Headline: Washington Post, 7/27/2022 (excerpt below)
The Respect for Marriage Act, a bill that would enshrine the right to same-sex and interracial marriage in federal law, is only four short pages long. (Using a smaller font and wider margin, it fits on a single page; see below.) Yet in the week since the House passed the measure on a bipartisan vote and Democratic leaders indicated they planned to put it on the Senate floor, few Republican senators have found the time to read it — or so they said Tuesday.
WaPo excerpt:
The reality is, senators have little trouble understanding what the bill does: It repeals the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act and requires states to extend “full faith and credit” to any marriage between two people, regardless of the “sex, race, ethnicity, or national origin of those individuals” — mirroring the action that the Supreme Court took in the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision that legalized same-sex marriages nationally.
The complicated part is the politics: Despite the fact that 7 in 10 Americans now approve of same-sex marriage, the issue remains a fraught one for Republicans. They still count the religiously intolerantrightas a key part of their electoral coalition, and they remain wary of being baited by Democrats into highlighting what some of them believe is a purely speculative threat to same-sex marriage rights nationally when Republicans would much rather be talking about rising inflation and a softening economy.
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