Tag Archives: Category: Marriage and Family

CNSNews: Calling it “The Great Crossover,” a report by academics and social activists shows that for the first time in history the median age of American women having babies is lower than the median age of marriage – 25.7 and 26.5, respectively.

Family Research Council: Just two days ago, news outlets were plastering its poll results of “record” backing for same-sex “marriage” on their websites–only to see the support vanish as quickly as it appeared. Today, the Reuters Corporation released the results of an even bigger poll than the Post’s and found that only 41% of America supports the case being made by Ted Olson and David Boies at the Supreme Court.

Matthew J. Franck at National Review: At the Daily Beast and the Jewish Daily Forward, writer Jay Michaelson has been touting a “report” he has published this week under the auspices of a Massachusetts-based outfit calling itself Political Research Associates.  The product of a little research, a fevered imagination, and extremely sloppy thinking, Michaelson’s report is titled “Redefining Religious Liberty: The Covert Campaign Against Civil Rights.”  His targets are the “right-wing” groups making what he claims are dangerous and disingenuous arguments on behalf of religious freedom.  These groups include the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and the Alliance Defending Freedom, among others.

Catholic Register: As the Supreme Court prepares to consider the issue, some prominent Republicans publicly support a redefinition to include same-sex unions.

Alexander Volokh at Reason Foundation: Contracting with a private corporation to deliver an activity may alter the labor-management relations regime and the ADA regime but not the RLUIPA regime. The constitutional state-action regime may be unchanged with respect to the population served, but may be radically different with respect to hiring and firing decisions. What other regimes are altered may also depend on what conditions the contractor committed to fulfill in its contract. How, then, do we define “public” vs. “private,” “government” vs. “private sector,” “instrumentality of government” vs. “mere contractor”, “state actor” vs. “private actor”? We don’t. Each of these terms is a shorthand designating a broad set of attributes, and contracting out is all about exploring the limits of these concepts. For any given statute or constitutional provision, different rules might be appropriate in different contexts.

Religion Clause Blog: Publicly funded child-care agencies and foster homes across the state also will be barred from placing religious items in children’s rooms without their consent, and religious materials will be given only to children who request them.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: As American public opinion appears to shift in favor of gay marriage and the Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments on the issue next week, a major medical organization has weighed in, saying same-sex couples should be allowed to wed and calling it “the best way to guarantee benefits and security for their children.” | Pediatrics: Promoting the Well-Being of Children Whose Parents Are Gay or Lesbian

David Limbaugh at Newsmax: For the first time, I am wondering about the long-term viability of the Republican Party. I say this not as an advocate of its demise or restructuring but as an observer of troubling signs.

Doug Mainwaring at Public Discourse: Just as chess requires players to seriously consider every possible consequence of their moves, we need to seriously consider every possible consequence of the push for same-sex marriage, especially for children.

CNSNews: As for Senator Portman, his announcement hasn’t exactly been popular with either Ohio party, so far. Reports suggest that the calls flooding into his office are 60 percent opposed to the Senator’s new position.

SCOTUS Blog: Renewing the argument that the Supreme Court should pass up the opportunity to rule now on the constitutionality of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, a Court-appointed legal adviser on Wednesday suggested that it would not be long before the issue would come up again in a proper case. Harvard law professor Vicki C. Jackson, in a reply brief, argued anew that neither the federal government nor the Republican leaders of the House of Representatives have brought a proper case to the Court.

NY Times: They hear that their cause is lost, that demographics and the march of history have doomed their campaign to keep marriage only between a man and a woman. But the young conservatives who oppose same-sex marriage — unlike most of their generation — remain undaunted.

Ryan T. Anderson at Washington Post: What is marriage? Why does it matter for policy? Reflecting on these questions reveals why there’s nothing “equal” about redefining marriage to eliminate sexual complementarity, which has been the foundation of marriage throughout history.

Robert P. George and Sherif Girgis and Ryan T. Anderson at CNN: But marriage is far more than your emotional bond with “your Number One person,” to quote same-sex marriage proponent John Corvino. Just as the act that makes marital love also makes new life, so marriage itself is a multilevel — bodily as well as emotional — union that would be fulfilled by procreation and family life. That is what justifies its distinctive norms — monogamy, exclusivity, permanence — and the concept of marital consummation by conjugal intercourse.

