Arizona Alert
The Duty to Defend Life & Marriage Just Got Harder
by William L. Saunders
On Election Day last November, voters in seven of eight states with constitutional amendments protecting marriage (as the union of one man and one woman) on their respective ballots, passed them. However, even here there was bad news: Arizona became the first state to reject such an amendment.
Same-sex marriage advocates are calling the elections a “victory.” It is true that the campaign in Arizona for the amendment seems to have been barely, and poorly, organized. But it still lost, and when that loss is combined with the New Jersey Supreme Court’s unanimous endorsement of same-sex relationships (if not same-sex “marriage” by name), the Arizona defeat robs the marriage-protection movement of some of its momentum.
Pro-life forces also lost two high-profile ballot initiatives. In Missouri, voters barely approved an amendment to the state constitution that, like the successful initiative in 2004 in California, permits—and effectively all but mandates—embryonic stem-cell research and cloning.
Poorly written ballot initiatives are the bane of social conservatives. Arizona’s marriage-protection initiative was so badly written as to make some voters think that voting against it would protect marriage.
Missouri’s initiative, prepared by cloning advocates, seems to have been badly written on purpose to confuse the voters. It claimed to ban cloning, when all it did was to simply and brazenly re-define it, from the creation of a living, single-cell human being to the implantation of the clone in a woman’s womb.
In South Dakota, under a unique state constitutional provision, voters were given the option to approve or reject a legislature-passed ban on all abortions except when the life of the mother is at risk. They rejected it.
The pro-abortion forces campaigned against the ban by emphasizing that it did not permit abortion when rape or incest was involved. In any case, even had the voters approved the ban, the law was certain to be enjoined by a federal court. And that brings us to the true tragedy of this election.
The True Tragedy
In America, of course, we have not chosen abortion through the ballot, but have had it imposed upon us by the courts. In the past year, the Senate approved two new justices to the US Supreme Court, John Roberts and Samuel Alito, who are judicial conservatives.
William L. Saunders is Senior Vice President and Senior Counsel at Americans United for Life.
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