Right-wing pseudo-historian David Barton, who compares homosexuality to smoking and celebrates the fact that there isn’t a cure for AIDS, said today on WallBuilders Live! with co-host Rick Green that same-sex marriage is much like letting people marry horses or dogs. Discussing the Defense of Marriage Act, Barton warned that marriage equality proponents may try to “evangelize” their belief that “marriage shouldn’t be between a man and a woman” since “that’s unfair for two men who want to be together, or two women, or a horse and a dog, or whatever it is.”
Barton: Other courts, other areas started saying ‘well you know we can’t really justify this position anymore, marriage shouldn’t be between a man and a woman, that’s unfair for two men who want to be together, or two women, or a horse and a dog, or whatever it is,’ so at that point as it looked like the states were starting to mess around the problem you have is the contracts in one state are supposed to be honored by another. So if I make a business contract with you in Texas and we move to Oklahoma, that contract is going to be recognized in Oklahoma. Well on marriage, that’s a contract. So if one state suddenly says we want same-sex marriage and in Texas we say we don’t, just because you got married in Vermont and moved to Texas doesn’t mean we have to recognize your contract.
So that ability of saying one contract is going to be forced on another caused Congress to act in 1996 and say look the federal government and the states both have to deal with marriage, now here’s what we’re doing, on the federal level we are telling you marriage is a man and a woman and everything that deals with marriage on the federal level is going to be considered a man and a woman. They said as far as the states, you states are not going to be bound by the marriage decision of another state. Green: You do it the way you want to do it and don’t expect to be able to export that to another state.
Barton: Don’t use that to try to evangelize the other forty-nine states.
Green: And we won’t let the other states force it on you.
Barton: That’s right.
Ed Meese, who served as attorney general under Ronald Reagan, told Barton and Green that the legalization of same-sex marriage in several states “just shows how the culture has deteriorated over two centuries,” and asserted that same-sex marriage is an attempt to “defy nature.”
Green: It’s almost like they are making it up on the fly, the actual language of the Constitution doesn’t matter; it’s what these judges that happen to be on the bench at the time think it should mean.
Meese: The founders, we go back to the founders, the reason that they didn’t put something in the Constitution to say that marriage is the union of a man and a woman is nobody would have even thought at that time that there could be any other. It just shows how the culture has deteriorated over two centuries.
…
Green: You also mention that the Defense of Marriage Act should control what’s happening on the military side of things. How have they managed to push through so much with the military in the Obama administration on this issue working around DOMA?
Meese: Well that’s still an open issue and that’s why DOMA is very important. For example, whether chaplains should be required to participate in a homosexual marriage ceremony; whether that would be required as part of their duties, that’s where DOMA is a very important statute. This idea that somehow there is some obscure right in the Constitution to defy nature, as they do in homosexual marriage, is just ludicrous.
