. He tweeted about testing positive for COVID on Monday, writing,

I am fully vaccinated and boosted. and am experiencing mild symptoms. I will isolate and follow CDC guidelines as I continue to work remotely to serve West Virginians. Senator Lindsey Graham is introducing legislation that would end the forced retirement of airline pilots at 65. The South Carolina Republican tweeted Monday, there is a severe and growing pilot shortage in the U.S. Every air traveler sees and feels the impact when they go to the airport. Talking about his bill, the Let Experience Pilots Flyer.

Act, Graham added that it requires the pilots over the age of 65 maintain a first-class medical certification which must be renewed every six months. According to NBC News, the retirement age for commercial pilots used to be 60. It was changed to 65 in 2007. Americans want term limits for Supreme Court justices. A new poll from the Associated Press, Nork Center for Public Affairs research found that nearly two and every three Americans think term limits. or a required retirement age would be a good idea. The poll found that 82% of Democrats and 57% of Republicans think term limits should be enacted. The poll was conducted in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roeby Wade.

The U.S. Constitution specifically states that federal judges, including Supreme Court justices, are appointed for life. It is unclear how Congress could easily pass legislation to limit justices. terms without violating the Constitution. That's all for headlines. Now stay tuned for Doug's conversation with Jared Eckert as they discuss the details of Congress's new gay marriage bill. Do you have an interest in public policy? Do you want to hear lectures from some of the biggest names in American politics?

The Heritage Foundation hosts webinars called Heritage Events Live. These events are free and open to the public to find the latest heritage events and to register, visit heritage.org slash events. My guest today is Jared Eckert, a research assistant in the Richard and Helen Devast Center for Life, Religion, and Family here at the Heritage Foundation.

Jared, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I'm super excited to be here. Great. Well, let's get started then. Let's talk about this bill making its way through Congress that would codify gay and interracial marriage into law. So, it's been a lot of discussion about this bill. Is it a good bill or a bad bill?

Yeah. So last week, It was passed in the House 267 to 157 vote with actually 47 Republicans voting in favor of it. So you've asked the question, you know, this is a bill for codifying same-sex marriage and interracial marriage. Well, quite frankly, that's not what it's about because neither of those things are under threat by any means. This is just an alarmist overreaction to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. And if you actually look at the opinion of Dobbs, for example, which is what Pelosi and others are citing, for why we need this legislation. The court explicitly recognizes that Dobbs only addresses abortion. It doesn't address anything else so that people are citing Clarence Thomas's concurrence,

but even he recognizes explicitly. Look, there are some legal questions about substantive due process, but at bottom, this only applies to abortion. The court universe, like, all recognize that in their majority opinion. So the other question about what this bill would do is whether the states would be compelled to recognize the type of marriage that they maybe weren't wanting to do. So, for example, if Alabama failed to recognize gay marriage, would that be a problem under this bill? So one thing that's important to understand is that this bill doesn't actually change the legal landscape at all.

States are already required to recognize same-sex marriage under, given Obergefell and Windsor, Supreme Court cases passed it, ruled in the last 10 years, five, 10 years. So the legal landscape is already set so that states have to recognize same-sex marriage as legitimate and as legally recognized. So this bill is really, again, what's important for people to understand is that this bill is really a sort of publicity stunt, trying to, again, divert attention from Democrats' radical policies. One thing to keep in mind is that this bill comes in the middle of two administrative regulations that are being. rolled out. One was a proposed rule by the Department of Ed that would redefine sex under Title IX and basically require anyone who identifies as a woman to be allowed to participate in basically any school activity or program. This includes facilities while the administration tries to skirt

around whether that includes sports. There's nothing explicitly barring it from including sports. And then it also comes before the Department of Health and Human Services. They're going to roll out a rule that would likewise redefine sex under the non-discrimination clause of the Affordable Care Act. Again, in an attempt to push a radical policy of we need to make transgender transitioning, kind of basically standard care in the medical space. So this is just, this is coming between two radical policies. It is itself a radical policy as something else I think we need to understand. This is a Trojan horse.

This, again, has nothing to do. If there's no threat to same-sex marriage or if there's no threat, legally speaking, to interracial marriage, then what is this bill really about? We've already talked about the kind of publicity stunt thing, right? But the thing we need to recognize that this is really about codifying something more radical, specifically polygamy. Oh, wow. Obergafel recognized that it redefined the federal definition of marriage between a man and a woman to basically include any two individuals. This bill goes even further and says, basically, whatever a state recognizes as marriage has to be federally recognized as marriage. So if one state, just one state, recognizes polygamy as a legitimate marriage or legal marriage, then basically the federal government has to do that.

And this creates tons of problems for basically all the laws on the books regarding marriage, tax code, welfare, you name it. It just creates a mess. Okay, so just to kind of really sink that in, for example, if a state decided that beastiality, that marrying a dog. would be legal. This bill would say that at the federal level that would have to be recognized. Okay. That's, I mean, that's shocking. It seems like that that would be insane. How does that function as a proponent of federal law where it basically would say one state gets to dictate the entirety of marriage law in the entire country? Yeah. Well, I mean, this is exactly the point. is there's no, the state doesn't have historically and presently the state shouldn't have,

has never had interest in people's feelings, their sort of romantic lives. Like the whole point of why federal law even recognized marriage is something special, right, is because it has an interest in the welfare of children, the welfare of the family, because when families thrive, children thrive, society, civil society thrives. So the reason for these laws is, again, because of a sort of natural social institution that is actually better for society. And so the state has recognized it's not discriminating against single people or before Obergefell same-sex individuals, same-sex attracted individuals. It was simply about recognizing that naturally marriage is ordered towards procreation and parents are best at raising their kids. and when those families thrive, civil society thrives.

