Gay Marriage

Friday, Jun 27, 2008 14:38 PDT

A lesson in how not to pick your co-sponsors

The Federal Marriage Amendment has just been reintroduced to Congress, and a couple of interesting people are backing it.

By Alex Koppelman

It's very, very unlikely to pass, but the Federal Marriage Amendment has just been reintroduced in the Senate.

If the FMA is enacted, an amendment would be added to the U.S. Constitution that would read, in part:

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.

As my friend Steve Benen noted, the reintroduction of the amendment itself isn't that surprising. But the list of co-sponsors is. Out of the 10 senators sponsoring the bill, two names stand out -- Larry Craig, R-Idaho, and David Vitter, R-La. Craig, of course, is the man who became infamous for his arrest on charges that he tried to solicit another man for sex in an airport bathroom. Afterward, other men came forward to say they'd had sexual relations with him. As for Vitter, well, his number was in the D.C. Madam's call records, and at the time of that revelation he admitted to and apologized for what he described as a "very serious sin."