Only once in 217 years have we allowed a purely social/personal-morality issue to sneak into the U.S. Constitution.
That also was the only time that we used the Constitution to take away the personal freedom of Americans.
The occasion was Prohibition. We ratified the 18th Amendment in 1919, which outlawed "intoxicating liquors."
We came to our senses and repealed the 18th with another amendment, the 21st, which was ratified in 1933.
The 18th and 21st amendments will remain as part of the document for all time, a pair of bookends bracketing a spasm of short-term foolishness. They look silly sitting there with all the other amendments.
The rest of the 27 amendments to our Constitution deal with two kinds of subjects: (1) the fundamental structure of the U.S. government and (2) the basic political freedom of Americans.
The first 10 amendments, of course, make up our Bill of Rights, one of the most important sets of words ever written. The Bill of Rights declares what government may not do to American citizens.
We are free to worship as we please in America, or not be forced to worship if that is our choice. We can say and print what we think. We can associate with the people we choose. We can assemble and petition and make demands on the government for redress.
The government cannot disarm the people. (Yep, I think that's what it says, but feel free to disagree.) The government can't just bash down our doors, seize our property, torture us into confessing to something we didn't do.
Women get to vote, not just the men. Not just the white people, either.
Black people, Hispanics, Catholics, Jews, Protestants - everybody has the same political rights. Our most frequent reason for amending the Constitution, in fact, has been to expand and protect the right to vote.
Perhaps the least popular amendment might be the 16th, which allows a federal income tax. And yet, they have to get the dough from someplace. (Besides, we could always repeal that one ...)
All in all, it is a pretty good set of amendments, with the exception of the 18th.
But to this list we now would add ...
Same-sex marriage!
The idea clanks off the rim like a bad foul shot. It sounds trivial. It is trivial. It is short-term, election-year foolishness.
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On top of that, the language of the same-sex amendment that has been introduced in Congress is crazy. It is almost deliberately unclear. You would think we learned something from our fights over the confusing "well-regulated militia" in the Second Amendment.
After the proposed amendment declares that marriage can only occur between a man and a woman, it adds that no court can order marital status - or the legal incidents thereof - for unmarried people.
"The legal incidents thereof."
Nobody knows what that means, or how a court could interpret it. The "legal incidents thereof" might well include health coverage, survivor benefits or existing civil-union agreements. If a state decided to take away those things, no court could rule otherwise.
This smacks of more than just trying to define "marriage." Even if the polls show most Americans oppose legal marriage by gays and lesbians, I do not believe most Americans are so mean as actually to want to hurt them.
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Finally, Americans ought to be free to live in peace as they choose. Period. As my Republican friends used to complain when the Democrats were in charge, we have too much of one bunch using the government to tell other people how to live.
If your private morality abhors same-sex relationships, then feel free to abhor it. Go for it. Your freedom is not restricted in any way.
But to use the power of government to boss around other people! What a nation of busybodies we have become. It is nobody else's business. Not yours, not mine, and most certainly, most certainly, it is not the president's.
