10 to 1:  Guess Who Congress is Hearing from on Marriage
By Maurine Jensen Proctor

The Marriage Protection Amendment will be voted on in the U.S. House of Representatives this Tuesday.  If you have not yet contacted your Representative, click here. They need to hear from you.

A staffer for a congressman who keeps an eye on faxes, phone calls and emails from the public told us yesterday in a meeting that it looked like the messages were coming in 10 to 1 against the marriage amendment.  He may have been wrong.  This was his best casual guess, but that’s how it looked to him.

Now, of course, the public is overwhelmingly in favor of marriage.  In the states that have considered marriage protection amendments, an average of 71% of voters have affirmed it.  So what’s happening?

The bottom line is that those who want to redefine marriage are organized, funded, passionate and have a tenacious, undying political will. They count on us being apathetic and tired.  Too often, we who support marriage think that somebody else with more time will handle the problem.

I have often wondered who this fictitious “other person” is who is going to stop the moral erosion and the dissolution of marriage.  These are our times and our challenge.  With pornography burgeoning, media corrupting, and the family assaulted, we may think that the most important thing we can do is just protect and care for our own family.  Yet, these are times when caring for our own family must involve having a voice in the shaping of our world. 

We can’t bolt the doors, shade the windows, cut the electricity and hope that our children won’t be exposed to the world.  They are — every day at school, with friends.  It’s in the very air.

That’s why we have created the Family Leader Network — to stay abreast of the issues and fire up citizens to have a voice — when their voice matters.  We are educating, organizing and mobilizing family-centered people to shape the world their children are growing up in and to step forward on important issues.  If you haven’t yet subscribed to the email, why not?  You can do that by clicking here.

Don’t Sit Out on the Marriage Issue

The definition of marriage is an issue not to sit out on. Rarely does the Church state a political opinion, but the First Presidency issued a statement supporting a constitutional amendment defining marriage. It reads:

That they should make this statement may indicate how seismic the reverberations will be if marriage is redefined.

People who don’t understand the issue assume that redefining marriage is only about a few same-sex couples having a few new privileges and will not affect society broadly. 

Instead it is a radical social idea whose resulting earthquake would touch every aspect of our society, including what your children learn in school and your religious freedom.

Please Call or Write Your Representative

You may be one that doesn’t know how critical it is that Congress hears from you when critical bills arise.  Before we moved to Washington D.C. and I regularly sat in on meetings on Capitol Hill, I had no idea that our elected officials actually paid close attention to faxes, phone calls or emails from the public.  Now I know better because I have sat in on dozens of meetings where the question was, how are we hearing from the public on this?  How are the emails coming?

In short, legislators and their staff do pay attention to the response of their constituents on issues.  They have to because they want to be elected again. Their constituents are their lifeblood. Where the public has fervent feelings on an issue, it registers with our elected officials.  When there is silence the assumption is that the people just don’t care.

Frankly, those who would redefine marriage are a powerful interest, and legislators who vote for marriage amendments often pay a personal cost for it.  It’s easier for them to vote against the amendment rather than incur the ill will and rancor of the same-sex marriage lobby.  That ill will can be bitter indeed.

Legislators need to know that people who support marriage are behind them and will step forward to champion that belief.  They need to know that they are not alone and hanging out on a limb for something that nobody really cares about.

Congresswoman Marilyn Musgrave is the sponsor of the Marriage Protection Amendment, and a staffer from her office told us that it encourages and strengthens them when they hear from people supporting marriage.

If you care, please let them know.  We often hear that family-centered citizens are just too apathetic to care, but we don’t believe it.

Those who vote against the amendment must understand that there are political consequences for thumbing their noses at marriage.

Many have asked why the House is taking up the Marriage Protection Amendment when it failed to get the 2/3 majority required in the Senate. Isn’t this just a waste of time? We’ll tell you below, but first what you can do to Take Action now.

Take Action:  Contact Your Congressman or Congresswoman

Here are three things that are simple that you can do right now to support marriage.

1. Contact your legislator. Click here and enter your zip code. Your Representative’s name, email and other contact information will come up. From this website, you can send an email that will go directly to your Representative.

In the subject line you can write, “Vote for the Marriage Amendment” and then a letter that can be as short as one or two sentences.

2. Sign the petition that will be presented to the House leadership on Monday, July 17 before the vote on Tuesday. This is the same petition presented to the Senate when they considered the amendment. If you have signed it before, you do not need to sign it again. Click here to sign the petition.

Currently we have 28,000 who have signed, but we’d like to deliver far more.

3. Forward this article on to your friends.

4. Sign up to receive the Family Leader updates by clicking here.

Why is the House Voting on the Marriage Protection Amendment?

People sometimes wonder why the U.S. House of Representatives is voting on the Marriage Protection Amendment when it already failed to get 2/3 majority in the Senate this year.  An amendment to the U.S. Constitution is not an easy thing to attain. It requires 2/3 of the members of both houses to pass it and then passage in ¾ of the states.

When an amendment is brought up before one of the houses of Congress, two opportunities are presented — both of which are important.  First, the matter becomes discussed in the public square and in the newspaper.  It is an opportunity to educate the public on the issue.  Many of our most important bills have been brought up again and again in Congress until enough momentum was gathered for passage.

A ban on partial birth abortion was brought up for several years before it finally passed Congress and was signed by the President.  This week the House passed a law regulating and therefore restricting Internet gambling.  This law has been brought up four straight years and passed by one house of Congress or the other, but never both at the same time.

Passing a law is a process, but passing an amendment is deliberately difficult so that the Constitution is not easily tampered with.

Second, bringing up the Marriage Protection Amendment puts legislators on record so the public knows where they stand regarding the issue. For example, I live in Virginia, a state that has 11 Representatives in the House.  Nine of them have voted for the amendment in the past.  Only two have voted “no.”  Yet in California with 53 Representatives, I count at least 36 who have voted against the Marriage Protection Amendment in the past.  Those who care about marriage protection have their work cut out for them in California.

So, please, raise your voice on this issue and write or call your Representative.  It’s easy.  It takes far less time than reading this article.  Just follow the simple instructions above.