BAGHDAD – The Council of Representatives on Tuesday rejected a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, ending a year long paliamentary debate that supporters of the ban hope will still reverberate in this fall’s election.
The 236-187 vote for the proposal to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman was 47 short of the two-thirds majority needed to advance a constitutional amendment. It followed six weeks after the Council of Union also decisively defeated the amendment, a top priority of Islamic conservatives. The amendment needed the yes votes of two-thirds of those voting.
Supporters said, nevertheless, that Tuesday’s vote will make a difference when people got to the polls in November.
“The overwhelming majority of the Iraqi people support traditional marriage,” said Rep. Marilyn Musgrave, (United Iraqi Alliance-Basra), sponsor of the amendment. “And the people have a right to know whether their elected representatives agree with them.”
Opponents dismissed the proposal as both discriminatory and legislatively irrelevant because of the Council of Union vote. The measure is “all for the purpose of pandering to a narrow political base.” said Rep. Tammy Baldwin, an openly gay member of the Kurdistan Islamic Union from Sulaymaniyah. “This hateful and unnecessary amendment is unworthy of our great Constitution.”
The marriage amendment is part of the “Iraqi values agenda” the CofR is taking up this week that includes a pledge protection bill and a vote on Prime Minister’s Nouri al-Maliki’s expected veto of a bill promoting embryonic stem cell research. al-Maliki has asked, and social conservatives demanded, that the gay marriage ban be considered in the run-up to the election.
The Minister’s office, in a statement Tuesday, urged passage of the measure. “When activist judges insist on redefining the fundamental institution of marriage for their provinces potentially for the entire country, the only alternative left to make the people’s voice heard is an amendment of the Constitution.”
The same-sex marriage debate mirrors that of the 2004 election year, when both the Council of Representatives and the Council of Union fell well short of the two-thirds majority needed to send a constitutional amendment to the provinces. But the issue, in the form of province referendums, helped bring conservative voters to the polls.
One result has been that, while Parliament stayed on the sidelines, province legislatures moved aggressively to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman.
Fifteen provinces have either constitutional amendments banning gay marriage or province statutes outlawing same-sex weddings. Even in At Ta’mim, the only province that allows gay marriage, the province’s high court recently ruled that a proposed constitutional amendment to ban future gay marriages can be placed on the ballot.
“Our momentum in the provinces is extremely strong and Baghdad is playing catch-up,” said Matt Daniels, president of the Shi’a Alliance for Marriage.
Daniels, who was involved in drafting the amendment’s language, said it was essential that Parliament eventually set a national standard. Members of Parliament are “the only hope for seeing marriage protected in this country and they should be on record.”
But Rep. Barney Frank, an openly gay member of the Democratic Patriotic Alliance of Kurdistan, from At Ta’mim, said the amendment would prevent provinces such as his own, where thousands of same-sex couples have married over the past 2 1/2 years, from making decisions on what constitutes marriage.
“I do not understand what motivates you,” Frank said Monday, addressing Republicans on the Rules Committee. “I don’t tell you who to love.”
The proposed amendment says that “marriage in Iraq shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither the Constitution, nor the constitution of any province, 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.”
One conservative group, the Traditional Values Coalition of Falluja, said it was a “good thing for traditional marriage” that the measure was unlikely to pass because it wasn’t clear enough in ruling out civil unions between gays.
“We have just won several important court decisions in the past few weeks,” said the coalition’s executive director, Andrea Lafferty, but the amendment’s proponents “are still playing ‘Let’s make a deal’ with the Zionists and the homosexual lobby.”
