By Hilary White
SEATTLE, February 6, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance, a gay activist lobby group working to install gay “marriage” in the state, has filed a ballot initiative that proposes to annul any marriage between a man and a woman that has not produced children within three years of the wedding.
The initiative, says the group’s website, would add the phrase, “who are capable of having children with one another” to the legal definition of marriage.
The group’s spokesman, Gregory Gadow, says the initiative is in response to a July 2006 Washington Supreme Court decision that affirmed the “legitimate interest” of the state in recognizing the essentially procreative nature of marriage that offers a stable environment for children. To be accepted as a formal ballot initiative, the group would have to collect 224,880 signatures by July 6.
Speaking to the Seattle Times, Gadow said the initiative is a parody meant to challenge the concept that marriage is necessarily related to the possibility of natural procreation. “We want people to think about the purpose of marriage. If it exists for the purpose of procreation, they must understand then that these are the consequences,” Gadow said.
In addition the group’s mock initiative proposes to make it a criminal offense for childless married couples to receive state marriage benefits.
By the group’s own admission, the initiative is more an exercise in public relations than serious political lobbying. The group’s website admits that the purpose is to prompt discussion about the “misguided notions” about the nature of marriage that prompted the Supreme Court ruling.
“And at the very least, it should be good fun to see the social conservatives who have long screamed that marriage exists for the sole purpose of procreation be forced to choke on their own rhetoric.”
The Washington Supreme Court decision, however, in denying the possibility of “gay marriage” recognized that there is no physical equivalence between natural sexual relations between a man and a woman and the homosexual act which by its nature is antithetical to procreation.
In upholding the state’s Defense of Marriage act, the court’s ruling upheld the nature of marriage, whether realized or not in individual cases, as being inherently ordered towards childbearing.
The restriction of marriage to heterosexual couples, the court ruled, “does not grant a privilege or immunity to a favored minority class… The plaintiffs have not established that they are members of a suspect class or that they have a fundamental right to marriage that includes the right to marry a person of the same sex.”
The court’s ruling said, “(The Defense Of Marriage Act) is constitutional because the legislature was entitled to believe that limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples furthers procreation, essential to survival of the human race, and furthers the well-being of children by encouraging families where children are reared in homes headed by the children’s biological parents. Allowing same-sex couples to marry does not, in the legislature’s view, further these purposes.”