Last month, after a Massachusetts court declared that the state must allow gay couples to marry, the country finally confronted his cause. The “Federal Marriage Amendment” now has more than 100 bipartisan cosponsors in the House and, last week, three Republicans introduced it in the Senate. But Daniels is not exactly thrilled about all his new allies. A registered Republican, Daniels generally sees himself as steering a moderate course–reserving marriage for opposite-sex couples, while allowing gay partners civil benefits. But many of the amendment’s new backers are religious conservatives who take a harder line, calling for the abolition of civil unions. Daniels is uncomfortable with that approach. “We’re going to have to find a solution to this divisive debate that both sides can live with,” he says. The right strategy is critical, because the hurdle is so high: the U.S. Constitution has been changed only 27 times in its 216-year history.
Daniels hoped his measure was moderate enough to win the required support from two thirds of both houses of Congress and three quarters of the states. He attracted a diverse board of advisers, including former Democratic D.C. congressman Walter Fauntroy, Princeton professor and President Bush’s bioethics adviser Robert George, AME church leaders, rabbis and imams. Daniels’s group crafted a concise, two-sentence amendment that would allow civil unions if they were devised by the legislatures, not the courts.
That didn’t please activists on either side. “It is anti-gay, not just about marriage,” says Evan Wolfson, executive director of Freedom to Marry, who believes the amendment would rule out civil unions. Conservatives grumbled, too. One skeptical member of the religious right scoffed to Daniels that his unorthodox coalition “looked like the bar scene from ‘Star Wars’.” American Values president Gary Bauer credits Daniels with getting the amendment off the ground, but worries his version doesn’t go far enough. “What we want to avoid is having all of the components of marriage being awarded to someone other than a married couple,” says Bauer.
Last week a half-dozen competing versions of the amendment were circulating on Capitol Hill. But when Colorado Sen. Wayne Allard introduced the bill, he stuck with Daniels’s original language. “The door has really closed on their efforts to steer it to the right,” said Daniels. But GOP Hill aides said lawmakers–some in consultation with the White House–were still poring over the wording. Daniels isn’t quite ready to relinquish his longtime project to the messy process of legislating. But if he ever hopes to read his words in the Constitution, he may have to let lawmakers take it from here.
