There is hope—but only if we immediately change our game. The animus propelling the recent decisions was “equality”, as evidenced by oral arguments and the terse language contained in decision of the Supreme Court. It is possible to reverse the rulings and protect state constitutional bans if we lead with strong equality arguments in our briefs and in our public work on the cultural front.

Time is of the essence. Suits challenging state constitutional same-sex marriage bans have already been filed in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, Kentucky, and two cases in Virginia ^{(1) (2)} . In Michigan, the federal court invoked the Full Faith and Credit Act, ordering the state to provide marital tax and other economic benefits to same-sex married couples from other states. We will quickly see challenges to state constitutional bans on gay marriage in all other states that ban same-sex marriage.

The Executive branch could also move to starve out states with constitutional bans by blocking federal funding on grounds that states are discriminating against their citizens. States’ attorneys will have no choice but to stand aside while their constitutional bans are quickly destroyed by state court challenges.

If we consistently apply the equitable principles outlined in this article, we can defend state constitutional bans and send the issues back to the Supreme Court for consideration on equitable matters. The Center for Marriage Policy is currently drafting a preliminary brief with the assistance of a ranking constitutional scholar.

Why heterosexual marriage is exclusively constitutional

Heterosexual marriage is the only constitutional form of marriage because it is the only possible arrangement that automatically confers equal social, economic, and parental rights to all married men and women regardless of one’s ability to naturally bear a child. Same-sex marriage immediately bifurcates these rights, destroying equality between men and women.

Sexual orientation is not relevant in same-sex (or so-called “gay” marriage) litigation or the cultural debate. The laws of a few states, the federal government, and the recent Supreme Court are irrationally flawed because they create the right for any two unrelated, unmarried human beings to marry each other regardless of sexual orientation. Where the discriminatory action of same-sex marriage will be imposed on all adults regardless of sexual orientation, sexual orientation is at most a secondary element an invalid cornerstone for the recent Supreme Court rulings.

In its ruling the Supreme Court unjustly and erroneously created three classes of marriage with vastly different reproductive, social, political, economic rights, and liabilities—depending solely on an individual’s ability to naturally bear a child.

Class 1: Mother-mother marriages: The class of marriages having most advantageous rights is marriages between two women. When two women marry, it is a three-way contract among two women and the government. Most women will bear children by men outside the marriage—often by pretending they are using birth control when they are not. Entrapped men become economically-conscripted third parties to these marriages, but get nothing in return.

This is a significant advantage compelling women who would otherwise become (or are) single mothers to choose to marry a woman instead of a man. They can combine incomes, double-up on tax-free child support and welfare benefits, decrease costs, and double the human resources available to raise children and run their household. They are sexually liberated with boyfriends often cohabiting with them to provide additional undeclared income and human resources without worrying about what happens when they break up with their boyfriends.

Today, approximately 25% of single mothers cohabit with an undocumented boyfriend. Same-sex marriage allows women to double-up on everything, establishing sub-rosa polyandrous marriage as a common legal institution with men as peripheral servants without a stake in marriage or society.

The welfare state is an automatic statutory third party economically supporting these marriage contracts via welfare entitlements, some of which are “advances on child support collections.”

The Supreme Court cannot explain away the unconstitutionality of same-sex marriage when the welfare state becomes a predatory, automatic, and unnatural statutory third-party-provider to a class of often structurally-polyandrous marriages, extracting substantial income from taxpayers and entrapped men, that other marriages do not qualify for.

Class 2: Heterosexual marriages. The second class of marriages is traditional marriages between men and women. Children of these marriages are almost always borne of the marriage and supported by husband and wife without governmental involvement. In these marriages, men and women have natural parental and economic rights, standing in society, and equal “gender power” before the law. Traditional marriages will be economically-disadvantaged compared to mother-mother marriages because they cannot draw large incomes from the welfare state and they will be taxed to support other marriages. They are treated in discriminatory fashion having to subsidize Class-1 and perhaps Class-3 entitlements (including ObamaCare) in their taxes.

