Daniels led the drafting of the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment and unsuccessfully lobbied for its passage during the administration of President George W. Bush.
[4] After graduating from Penn Law, in 1996, Daniels became the director of the Massachusetts Family Institute in Boston, affiliated with social conservative activist and author James Dobson.
Daniels' work stressed the importance of fathers; he commissioned research demonstrating the negative impacts of single-mother families and advocated making divorce more difficult to obtain.
He told USA Today that he is not anti-gay, but rather, wanted to make sure that children have both a mother and father, which recognition of same-sex marriage would jeopardize.
[3] According to Daniels, the Amendment was crafted so as to prohibit same-sex marriages but allow room for civil unions and other similar arrangements, which had been established in states like California at the time.
[3] (Some co-authors disagreed; Robert George and Gerard Bradley maintained that it would also prohibit at least some forms of non-marriage unions for same-sex couples.
[3] Activists were generally more concerned with stem cell research, and the September 11 attacks further realigned political priorities away from other social issues.
Shows lost his subsequent election; Daniels then worked with Republican freshman from Colorado Marilyn Musgrave, who introduced the bill again on May 21, 2003, but it received less support than the previous year.
[3][7] The Wall Street Journal reported that most of those opposed were eventually persuaded by Daniels and Musgrave to accept the proposed amendment on the grounds that more strict prohibitions of civil unions would be politically impossible to pass.
[10] Going into the 2004 presidential elections, President Bush sought to court socially conservative voters by taking a formal stance against gay marriage while being able to position himself as a relative moderate.
Daniels vowed to continue the fight, stating that the bill had already succeeded in raising public awareness and getting politicians on the record in the run up to the 2004 elections.
The project was unrelated to his previous activism and focused on highlighting "positive role models" such as military service members, firefighters, and police officers.