So this is actually looking like it might pass with Republican support. There have been a lot of Republicans who have gone on the record, senators who have said that they will vote for this. How did a party that had traditional marriage between a man and a woman for a long time as part of its platform shifts so radically in this direction? Yeah. This shift, I think, really is sort of a fulfillment in this kind of sexual revolution. you get a lot of people making those comments.

I think it's important to recognize that, you know, transgender ideology that we're seeing kind of pushed in schools, that we're seeing come through courts, through laws. Basically, these are connected. It's a rejection of the personal significance of biological reality, that our bodies are actually part of who we are and that they shape and define the world we live in. And so I think, but what's important here, again, is just to draw attention that we don't need to rehash the marriage debate.

We recognize, again, that Obergefell didn't change the nature of marriage, just legally redefined it. And marriage is still marriage. And so I think what we need to recognize is that this is, again, just the left's attempt to draw attention off of its radical policies to kind of build a Trojan horse to sneak something more extreme than even Obergefell. Bergfeld did into federal law just to get, and again, like in time for midterm elections. You know, this is an attempt to get the eyes off the Democrats off the left and to force GOP members to hash out a debate, something that's, you know, the shift in a public opinion has maybe gone towards same-sex marriage. But the reality is it's a mile wide and an inch deep. And it's just something that we don't need to rehash and Republicans shouldn't take the bait. This is something

that needs to be met with a real honest, objective look at the facts, which says, this is not under threat. This is a non-issue when we've got so many other things we've got to be concerned about from inflation, war in Ukraine, you know, again, gender ideology in schools, transitioning children. There are plenty more concerns we have than same-sex marriage right now. To play devil's advocate for a second, there are some who argue this is how the process should work. This may be a very bad bill. That's entirely possible. But the court has said in their decision to overturn Roe v. Wade that these types of decisions, these types of wide-reaching decisions are not the responsibility of the judiciary. They are in fact the responsibility of the

people and their representatives. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah. I mean, Again, this is one of the things that if the left had actually tried to push this through legally, right, they wouldn't have been able to do it, you know, prior to Bergerfeld. So there was a sort of judicial activism. And again, the sort of, I think Thomas talks about the substantive due process that has been used, this sort of doctrine that's been used to create rights that aren't actually in the Constitution. And so this, you know, given that they've had the court win, now they're basically trying to force a vote on. something that, again, regardless of what people say or believe, the state has an interest in family and marriage, natural marriage, and that this shouldn't be seen as something that, yeah, maybe it's for the people to decide, but this is a non-issue right now.

Again, just want to keep drawing back to that point. Regardless of what the process is and how people should decide it, the point is that why are we focusing on this issue? Why are we drawing attention to this issue, which isn't even. under threat given the current legal landscape. One thing that I guess I'm curious about is since this will be federal law, this would be something that would affect Americans at the federal level, the states couldn't intervene necessarily.

Will this bill have any spillover, say, for free speech and free exercise of religion? We've already seen the court has had to deal with a number of cases that have dealt with people's objection to serving same-sex weddings. Would this bill have any impact on those? Yeah, it puts a lot of organizations at risk. So basically any, we saw this in Philadelphia. The Fulton case last summer was connected to that. The city of Philadelphia basically saw that Catholic Social Services were performing a state function, right?

And that if they were going to, quote, unquote, discriminate and refused to place with same-sex couples because they held a sincere belief that marriage is between one man and one woman, right? They shut down Catholic social services saying, look, you can't do this. This is discrimination. Fulton ruled in Catholic social services favor rightfully, maintaining that religious organizations do have the freedom to operate according to their sincerely held beliefs. So I think it's just worth keeping in mind that if this bill were to pass, any organization that could be alleged to be acting under the color of state law is the language of the bill, then they could be sued.

And we know that there are activist groups, again, that have, already been doing this work. And so it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. The other thing I'd add is that this creates grounds for like the IRS, for example, to deny non-profit status, tax-exempt status to organizations that refuse to place with same-sex couples. Because, again, because of their sincerely held beliefs. And extending that out further, obviously, as you were saying, this bill could theoretically legalize polygamy, so that would apply then to families of, you know, four or five individuals living in a house. Exactly.

And could create, I mean, especially in the child welfare space, a lot of problems and questions that our legal landscape has an address. And so it just creates a mess out of, you know, yeah, the whole situation. Interesting. As we begin to wrap up here, I'm curious, if this bill is to pass, what can states do? And frankly, what can individual America? Americans do to sort of counter the worst parts of it. Is there any way to do that? Yeah. I mean, I think the first thing is that we need to be making sure that elected officials have the resources they need to understand this issue.

This bill needs, you know, it creates a lot of problems. And so I don't think it has to get to that point. And so what we have yet to see in the next couple weeks is whether people can become informed about what's going. on and do what they need to do to ensure that their elected officials are representing them. Excellent. That was Jared Eckerd, a research assistant in the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion and Family here at the Heritage Foundation. Jared, very much appreciate your time. Thanks for having me. And that'll do it for today's episode.

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