The Pennsylvania Legislature is facing a lot of unfinished business. Property tax relief goes unfulfilled, school districts have inequitable funding, public transit agencies struggle to get by.

But what are real problems stacked against the imagined threat of gays who might marry?

Two Republican House members, Scott W. Boyd of Lancaster and Daryl Metcalfe of Cranberry, want to change the state constitution so that marriage absolutely and positively is defined as the union between one man and one woman. We say absolutely and positively because it is already defined that way -- Pennsylvania has had an anti-gay marriage law since 1996.

Predictably, the bill's supporters fear that activist judges, those boogie men of the right, will overturn the law. To be sure, a judge in Maryland did that last week, but this is Pennsylvania, where Republicans are the majority on the Supreme Court. This commonwealth doesn't need to write bigotry into its constitution in the name of misplaced morality.

The constitutional amendment is being offered as House Bill 2381 and, to their shame, 89 co-sponsors have signed on for a chance to do something negative at the expense of gay people, as always a safe group to pick on.

The wording, however, invites trouble from activist judges of a reactionary stripe. Not content simply to define marriage as being between a man and a woman, the proposed amendment goes on to say that "neither the commonwealth nor any of its political subdivisions shall create or recognize a legal status identical or substantially equivalent to that of marriage for unmarried individuals."

As Rep. Dan Frankel, a Squirrel Hill Democrat, correctly points out, the amendment could threaten the rights of adoptive parents, as well as undermine health coverage, medical decision-making and inheritance rights. It could even affect senior citizens who do not marry their partners.

This threat is more than theoretical: Ohio passed a similarly worded amendment in 2004 and triggered legal arguments about whether this overturned domestic-violence law.

Throughout America, there are gay couples who live in loving and stable relationships, often with children. These Americans threaten nobody else's marriage and yet they suffer discrimination in fundamental ways. They can be denied the right to visit a partner or a partner's child in the hospital or have access to a partner in a medical emergency. They can even be told that they can't arrange for the final disposition of a partner's body.

This heartbreaking unfairness is addressed in House Bill 2840, which is sponsored by Rep. Frankel. It handles a real problem in a compassionate way. Rather than tinker shamefully with the constitution, members of the Legislature should support this bill -- and reject the negative for the positive.