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Congress last considered a federal marriage amendment two years ago, but after several congressional

hearings and much media attention, the amendment failed to pass.

On June 6th, the Senate will once again vote on a constitutional amendment

defining marriage. Why has this again become an issue? Dale Carpenter,

Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota and author of the Cato study,

the Federal Marriage Amendment, unnecessary anti-Federalist and anti-Democratic, explains.

I think there is no doubt that the timing of this vote is clearly to coincide with the fact that we have a national election this year and that a vote on an amendment appeals both to the base of the Republican Party

that is religiously conservative and opposes gay marriage and appeals to some Democratic voters who are socially conservative

that the president wants to appeal to and the Republicans in Congress want to

appeal to, but who are not otherwise very sympathetic to the Republican agenda.

It is no accident that we last voted on this issue in the Congress in 2004,

which was another national election year. We're doing so again this year.

And my guess is that this issue is going to come up in one way or another once again in 2008

when we have our next national election.

The interesting question is, aside from the pure political motivation here,

there really have not been very many developments on the marriage front that justify an amendment

any more than an amendment would have been justified two years ago.

And in fact, while there were a number of developments prior to 2004 that could have been cited as a reason to have an

amendment. We've had no further dramatic judicial decisions enforcing gay marriage

...