Reuters: Fifty-five percent of those surveyed said married gay and lesbian couples should be able to qualify for Social Security survivor payments and other benefits provided to married heterosexual couples, according to Reuters/Ipsos polling of 2,886 people between March 5 and March 14.

Christian Science Monitor (includes video): House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner said on Sunday he cannot imagine ever supporting gay marriage even though Sen. Rob Portman, his friend and fellow Ohio Republican, very publicly reversed his opposition last week.

LifeSiteNews: Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus has decided that the way for his party to win over voters is to parrot the Left’s policies,” said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins. By courting young voters, he said, “Priebus would be betting the future of the GOP on a bloc who barely votes, while alienating the millions of social conservatives who do.”

AP: Arizona lawmakers have jumped in to the national debate over the rights of transgender people with a bill being debated Wednesday that would make it illegal for people to use public restrooms not associated with their birth gender.

Christian Post: Austin Nimocks, an attorney for Alliance Defending Freedom who will serve as co-counsel defending Proposition 8 during oral arguments at the Supreme Court, agreed. “Those arguing for same-sex marriage in the Supreme Court are arguing that same-sex marriage is a fundamental right in the U.S. Constitution, which means that it is deeply rooted in our country’s history and traditions,” Nimocks said. “Our argument is very simple – that’s not true. “You can’t find in the history of our country and our Constitution a deeply rooted tradition and history of same-sex marriage. Marriage is what it has always been, since the beginning of time. The Supreme Court has acknowledged marriage 14 times in its prior jurisprudence. It has rejected a claim for same-sex marriage already, back in the 70s. And so, in no circumstances can our opponents make the constitutional case that same-sex marriage is a fundamental right in the U.S. Constitution.”

SCOTUS Blog: The Supreme Court on Friday afternoon released the list of lawyers who will argue in the two-week sitting that begins on Monday, including the line-up of attorneys who will argue the same-sex marriage cases in the second week of that sitting. The schedule for the marriage cases appears below the jump

CBN (includes video): Alliance Defending Freedom attorney Austin Nimocks is on the legal team defending traditional marriage before the High Court. “Marriage is what it has always been since the beginning of time: the union of a man and a woman,” he said. “That’s how the Supreme Court has acknowledged marriage 14 times in its prior jurisprudence.” But if the pro-gay side triumphs, Nimocks said what’s at stake is whether the American people themselves get to have the final say about what marriage is “or whether the Supreme Court is going to impose a radical new definition of marriage upon all 50 states and the four U.S. territories.” “Americans want to engage in this debate,” he continued. “We’ve been doing it for the last 10 years.” “Americans care about this, and what we need is for the Supreme Court to keep its hands off marriage right now,” he said. “Let Americans continue to debate this through our democratic institutions.”

SCOTUS Blog: Lawyers for the sponsors of California’s Proposition 8 ban on same-sex marriage suggested in a new Supreme Court filing on Tuesday that their case might be sent back to the state supreme court to further analyze their right to defend that measure’s constitutionality.

Dean Kalahar at American Thinker: The homosexual agenda once took a covert route to incrementally gain approval with small victories that flew under the radar of common sense. Today, the movement has bought into its own myth and now brazenly injects itself into every corner of the culture to create the appearance of normalcy. Even so, 31 states do not grant any form of legal recognition to same sex couples, and 44 out of the 50 states do not allow for same-sex marriage. The Federal government has never had a law sanctioning same sex marriage.

The Pearcey Report: Admittedly, the phrase “marriage equality” functions as highly effective PR. After all, who wants to stand against marriage? And who could possibly protest against equality? Therefore “marriage equality” seems like a win-win. Yet, a critical distance allows one to see beyond the PR and to realize that the kind of “equality” promoted in “marriage equality” is alien in theory, and inferior in results, to the genuinely liberating concept of “created equal” we find planted in the Declaration of Independence.

The HIll: If the Republican party “abandons marriage evangelicals will either sit the elections out completely — or move to create a third party,” said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council. “Either option puts Republicans on the path to a permanent minority.”

Boston Globe: The Supreme Court will release audio recordings of next week’s arguments in two gay marriage cases just a few hours after they conclude.

Kay Hymowitz, W. Bradford Wilcox And Kelleen Kaye at Wall Street Journal: For many Americans, the phrase “young single mother” conjures up a picture of a teenage high-school dropout. But that image is out of date. Teen pregnancy rates have been declining for two decades now. Today’s typical unmarried mother is a high-school graduate in her early 20s who may very well be living with her child’s father.

