Marriage bill will get look this session
By Matthew Whittle
Published in News on March 12, 2007 2:00 PM
Already the protests both for and against it have begun, but state Sen. Fred Smith, R-Johnston, said that there's one thing people need to keep in mind when discussing the Defense of Marriage bill introduced last month in the Senate.
"Those people who want to say this bill is against gay people, that is not a correct statement," Smith said. "We can talk about a lot of other relationships (it affects). We can talk about a man and two women, a man and five women, a man and a child or a man and a dog.
"That bill says nothing but that marriage is between one man and one woman."
The bill, which is an act to amend the state constitution to recognize marriage as being between one man and one woman, is currently in the Senate Committee on Ways and Means.
It does, however, specify that gay marriage -- along with several other types of relationships -- would not be recognized.
Before it can become law, the bill must be approved by a three-fifths majority of each house of the state General Assembly and by a majority of the state's voters through a referendum.
And that Smith, one of the bill's co-sponsors, said, is all he's trying to do -- give the people of North Carolina the opportunity to define marriage.
"It is a positive bill. It takes marriage, as defined by statute, and gives the people the chance to vote in whether they want to move it from a statute that any future judge or general assembly can change, to a constitutional amendment that only the people can change," he said. "Every general assembly in the Southeast thought it was important enough to do that.
"All we're doing is what everybody else has done. There's a legitimate debate about what marriage should and shouldn't be, but there's no debate that the people should be allowed to decide how they want to define marriage."
But, Sen. Charlie Albertson, D-Duplin, said, the fact that nobody has challenged the decade-old law defining marriage as between one man and one woman is proof enough that an amendment is unnecessary.
"We don't need a marriage amendment," Albertson said. "There's already a law on books since '94-'95 that clearly says marriage is between a man and woman and the law is working fine."