Americans are pro-family. Therefore, through our government, we have defined a legal status that bestows family members with certain legal rights and responsibilities. Borrowing from our religious nomenclature, our government used the term "marriage" to designate this legal status. But this legal term does not replace or equate to the religious term.

This legal status is important to families and the children raised in them. According to the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, 1,138 federal statutory provisions use legal marital status in determining legal benefits, rights, and privileges (http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d04353r.pdf). Children who are members of a state-recognized "family" can obtain health insurance if one of their parents' employers provides family coverage. They can receive social security benefits in the event of death or disability of either parent. Either parent could authorize medical care for them in an emergency. The list goes on and on.

There are at least a million American children, perhaps over ten million, who are being raised in gay families. The Legislature's amendment would constitutionally deny hundreds of legal benefits to thousands upon thousands of Wisconsin children. Shamefully, these benefits are already denied by state law. The amendment would enshrine this discrimination in our most fundamental legal document, our Constitution. It would also ban civil unions, a compromise status that would give at least some of the rights of marriage to gay families.

I have six grandchildren who are being raised in a loving family headed by two moms. Why should they be constitutionally denied the rights enjoyed by other children?

To those pushing this hateful agenda, I ask, "Why do you hate my grandchildren? Perhaps you believe my daughter sins. But are you so free of sin that you may cast the first stone, not only at my daughter, but also at the children she and her partner are working so hard to raise?"

When our country was founded, the full rights of citizenship were extended only to white, land-owning men. Over time, we extended these rights not just to the powerful, but also to the least among us. Our original federal Constitution defined a slave as 3/5 of a person. The 13th amendment freed the slaves, and the 14th provided all persons with "the equal protection of all the laws."

It's disgraceful that we should consider denying American citizens who have never done us harm equal protection under the law. The amendment goes even further: it would persecute their children.

We shall always have bigots among us, those who hate anyone different from themselves. But there are those whose motives are even more disgraceful, those who fan the flames of bigotry, who use hate and fear to turn citizen against citizen merely to consolidate their own power. It was such people who, in Germany in 1929, claimed that the Jews were leading the movement to decriminalize homosexuality in an attempt to undermine the morality of the German people. It was, in fact, those making these claims who undermined morality.