KTLA.com (includes video): Some students at a school in Hesperia say they’re being bullied, and they say those bullies are their teachers and administrators.

Brown Daily Herald: The Senate Judiciary committee will meet Thursday to hear two same-sex marriage bills, including one that would legalize same-sex marriage — the Senate version of the bill that passed the House in January.

The Atlantic: This was the most shocking statistic I read this weekend: 58 percent of first births in lower-middle-class households are now to unmarried women. Meanwhile, two in five of all births are to unwed mothers, an all-time high, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

American Federation for Children: The American Federation for Children—the nation’s voice for educational choice— today applauded the hundreds of Louisiana parents, grandparents, and education reform advocates who traveled across the state to gather outside of the Louisiana Supreme Court in New Orleans to show their support of the Louisiana Scholarship Program.

Washington Post: That rapid change — particularly on what had long been a divisive social issue — is remarkable in an age of politics where the entrenchment of the two parties seems close to permanent. And, it begs the question: What the heck happened? The answer comes in two parts — one well understood, the other less so.

Raw Story: In a legal memo, City Attorney Geno Zamara explained that the state’s definite of marriage was gender-neutral and therefore did not prohibit same-sex marriage. He also noted that the constitution of New Mexico prohibits denying equality under the law on the basis of sex.

NY Times: Ban on Gay Marriage Led Lawyers to Shift Role
John C. Eastman, a law professor at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., and the chairman of the National Association for Marriage, which opposes same-sex marriage, said government officials in the two cases had demonstrated “a cavalier attitude toward their duties to enforce the law.” He was particularly critical of Mr. Herrera’s suit, which followed a brief period in 2004 during which Gavin Newsom, then the mayor of San Francisco and now the state’s lieutenant governor, instructed city officials here to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. “It was exhibiting lawlessness,” Professor Eastman said.

CNSNews: The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded $2.7 million to study why lesbians are at a higher “risk for hazardous drinking.” The University of Illinois has received grants since 2009 for its project, “Cumulative Stress and Hazardous Drinking in a Community of Adult Lesbians” . . .

Religion Clause Blog: Oral arguments are scheduled for March 26 in Hollingsworth v. Perry, and on March 27 in United States v. Windsor. These dates are the first two days of Passover– holidays in the Jewish calendar on which traditional Jews abstain from work.

David Cortman on the Zeb Bell Show. Related Alliance Defending Freedom press release. | MP3 audio 11:30 mins

Baptist Press (Alliance Defending Freedom video embedded): A prominent Christian legal group is urging believers nationwide to pray as the U.S. Supreme Court gets ready to decide the legal definition of marriage . . . Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which has been heavily involved in defending the traditional definition of marriage, is in the midst of a “nine weeks of prayer for marriage” initiative that includes weekly downloadable printouts naming attorneys and Supreme Court justices for whom to pray.

Yahoo News: In the annals of the Most Disastrous Shows Ever, there is a new entry. Folk-rock singer Michelle Shocked had the plug pulled on her concert Sunday night after launching into an anti-gay-marriage speech that led most of the audience to walk out.

NCPA Policy Digest: There is substantial evidence that choice raises the quality of education in public, charter and private schools and improves educational outcomes. Arizona is a national leader on school choice, says Jonathan Butcher, education director at the Goldwater Institute.

Defenders of California’s constitutional amendment protecting marriage filed a reply brief with the U.S. Supreme Court Tuesday that concisely answers the arguments of those attacking the amendment. The brief is the final one that will be filed before oral arguments scheduled for March 26 in Hollingsworth v. Perry.

MO Family Policy Council: “The wisest course is for the Supreme Court to resist demands to prematurely end the national debate over the future of marriage,” says Austin Nimocks, who filed one of the pro-Proposition 8 briefs on behalf of the Alliance Defending Freedom. “Californians voted for marriage, and the court should respect their freedom to affirm the fundamental building block of our society.” “Marriage between a man and a woman is a bedrock social institution that diverse cultures and faiths have honored throughout the history of Western Civilization,” Nimocks continues. “The freedom of the people to uphold this vital institution should not be taken away.” . . . The Family Research Council has produced an excellent bulletin insert about the marriage issue which we strongly encourage you to use in your local church to promote awareness and prayer for this event. It can be downloaded by using the following link. You will find it as the first item listed under “Resources” on the web page: Stand for Marriage Bulletin Insert

Selwyn Duke at American Thinker: In another case in the annals of conservative “adaptation” to yesterday’s liberal innovation, Ohio Republican senator Rob Portman has just announced that he now supports faux marriage. The change was motivated, he said, by his son having come out to him and his wife as a homosexual. Well, it’s a good thing his son didn’t announce that he was involved in bestiality.

