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By ERIN NEFF
REVIEW-JOURNAL
A constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage is necessary, Republican U.S. Senate candidate Richard Ziser said Monday, because without one there is no basis in law to prevent "those relationships."
His remarks came at the end of a civil yet spirited hourlong debate at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Boyd School of Law that asked, "Should the United States Constitution be amended to prohibit same-sex marriages?"
Ziser, the former chairman of Nevada's Coalition for the Protection of Marriage, adamantly supports such an amendment to protect the will of Nevada voters against the "actions of a rogue court."
Ziser said the successful four-year effort to amend the Nevada Constitution to define marriage as that between a man and woman was "obviously made necessary" by last week's Massachusetts Supreme Court decision that ruled a ban on gay marriage is unconstitutional.
"Massachusetts has now made it absolutely necessary for us to do what we have done," said Ziser, who led the initiative petition drive and election campaigns to amend the Nevada Constitution.
Tobias Wolff, a constitutional law professor at the University of California, Davis, who is a visiting professor at Stanford University, said it was self-evident and nonnegotiable that at least...