Class 3: Male-Male marriages. Marriages between two men are destined to be the marital underclass. In most cases, these men will become un-consenting “fathers” by reproductive entrapment.   Men in male-male marriages who become fathers by deceptive means will be forced to pay child support to women in bi-maternal marriages, and become economically enslaved to Class-1 marriages. The taxpayers will be guarantors of child support collections for low-income fathers who cannot afford to pay (as occurs in the existing welfare state).

Same-sex marriage is a multi-dimensional violation of 14th Amendment protections against sex discrimination. The 5^th Amendment protection for life, liberty, and property without due process of law is structurally violated in cases of reproductive deception by women, regardless of marital status of the men involved.

The Constitution cannot accept three-party marriage with government providing special entitlements to only one class of marriage at the expense of the other two. Secondly, the Constitution cannot accept any marital arrangement that establishes three classes of marriage, where the classes are crisply defined and either rewarded or discriminated against based on one’s physical ability to bear a child.

Harm: The harm of same-sex marriage is substantial. All the problems of marriage-absence will be imported into the institution of bi-maternal marriage. Children raised in father-absence have between 400% and 1800% higher rates of problems such as illegitimacy, suicide, ADHD, incarceration and are far less likely to finish high school or succeed in the work force. When men are structurally excluded from marriage, the problem of violent de-socialized males will compound over time.

When the welfare state was launched in 1963, the illegitimacy rate was 6% and the divorce rate was 1.4 per 1000. Today, the illegitimacy rate is 41% and the divorce rate is approximately 2.5 per 1000. We have incontrovertible proof that the economic entitlement of non-marriage has caused profound longitudinal damage to heterosexual marriage. There is no basis in Constitution or conscience for doubly-entitling illegitimacy within the institution of bi-maternal marriage.

Medical science has documented the fact that homosexual behavior is a great health and social risk to everyone. There is no evidence that gay marriage reduces the extremely high rates of promiscuity commonly practiced by homosexuals and bisexuals. The Supreme Court ruling guarantees that schools will be aggressively promoting lifestyles that kill or disable children and infect innocent women and babies with HIV.

A brief analysis of equal rights issues

The only form of marriage that can be held constitutional is heterosexual marriage. Dr. Stephen Baskerville points out the fundamental structural equal-rights function of marriage: “Marriage exists to attach the father to the family. It is not a gender-neutral institution …. homosexual parenting marginalizes children still further from their fathers (and sometimes mothers).”

But this article misses the primary point: Marriage is not the “gender neutral” institution that progressives would make it. Laws sought by progressives are not only orientation-blind,; they are expansively sex-blind. The state must marry any two unmarried, unrelated adults who wish to marry for any reason whether it be social, economic, heterosexual, LBGTQ, or most importantly, sexual power.

Progressive terminology morphed from “gay marriage” to “same-sex marriage” over the past five years because the feminist power-agenda is not attached to orientation. The feminist goal has always been to create an institution where any two women can marry each other, have children out of wedlock, and force individuals who cannot be part of the marriage to support it economically, with government as a statutory guarantor.

Marriage is a sex-neutral institution that brings two very different sexes into the “contract”, producing a sex-neutral outcome in every marriage assuring that children will be supported and reared in a diverse parenting environment without any governmental involvement. By affirming both sexes, heterosexual marriage naturally establishes protected equal social, economic, reproductive, parental, tax, and political rights between one man and one woman (in microcosm), and for all Americans (in macrocosm).

Impressing “gender neutrality” on marriage reverses the result. Two already-equal (same) sexes enter a marriage but end up with statutory rights (or liabilities) arbitrarily apportioned solely on the physical ability of those two persons to naturally bear a child.

The welfare-state-as-marriage: Bi-maternal marriages are economically far superior because they will predominantly bear children outside the marriage, drawing multiple sources of tax-free income not available to the other classes of marriage. Where child support and welfare are the right of the child, but those benefits are awarded to the adult custodian(s), the adult is economically propelled to choose the most advantageous marital arrangement at the expense of the child’s right to have a father and a mother.

Bi-maternal marriage will legally amalgamate the entire welfare state apparatus and the problems of illegitimacy into the institution of marriage. Marriage-absence generates a the greatest social, economic, poverty, and tax problems we face. Marriage-absence is also a tremendous, unproductive, and unnecessary load on federal and state social services budgets.

