6/08/2006

World Congress of Families Disappointed by Senate Vote on Marriage Amendment

NEWS ADVISORY, June 7 /Christian Newswire/ -- World Congress of Families organizer Dr. Allan Carlson expressed “extreme disappointment” over the Senate’s failure to approve the Marriage Protection Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. An attempt to end a filibuster failed. Only 49 Senators supported the amendment, far short of the two-thirds needed to approve a Constitutional amendment.

“The Senate has once again evaded its responsibility to defend the institution of marriage,” Carlson commented. “Opponents asked why supporters were wasting the Senate’s time with a ‘politically motivated’ measure, with war raging in Iraq and the price of oil at over $3.00 a barrel – as if preserving traditional marriage and the natural family was something of little consequence.”

Carlson reminds us that the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (adopted in 1948) recognizes the right of “men and women” – and men and women alone -- “to marry and to found a family.”

The Declaration states, “The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and entitled to protection by society and the State.”

Carlson: “This suggests that the United States government has an absolute duty to keep the courts from defining marriage out of existence, as the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court did three years ago, when it forced gay marriage on the state.”

Carlson noted that, in March, a commission established by the President of the French National Assembly recommended against extending marriage to same-sex couples in France. Its report declared that the interests of children are paramount here, that “marriage is not merely the contractual recognition of the love between a couple; it is a framework that implies rights and duties, and is designed to provide for the care and harmonious development of the child.”

Still, Carlson warned that European Union bureaucrats are trying to effect the same radical change sought by some judges here. In May, the EU ordered member states to facilitate gay marriages contracted in other EU countries.

Protecting marriage from the assault of social engineers – in the bureaucracy or on the bench – will be high on the agenda of World Congress of Families IV, when it convenes in Warsaw, Poland May 11-13, 2006.

For more information on the World Congress of Families, go to www.worldcongress.org .

What is the World Congress of Families? -- In response to a militantly anti-family ethos prevalent in the ‘post modern’ West, the World Congress of Families fosters an international network of pro-family organizations, scholars, and leaders that seeks to restore the natural family as the fundamental social unit and the ‘seed bed’ of a civil society. To date, there have been three World Congresses of Families – Prague (1997), Geneva (1999) and Mexico City (2004). WCF IV will be in Warsaw, Poland, May 11- 13, 2007.