A Mormon Woman's Reflections on Life and the Gospel of Jesus Christ

If you’d like to nip in the bud the attempt to redefine marriage, bill by bill in Utah, please read this, and check  out Bill Duncan’s blog on the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy website.

The following is a letter from United Families, outlining the proposed legislation underway in Utah, propelled largely by Equality Utah. If you would like to have input into your own state’s direction on what is and isn’t passed and normalized, you can do so, by reading this and contacting your legislators.

In the wake of California’s proposition 8, Equality Utah has the ear of some of Utah’s most influential policy makers.  According to the Deseret news, “A group of Utah lawmakers unveiled five pieces of proposed legislation aimed at securing rights for gay couples”. If you thought this could only happen in California or on the East Coast, think again.

The first of these five bills, the Wrongful Death Amendments Bill, passed the Joint Judiciary Interim Committee on Nov. 19 with flying colors. The vote was (10-4).  Although the committee membership includes two of three openly gay state legislators, the amount of support on this committee calls for great concern. The bill is now eligible to be heard during the regular legislative session that begins on Jan 26, 2009.

Equality Utah, Utah’s gay rights organization is the impetus behind this bill. Senator Scott McCoy, one of the three openly gay Utah legislators, is the sponsor of the seemingly harmless bill. It appears harmless because it makes no explicit mention of marriage in the bill, and appeals to those living together who have no sexual relationship worthy of wrongful death benefits to make the bill palatable.

Nip It In The Bud

If we act quickly we can stifle the efforts of the anti-family groups who have persuaded our normally conservative legislature to approve this bill.  Please contact your Senator and Representative, asking them to oppose the Wrongful Death Amendment Bill and the other legislation being proposed by Equality Utah.

United Families Utah Speaks to Committee

Along with several other pro-family groups in Utah, United Families opposed the Wrongful Death Amendments Bill in the Judiciary Interim Committee meeting, stating:

“While this may seem an innocuous request, we don’t believe it is. Extending through the Wrongful Death Amendments Bill benefits and provisions designed for and due married couples and their children to non-marital, cohabiting partnerships is commensurate with elevating homosexual or consensual cohabiting relationships to legally recognized status. Once sanctioned legally, through affording benefits reserved for married couples, a precedent is set for the acquisition of additional and ultimately all benefits due married couples.”

(see UFU Complete Statement)

Many of the Judiciary Interim committee members insisted that “this bill has nothing to do with marriage” or that “marriage is not even an issue in this bill”.  But one legislator who voted in favor of the bill clarified in his closing comments, “To me, we’re talking about the benefits of two people that are living together, and for them to be able to have the same kind of benefits as those that are married.”

Wrongful Death Amendments Bill is Just Plain Wrong

Utah’s current Wrongful Death Law has been in existence for many years, allowing a surviving spouse, child, or parent to sue for compensation (above and beyond the estate or inheritance) if their family member is killed through negligence.  This bill would amend the law to give an additional heir standing before the court as well-someone who “had a mutually supportive and dependant relationship” with the decedent.

The Wrongful Death Amendments Bill chips away at the integrity of the traditional family in the following ways:

1. It gives the same benefits to two people living together, as those that are married, providing government encouragement of cohabitation. History and research confirm that “Cohabiting relationships do not provide the same intrinsic value to society that marriage offers. Governments that extend such benefits, and thus approval, are in effect subsidizing the formation of fragile family forms.”

2. It redefines “heir” to include a ‘wrongful death designee”, raising unsettling concerns such as those expressed by Representatives Curt Webb and Jim Bird. Representative Webb asked, “Now we have another person in the picture sitting at the table, how do we explain to these children, that their piece of the pie is going to be less because of this individual?”  Representative Bird noted, “If the husband leaves the wife for another woman, under the current law, the old wife has no standing because of the divorce, and the new live-in has no standing because there is no marriage.  I’m not sure I want to change that.”

3. It extends legally recognized status to cohabiting and same-sex relationships in Utah, setting a precedent for further recognition in additional laws. We agree with Representative Lori Fowlke’s observation that, “it is the beginning of a recognition of some other type of relationship that has the same kind of validity that a marriage was created for.”

Representative Fowlke continued,

“I am not unsympathetic to the issues that you raise, and I do recognize that there are significant losses by people in these types of family arrangements, and I know that those do exist, and I’ve met with those people.  However, we as a society-and this is very much a policy decision-and we as the policy makers in this state have decided that we want to do everything that we can to protect traditional marriage.  And that’s not to say we don’t recognize that other relationships exist, that we don’t recognize that sometimes there’s pain in those other relationships as well, and loss, but it’s simply to say that we believe that marriage does have a significance far beyond what you say in the courthouse or wherever you get married.” (Listen to the recording of the entire Committee meeting, including public comment.)

Some have expressed concern about opposing these issues that seem to help others.  In the Provo Herald, Senator Valentine is quoted as saying, “There is already a process in place to allow a person to grant certain powers and resources to someone outside a traditional family. Whether power of attorney or using a will, those documents trump blood relations”.

Tags: Bill Duncan, culture and Mormons, Equality Utah bills, gay Mormons, gay rights Utah, Mormons: Followers of Jesus Christ, Utah and California

This entry was posted on Friday, December 5th, 2008 at 2:18 pm and is filed under Marriage Debate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.