Illegitimacy and non-marriage are informal activities not warranting the constitutional protections and affirmations of marriage. Same-sex marriage is not a substitute for, or equivalent to heterosexual marriage because of the documented costs it will impose on the nation, businesses, and the taxpayers. It would be unconstitutional to broadly empower the welfare state to affirmatively “buy out” the institution of heterosexual marriage in the name of “gay equality.”

If same-sex marriage is forced on America, it is an irreversible change at law. Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned us that illegitimacy would grow quickly and have profound adverse impact on marriage, budgets, crime, and the Nation. My prediction of harm is nothing more than a straight-line extension of Moynihan’s prescient analysis, proven to be fully correct by fifty years of history. If legalized, economic advantage will still drive women’s marital decisions, but many will choose to marry another woman (and the welfare state) instead of becoming a struggling single mother. Advantage alone will drive a much more aggressive and insidious welfare state that cannot be reigned in because same-sex marriage is a constitutionally-protected activity that by way of precedent cannot be withdrawn at a later date. This is far more dangerous than ObamaCare, abortion, capital punishment, or excessive gun regulations—which are reversible by legislatures and the courts.

Equal rights of the sexes: In bi-maternal marriages men have no automatic parental or custodial rights under federal or state law. They must unnaturally sue for them at great expense. A variety of state laws established by the Personal Responsibility and Work Act of 1996, such as “Paternity Registries”, are systematic procedural barriers to custodial and parental rights for men.

Men will be forced to labor for the economic benefit of marriages between women—marriages men have been “redlined” out of—by the choice of two women who married with intention to have children by men outside the marriage. This approaches the definition of slavery—and perhaps sexual trafficking or bondage. This is one reason that the welfare state has been called a “plantation” by an increasingly large cohort of politicians and activists.

Racial equality: Comparisons to racial equality laws strongly favor the proponents of heterosexual marriage. Whites cannot “choose” to deny blacks the ability to move into a neighborhood, to enter a restaurant, or to attend a school. Marriage is similarly a “public institution” licensed and regulated by government. Same-sex marriage will permit women to “choose” to advantageously wall men out of government-entitled marriages. Men’s natural social, economic, parental, and political rights will be procedurally subrogated. Many men will become rump-class servants to the bi-maternal welfare state.

Progressives hope to establish an irreversible system of choice-based sex discrimination against men operating similarly to pre-civil-rights racism, when discrimination against blacks was commonplace with respect to property, political, and voting rights. Individuals cannot “choose” to red-line blacks out of the housing market. Individuals cannot “choose” an arrangement impressing blacks to support them with nothing in return. This is precisely what gay marriage will do to all men of all races.

Severability of economic rights and lack of class-action status: Many same-sex cases beyond United States v. Windsor involve unmarried same-sex cohabitants living in economic “civil unions.” Windsor and these other non-class-action cases were carefully selected and framed to keep children and parental rights excised to ensure that welfare state and parental rights considerations could not poison the litigation. The recent decision in Windsor is a broadside evisceration of the economic function of the institution of marriage, and a propellant encouraging women to dump their husbands in favor of same-sex marriages. The lack of class-action scrutiny combined with the absence of review of child/parental rights and welfare-state impacts suggests these cases are too myopic and incomplete to warrant a Supreme Court finding justifying either review, much less broad application economically destroying heterosexual marriage in Supra.

The rights of citizens to act: It is well-established that citizens have standing to act when government fails to exercise its statutory duties. Citizens can form street patrols in high-crime neighborhoods. For example, Steven Seagal organized border patrols. Where the California state’s attorney refused to defend Proposition 8 pursuant to his sworn duty, the proponents of Proposition 8 have citizen’s right to defend it in state courts. This right is not procedurally severable merely because an Appeal rose from a state court to a federal court. The Supreme Court ruling in Hollingsworth v. Perry is a broad usurpation of local rule, citizens’ rights, and a disembodied application of the Supremacy clause.

The fundamental purpose of heterosexual marriage: Heterosexual marriage harnesses two very different sexes to form one human race working cooperatively to naturally build nations, economy, and raise children. It guarantees equal social, economic, parental, and political rights to all citizens regardless of sex. The Constitution does not support any idea that bifurcates and redirects the natural rights of men and women depending solely on the natural ability of a person to bear a child. To dismantle marriage—the most important equal rights institution framed by the Founding Fathers—is to dismantle the Constitution, freedom, and the United States of America.

