Bush calls for ban on same-sex marriage

WASHINGTON - President Bush said legalizing gay marriage would redefine the most fundamental institution of civilization and that a constitutional amendment is needed.

A few activist judges and local officials have taken it on themselves to change the meaning of marriage, Bush said Saturday in his weekly radio address.

In support for an amendment, Bush said, "If courts create their own arbitrary definition of marriage as a mere legal contract, and cut marriage off from its cultural, religious and natural roots, then the meaning of marriage is lost and the institution is weakened."

His remarks followed the opening of Senate debate Friday on a constitutional amendment effectively banning gay marriage.

Bush singled out Massachusetts' Supreme Judicial Court, which called marriage an evolving paradigm. "That sends a message to the next generation that marriage has no enduring meaning, and that ages of moral teaching and human experience have nothing to teach us about this institution," he said.

The president urged the House and Senate to send to the states for ratification an amendment that defines marriage in the United States as a union of a man and woman as husband and wife.

Sen. John Kerry and running mate Sen. John Edwards oppose gay marriage, but support civil unions.

PHILADELPHIA - NAACP President Kweisi Mfume asked President Bush on Saturday to reconsider his decision against addressing the black civil rights group's convention in Philadelphia this week.

There was no immediate response from Bush, who said Friday that he would not appear because he'd been offended by barbed criticism from the NAACP's leaders.

A snub of the country's largest civil rights organization would make Bush - who last spoke to the NAACP in 2000 when he was seeking election - the first president since Herbert Hoover not to address its convention. Many delegates responded angrily to Bush's decision, some going so far as to say that it would be hailed among some factions of white voters.

Mfume, at a press conference Saturday morning at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, urged Bush to "take a higher road," then added this barb: "If as president his new mantle for dialogue is to only meet with those who agree with him, we are getting closer to the previous regime in Baghdad than we are to a democracy."

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