Although the Illinois Senate's Executive Committee voted 8 to 5 today to support a bill to legalize same-sex marriage in Illinois, the Senate adjourned without voting on the measure. According to the Chicago Tribune, the Senate's failure to take a final vote came after a furious lobbying campaign by the Catholic Conference of Illinois and Cardinal Francis George.

In testifying against the measure, Springfield Catholic Bishop Thomas John Paprocki, echoing Cardinal George's earlier attack on the bill, insisted that the proposed law "would radically redefine what marriage is for everybody" by undermining the concept of the "natural family." "Neither two men nor two women," he declared, "can possibly form a marriage," and the "law would be wrong if it said that they could." The notion that marriage is between a man and a woman, Paprocki proclaimed, "is given to us in human nature, and thus by nature's God."

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