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David R. Usher is President of the Center for Marriage Policy.

“Marriage Equality” is perhaps the most convoluted canard of our time.  Underneath the hood of the homosexual revolution churns the most serious avoidable health problems of our time.

The majority of our most dangerous sexual diseases emanate from the homosexual revolution and are transmitted to wives, infants, children, and men by LBGTQ individuals who are most often bisexual.

Bisexuals are the majority in the LBGTQ movement.   Approximately 1.8% to 4% of Americans are bisexual.  This broad gateway infects unsuspecting heterosexual Americans with serious or fatal diseases. The impact to heterosexual women is serious.  70% of HIV infections in women are attributed to heterosexual contact.

The impact of homosexuality on the rest of us can no longer be ignored:

• Among female adults and adolescents that were diagnosed with HIV infection in 2009, 84.9% were infected through heterosexual contact.
• 25% of new HIV infections are women who are often straight.
• HIV is the #14 cause of infant mortality (Table B). This is most often caused by women who have a bisexual husband or boyfriend.
• There are about 1.2 million individuals infected with HIV in the United States.  About 20% of them do not know they are infected and are spreading the disease invisibly.
• Children raised by homosexual parents are dramatically more likely than peers raised by married heterosexual parents to suffer from a host of social problems.
• The total death impact of promiscuity is difficult to quantify because so many other opportunistic fatal diseases are the final cause of death.
• High rates of psychiatric disorders are well-known even in the Netherlands, where homosexuality is widely accepted.  Substance abuse is also common in the LGBTQ community. The rest of American often bears the costs of treatment for STD’s and endless psychological treatment for confused individuals.

Homosexuality has been “legitimized” in our schools.  It is considered an act of hate to question or oppose sexual perversion.  Why do we teach homosexuality in our schools while strongly encouraging our children not to use drugs or smoke?  Fatality data indicates that promiscuity and homosexuality are at least as dangerous to health and life as smoking or drugs.

In New York City, very high rates of risky homosexual practices are reported.  Nearly 10% of sexually-active New York City high school students say they had at least one same-sex partner.  Children do what they are taught.  “Gay, lesbian, and bisexual students are not born that way. The most recent, extensive, and scientifically sound research finds that the primary factor in the development of homosexuality is environmental not genetic”.

Smoking is banned everywhere in America because of the risks imposed to others.  We are tough on drinking and driving for the same reasons.  We can no longer give homosexuality a free pass because the grave healthcare burden it imposes on the rest of us.  The taxpayers cannot “leave the room” to avoid being harmed.

Incubating a national health problem:

Gay men have between 4 and 100 times more sex partners than heterosexual men.  Lesbians are 4.5 times more likely to have over 50 sex partners in their lifetime compared with heterosexual women. 75-90 percent of women who have sex with women have also had sex with men.  Only 10% of homosexual relationships are monogamous after five years.

• The incidence of HIV in men who have sex with men is 44 times that of heterosexual men, and 40 times greater than women
• Homosexual men are 46 times more likely than heterosexual men to contract syphilis.
• HIV is the #10 cause of death for black males and #24 for white males (Table D).
• While there are far fewer lesbians than gays, lesbians are 4.5 times more likely to have had over 50 sex partners than heterosexual women.
• 63 percent of syphilis cases were among men who have sex with men (cite).
• The majority of lesbians commonly have sex with men.

Gay advocacy overwhelms science

Ryan Sorba’s authoritative history of gay advocacy documents how the homosexual revolution overwhelmed the scientific community in the 1970’s and 1980’s applied aggressive activism and now-debunked “studies” to achieve the impossible:  diagnoses of homosexual disorders are no longer objective.  A psychiatric disorder exists only if the individual subjectively discovers it.  The majority of therapy focuses on solipsistic “affirmative therapy” (helping homosexuals feel comfortable with their behavior) instead of steering them to effective “change therapy” that could save their lives and relieve their mental anxieties.