George F. Will at Washington Post: When on March 26 the Supreme Court hears oral arguments about whether California’s ban on same-sex marriages violates the constitutional right to “equal protection of the laws,” these arguments will invoke the intersection of law and social science. The court should tread cautiously, if at all, on this dark and bloody ground.

Nathaniel Frank at Slate: “His rejection of the social science on gay marriage is incoherent, embarrassing, and anti-gay.”

Michael Barone at National Review: If opinion continues to move toward same-sex marriage, it will be a tough issue for Republicans, since most of their voters currently are opposed. But it will be a tough issue for some Democrats as well, since many black voters are staunchly opposed.

Vincent Carroll at the Denver Post: Tolerance may be the most admired virtue in America today — but it remains notably difficult for many to practice. Even those most effusive in their praise for tolerance sometimes resort to raw power to silence or marginalize those whose speech or behavior they dislike. And so we witnessed last week the spectacle of the Colorado Senate passing a civil unions bill while refusing to include a serious religious exemption to protect freedom of conscience.

Erik Stanley at Speak Up Movement: Forcing churches to stop hosting Scout troops is a big step in the process of sidelining churches. And we’ve seen enough attempts to render the Church irrelevant in the community.

NY Times: In December, however, when Coy, 6, was a few months into the first grade, the Mathises angrily pulled her out of school after being told that she could no longer use the girls’ bathroom but could instead use a gender-neutral restroom.

Matt Sharp at Alliance Defending Freedom:  For generations, the Scouts have represented the essence of what makes America great: our belief in God, our self-determination, our service to others, and a shared set of moral values. Among these values is the belief that open homosexuality is incompatible with being “morally straight.”

AP: Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced her support for gay marriage Monday, putting her in line with other potential Democratic presidential candidates on a social issue that is rapidly gaining public approval.

Ryan T. Anderson at Heritage Foundation (includes Jim DeMint video): Working with the National Organization for Marriage, the Alliance Defending Freedom, and the Family Research Council, Heritage has produced a short pamphlet making the case for marriage in everyday language. It helps you articulate what your heart knows.

SCOTUS Blog: The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to let an Obama administration lawyer take part in the argument on March 26 on the constitutionality of California’s Proposition 8 ban on same-sex marriage in that state.

AP on Google: “The idea that a major political party must accept the practice of homosexuality as normal so as to remain relevant will prove the contrary and lead to disaster,” said John Horvat II, a Catholic scholar. And Jenny Beth Martin, national coordinator for the Tea Party Patriots, faulted Washington GOP establishment leaders for the November losses, saying they strayed from the conservative message. “Americans and those in the tea party movement don’t need an ‘autopsy’ report from RNC to know they failed to promote our principles and lost because of it,” she said.

Think Progress: This is the old “fatherless” canard, in which the conclusions from studies about single mothers are used to argue against committed lesbian parents, even though not one of these “fatherless” studies included a same-sex couple. If Will had thoroughly read the full decision he cites here (notably via a link on the conservative Alliance Defending Freedom’s website), he would have seen that Lamb clarified this very point in his testimony.

Carson Holloway at Public Discourse: We cannot embrace same-sex marriage and live in continuity with our past as a civilization. To embrace it is to deny that tradition, revelation, reason, and nature have any authority over us.

LifeSiteNews: Reporters in the liberal media had a rare fit of bipartisanship recently when they learned some Republicans had signed a brief with the Supreme Court supporting same-sex “marriage.” A veritable avalanche of stories proclaimed this tiny group the new chiefs of the Republican Party.a

Thomas White at Baptist Press: But we haven’t told our kids about all the consequences — emotion and physical. Abortions leave one dead and one wounded. Extramarital sex (and pornography) leaves emotional scars that affect intimacy in marriage for years to come

Baptist Press: Altering the Boy Scouts of America’s longstanding national membership policy to allow homosexuals would undermine a Supreme Court decision in the organization’s favor and expose the Scouts to a “flood of litigation,” Alliance Defending Freedom has warned in a letter to Scout leadership.

Public Opinion: The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania has agreed to give Chambersburg Area School District an extension amounting to three more business days to reverse a decision that blocked a Gay-Straight Alliance from forming at Chambersburg Area Senior High School.

