By Gudrun Schultz
ANNAPOLIS, Maryland, February 3, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The House of Delegates was abruptly closed down yesterday in an unprecedented move to avoid a vote on a bill affirming traditional marriage.
House Speaker Michael E. Busch, a Democrat, unexpectedly terminated the House session in order to block a vote on the proposed amendment that would define marriage as a union of only one man and one woman.
“[Democrats] went through great political gyrations to get around what should have been a straightforward process,” Republican delegate Michael D. Smigiel Sr said to the Washington Times. “They were more interested in protecting their political party than in letting Marylanders vote on this important issue.”
By bypassing the vote, the Democratic delegates were effectively able to quash the bill. The amendment was changed, under a proposal by Judiciary Committee Democrats, to include gay civil unions as the equivalent of “marriage” for same-sex couples. Once that change passed, the rewritten bill was then submitted to the House with an unfavorable report, which effectively renders a House bill dead.
Once the amendment had been changed, delegates who had sponsored it removed their names from the bill, including the main Republican sponsor Delegate Donald Dwyer Jr.
“The bill no longer represents my intent or my will,” Dwyer told Fox News. “Once again, the Democrats have been up to their dirty deeds and have completely reversed the intent of the bill.”
A Baltimore Circuit Court judge ruled last month that the state’s 33-year-old ban on same-sex “marriage” is unconstitutional, a ruling that has made the marrige debate a central issue in the General Assembly for the past month.
Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., a Republican who supported the amendment, said closing the House was “at least, an abuse of the spirit of the rules.”
Such an extreme measure to thwart the passage of a bill is unknown in the General Assembly’s modern history.