Since psychiatric science does not recognize homosexuality as a diagnosable disorder, the policy responses of the CDC, psychological and psychiatric professions, and schools are limited to carefully encouraging condom use and spending vast sums of taxpayer monies taking care of ill and dying individuals.

Gay advocates now controlling the American Psychiatric Association created false science far more dangerous than Al Gore’s debunked global warming theories.  Gore’s confabulations did not kill anyone.

Gay advocates blame the consequences of their behavior on us, demanding that science and taxpayers take care of them.  Elton John blames “stigma” for causing the AIDS crisis, asserting that “love can fix the problem”.   If gay leaders truly loved their followers, would be addressing rampant promiscuity to save the lives of their followers instead of blaming everyone else.

Gay politics has become another big-government enterprise.  It forces us to accept it, urges more youth to do it, and creates expensive problems requiring massive funding to clean up the mess.

Kinsey acolytes have perverted politics and science in ways not seen since the dark ages.  The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed a bill that would “protect all 547 forms of sexual deviancy or ‘paraphilias’”. California is considering legislation guaranteeing that many children will die:  S.B. 1172 will bar counselors from helping children recover from unwanted same-sex attractions.

Gay Marriage will not reduce homosexual promiscuity

Gay marriage is an absurd proposition. Dan Savage, a leader of the gay movement, promotes promiscuity. The homosexual revolution is founded on sexual promiscuity.

In states that have gay marriage, few men marry.  Between 2004 and 2008, only 37% of same-sex marriages in Massachusetts involved men.

There is no evidence that “coupling” or gay marriage has notable impact on gay promiscuity.

Marriage becomes a promiscuous government village

Gay marriage is destined to be a three-way marriage between two women and big government.  When Suzie marries Joanie, the kids will most often be born of serial extramarital encounters (where men are unlikely to know that birth control is not being used).

Gay marriage establishes a superior four-income, two-mother, big government family.  Marriage-as-village policy is a lucrative tentacular arrangement:  women keep their own incomes, depending on government to force several men to provide multiple tax-free “child support” incomes.

The tremendous advantages of gay marriage for women are reflected in marriage data. Gay marriage is nearly twice as popular with women in Massachusetts, where 63% of gay marriages involved women between 2004 and 2008.

Gay politics overruns libertarianism and conservatism

Gay conservatism is an impossible concept.  The gay movement will settle for nothing less than hard-core multiculturalist government.

GoProud pretends that gay marriage is a state issue while actively supporting it at the federal level.  Gay marriage is very much a federal issue because DOMA exists.  An onslaught of litigation intended to demolish DOMA is raining down on the U.S. Supreme Court.  Lawsuits of every possible stripe are headed to the Supreme Court to force homosexuality on America.

The Republican Party is allowed Homocon 2012 to be held at its convention and allowed leftists to participate in writing its 2012 platform – a move that may suppress or alienate a large segment of the conservative and Tea Party vote.

Glenn Beck now supports gay marriage.  He is apparently unaware of the grave damage gay marriage will do to the rest of America.

Dear Glenn: Multicultural marriage divides America into two absolute classes depending solely on reproductive ability — with women entitled and men plantation bondservants to big government.  God-given natural social, parental and economic rights will be fully usurped by government.  Health care costs will soar due to illness and social problem grown due to the numbers of sexually-confused children and adults.  Your pocket will be picked and your children indoctrinated whether you like it or not.

We must rescind irresponsible homosexual public policy from the lawbooks across-the-board and discourage homosexual behavior.  We must not allow pansexuals to take over the conservative movement like they did the American Psychiatric Association.  Their invasion is as dangerous to our socioeconomic fabric as the Occupy movement is to free enterprise.

America is burning down because of the demise of heterosexual marriage. Marriage-absence is the greatest socioeconomic problem we face.   Our focus must be on restoring heterosexual marriage as the social norm.

Certainly, budget cuts are necessary.  We must also learn from the political failure of “austerity” in France. If we do not change what the “Federal Sausage Machine” makes, it will continue generating mass social disaster.  There will be no funding to clean it up, and angry voters will again swing to the hard left as they did in 2008.