We cannot hope to limit government if we do not stand up for our core civil society institutions, beginning with marriage.

LifeSiteNews: [Bishop Jean Laffitte, Secretary of the Pontifical Council for the Family] . . . affirmed what many in the pro-family movment have long believed, that the push for “gay marriage” is not coming exclusively from homosexual lobbyists, but from a more sinister international cadre of highly placed secularist social engineers seeking a radical alteration of the foundational ideas of Western Civilization.

Christian Institute: Voters are fed up with change for the sake of change, like the plans to redefine marriage, writer and political commentator Frederick Forsyth says. That’s why people of all classes are casting their votes outside the three main political parties, Mr Forsyth says in his column for the Daily Express.

CNN: The placement of a hand or positioning of the groom contains assumptions about physicality and gender roles that often don’t apply to same-sex couples or even nontraditional straight couples.

GLAD: GLAD initially filed the lawsuit, known as Doe v. Clenchy, after officials at an Orono elementary school denied our client the use of the girls’ restroom and other facilities and restricted her participation in school activities. The school had previously allowed Doe to use the girls’ restroom without incident until one of her male classmates began making it an issue with coaching from his grandfather. Doe also suffered a campaign of harassment and bullying for over two school years at the hands of this classmate, whom the school failed to discipline

Defenders of marriage need some entrepreneurial thinking. America has been governed by no-fault divorce, illegitimacy, and disordered desires of every kind for two generations; there are fewer and fewer people around who even remember living in a world where the Christian position was the default. We need to stop imagining real marriage is like the Apple of 2013—assuming we are the dominant entity and our opponents are upstarts trying to displace us from our position at the top.

Ryan Anderson at Heritage Foundation: Redefining marriage would further distance marriage from the needs of children. It would deny as a matter of policy the ideal that a child needs a mom and a dad. We know that children tend to do best when raised by a mother and a father. The confusion resulting from further delinking childbearing from marriage would force the state to intervene more often in family life and cause welfare programs to grow even more.

Wall Street Journal (via Google): Chief Justice John Roberts preserved one of President Barack Obama’s main legacies—and helped forge his own—by largely upholding the president’s health-care law last year. Now, the two leaders’ places in history are entwined again, as the Supreme Court prepares to hear two gay-marriage cases later this month.

Washington Blade: A Maryland state Senate committee on Thursday struck down a bill that would have banned anti-transgender discrimination in housing, employment and public accommodation. The 6-5 vote in the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee came slightly more than two weeks after it held a hearing on Senate Bill 44 . . .

American Spectator: Other pro-family groups have been collecting petitions and urging the BSA to stand firm. The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which litigates in defense of religious freedom, has recently warned BSA that its proposed local option would potentially remove protection that courts have given BSA’s national policy. Absent a clear national standard, ADF warns, BSA would be vulnerable to litigation. “It is not legally necessary for BSA to sacrifice its history or its principles in the face of growing threats,” ADF told BSA in its appeal.

Baptist Press on Opposing Views: Even a neutral national policy that leaves membership decisions to local councils and troops would endanger the organization, ADF said, because the Boy Scouts “then will have no common message upon which to base their right to freedom of expressive association.” . . . However, to ensure ongoing protection for its national policy under the First Amendment, BSA should take steps to regulate or disassociate itself from these groups,” ADF said. “In sum, consistency is key. Organizations that strive to maintain a consistency of their message by selecting members and participants based on a shared set of values typically have their First Amendment free association rights affirmed.”

KHASTV.com (includes Kellie in video): Thursday lawmakers got together to debate an issue that’s faced a number of Nebraska cities lately and it is now hitting a state level – workplace discrimination based on gender or sexual orientation . . . “This bill fails to protect the First Amendment freedoms. Instead, it seeks to confine religious freedom in particular to the four walls of a church or a place of worship,” said Kellie Fiedorek, Alliance Defending Freedom.

Baptist Press at Townhall: “The institution of marriage is the foundation of society, and on March 26-27, the public purpose of marriage will be at stake before the United States Supreme Court in two equally but critical cases to potentially reaffirm or redefine marriage in America,” ADF’s Alan Sears, president and CEO, says in a video at the website. “We’re asking you, your friends, family, neighbors and church community, to join Alliance Defending Freedom and our allies in faithfully praying … for different people and different things leading up to the Supreme Court arguments.”