“Protecting Marriage Month” is a viral leafleting campaign initiated by the Center for Marriage Policy that every American can easily participate in.  Businesses, politicians, and city councils need to focus on health and safety of women and children.  We encourage everyone who backed Chick-Fil-A to download and actively distribute the Protecting Marriage Month leaflet during the month of September.

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David R. Usher is President of the Center for Marriage Policy.

Cynthia L. Davis is Executive Director of the Center for Marriage Policy.

Media Contacts:

Cynthia Davis: cynthia.davis@centerformarriage.org, 636 240-6369

David R. Usher: david.usher@centerformarriage.org

Scott Lively: http://defendthefamily.com, sdllaw@gmail.com, 413 250-0984

Ryan Sorba: ryanjsorba@gmail.com

Forget the adjectives “same sex” and “gay” as prepends to marriage.  These are victim-based marketing ploys invented by NOW to send us off into a heated debate about homosexuality and equal rights – distracting us from seeing their real goal of establishing “feminist marriage.”

Feminists made feminist marriage their top long-term goal twenty-five years ago and invested tremendous resources in it, because they intend to convert marriage into a feminist-controlled government enterprise and subordinate the rest of America to fund it.

Feminist marriage is structurally designed to destroy equality.  It establishes three classes of marriage, each with vastly different reproductive, social, and economic rights and protections under Constitutional law.

1. Feminist marriage is a three-way contract between two women and government.  Most women will have children, and few women can afford or will go to the extreme of using artificial insemination to achieve pregnancy.  Government is the automatic third party collecting “child support” entitlements for children born in these marriages.

Children will be born of extramarital affairs backed by welfare guarantees and child support entitlements.   Feminist marriages are automatically entitled with many tax-free, governmental income sources for having children.

Feminist marriage is a marriage between any two women and the welfare state.  It constitutes a powerful feminist takeover of marriage by government, and places the NOW in the position of dictating government policy as a matter of “feminist Constitutional rights.”

Feminist marriage will be far more attractive to women than heterosexual marriage.  Sexual orientation does not matter when two women marry and become “married room-mates.”  They can still have as many boyfriends as they want and capture the richest ones for baby-daddies by “forgetting” to use their invisible forms of birth control.  On average, a feminist marriage will have at least four income sources, two of them tax-free, plus backup welfare entitlements.

Feminist marriage is government-sponsored serial polyandry, uniquely enriched by one or more substantial income sources not available to the other two planned subordinate classes of marriage.

2. Heterosexual marriage:  Traditional marriages between men and women will continue, but be subrogated to feminist marriage and socio-economically  dis-incentivized.   Those in traditional marriages will pay taxes that will be used to support feminist marriages where child support or welfare cannot be recouped, as occurs in our existing welfare state.  Traditional marriages have only two income sources, neither of them entitled or tax-free.  Over time, many women will prefer “feminist marriage” because of the very substantial economic and sexual liberation advantages.  Heterosexual marriage will be heavily burdened by costly marriage penalties, and be comparatively unattractive to women.

3. Male-Male marriages:  Marriages between two men are destined to be the “marital underclass.”  In most cases, these men will become unconsenting “fathers.”   Women in feminist marriages will not mention they are not using birth control.   Men in male-male marriages will be forced to pay child support to women in feminist marriages and become economically enslaved to these women.  The taxpayer will be forced to pay for child support some men cannot afford to pay, as occurs in our existing welfare state.

Male-male marriages cannot reproduce naturally (a primary factor in Constitutional case law).  They can acquire children only by artificial means, and at great expense, by adoption or renting a womb.  Most men in these marriages will still have regular sexual encounters with women.   Some men in these “marriages” will want to have children.  These men will have even more illegitimate children with women in (or contemplating) feminist marriages, most often without informed reproductive consent. Over time, reproductive fraud will become the norm in the United States.

The longitudinal impact of feminist marriage on reproductive and marital choices of unmarried individuals will be profound.   Women who are presently welfare beneficiaries will be propelled to marry each other, leaving unmarried men already sidelined by the welfare state machinery doubly disenfranchised.  Women who are not married can enter the welfare state by having a child out of wedlock, and then double their entitlements by marrying another woman on welfare.

I argue that the structure of feminist marriage, after a full review of its inseparable interlocking interaction with existing federal and state welfare law, is unconstitutional on its face.

The vast majority of women in feminist marriages will bear children out of wedlock, making government the automatic, statutory third party in such marriages with naturally conceived children.

Feminist marriage directly violates 14^th Amendment protection against sex discrimination, and the 5^th Amendment is violated at the Federal level.

Under the Constitution, the law cannot accept a structure of three-party marriage establishing an arrangement of government-sponsored economic polygamy as a protected, superior class of marriage under any rational-basis test.  Secondly, the law cannot accept any marital arrangement that establishes three classes of marriage, where the classes are crisply defined and either rewarded or discriminated against based on the natural reproductive capacity of one sex.

The issue of future harm is not central to the structural arguments, but is a supporting factor, because discrimination and harm are immediately created in every feminist marriage where women bear children “out of wedlock” and receive child support.

In Constitutional cases, “harm” is a substantial determining factor, establishing a claim of discrimination.   Existing case law has not yet tested the imminent harm that feminist marriage will unquestionably produce immediately in each case and cumulatively over time.

Assertions of future harm often place the claimant in the position of proving harm without having the future evidence to support the claim.  In this case, a tremendous body of data exists demonstrating the profound cumulative negative impacts of the welfare state on marriage.  Doubling the impact of welfare-state socioeconomic law and policy, in conjunction with the construct of feminist marriage, forces the court to acknowledge that doubling the harm already proven by existing social science is proof of substantial future longitudinal imminent harm.

• Feminist marriage will fully eviscerate the close-scrutiny Constitutional meaning of equality based on sex.  Marriage will become a lawful, discriminatory institution based on one’s ability to naturally bear a child or not, with the welfare state playing a pivotal role in marital decisions.  Assertions of “gender equality,” that might have some value in employment situations, are oppositional in marriage litigation and are either subordinate or immaterial.
• Hundreds of studies demonstrate the socioeconomic impact of the existing welfare state on the marital behavior of women and the  disaffection of men subjugated by the “plantation system.”   Doubling the welfare state will have far greater negative impact on heterosexual marriage because of very substantial economic and sexual-liberation “rights” that feminist marriage would establish.
• The impact of feminist marriage on crime and social violence over time will be profound.  Hundreds of peer-reviewed studies demonstrate that men whose behavior is not tempered by heterosexual marriage are the most likely to end up uneducated criminals earning a living in the underground economy.    Men have no pressing reason to marry each other.  Few will marry, as demonstrated by same-sex demographics in Massachusetts, where at least two-thirds of same-sex marriages are between women.
• When the welfare state was launched in 1963, the illegitimacy rate was 6% and the divorce rate was 1.4 per 1000. Today, the illegitimacy rate is 41% and the divorce rate is approximately 2.5 per 1000.  We have incontrovertible proof that the longitudinal impact of the welfare state (coupled with the feminist-inspired “divorce revolution”) has caused massive social and economic harm to the nation, the states, and their citizens.  Converting the illegitimacy metric into feminist marriage does not change the socioeconomic construct or ameliorate the known social consequences.  Feminist marriage will unquestionably drive very substantial increases in problematic social trends and taxpayer costs with which we are already besot.

I urge organizations opposing feminist marriage to fully research and litigate these points in every case and on every appeal, including “civil unions” which bear the same discriminatory design, absent religious meaning.  Opposing feminist marriage on moral and historical grounds does not directly counter the “equal rights” arguments asserted by proponents.   The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is valuable in the short term, but will eventually be defeated by proponents of feminist marriage.  Feminists will chip away at DOMA using the same collection of splatter-gun arguments that fooled seven states into implementing feminist marriage.

Corporations supporting the repeal of DOMA are making a tragic mistake supporting feminist marriage.   Feminist marriage will demolish men’s drive to be successful, motivated workers.  It will also further weaken the American job market and harm women’s employment opportunities.  Our “Competitiveness Gap” with marriage-based Asian economies will expand as men’s productivity and educational attainment continues to decline, while increasing social problems, violence, and higher taxes stimulate businesses to remove jobs overseas.

The sham of feminist marriage is now fully exposed.  Now, let us litigate, relitigate, and legislate it out of existence.

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David R. Usher is President of the Center for Marriage Policy.