Tag Archives: Category: Marriage and Family

Austin Ruse at C-FAM: Homosexual advocates seem obsessed by a social science study that goes against them. They say the research is unimportant but can’t stop talking about it.

Christopher C. Roberts at First Things: Consider: If marriage is grounded in the procreative potential of sexual difference, then it is grounded in something prior to the human will, and therefore prior to positive law. If marriage is the way we humanize and acculturate mammalian mating, then marriage has a rationale with which government interacts but which government does not invent.

Kristina Johannes at The Catholic Thing: Rarely, however, is parental choice seen as the social justice issue that it is. Instead, what we hear is the old argument that parents who choose parochial or other private schools are separating themselves from the public – and by extension – the common good; an argument that even the Ku Klux Klan used to its advantage in the 1920s.

Delaware Online: “If you promise to do your part and to assure that the marriage equality bill reaches my desk this year, I make a promise to you. I will sign it.”

Clarion Ledger has posted this report with a map and data from the UCLA Williams Institute.

KOLOTV.com: SJR13 was approved Thursday on a 3-2 party line vote by the Senate Committee on Legislative Operations and Elections. It now goes to the Senate floor.

Jessica Valenti at The Nation: Conservatives need to understand that what they’re pushing for is an impossible sell: Women’s subservience to the domestic as a cultural grounding force, while men get to work and explore and create? No thank you. We don’t want the good of society on our relationships’ shoulders.

Daily Herald: What is the definition of marriage? Is marriage simply the deep, emotional relationship of two people or does it go beyond that? Authors Sherif Girgis, Ryan Anderson and Robert George say that the answers to these questions are at the heart of the gay marriage debate, not equality.

Delaware Online: Democratic lawmakers will introduce legislation today to legalize same-sex marriage in Delaware, a measure proponents have aggressively sought in recent months and are determined to make law before the close of this year’s General Assembly session.

Bradley Abramson at Townhall: In the American Declaration of Independence, our Founding Fathers proclaimed that we are endowed by our Creator with the unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness. Unfortunately, we have long forgotten what our Founders meant by that now iconic phrase—“the pursuit of happiness”—and, as a consequence, we are now in jeopardy of losing the very liberty our Founders purchased for us at the risk of their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.

Daniel Kuebler at Public Discourse: There are two problems with this type of reasoning. First, it’s questionable whether sexual orientation is biologically determined. Second, even if genetic and developmental factors cause one to have same-sex attractions, it does not follow that one’s biology should determine one’s behavior, much less dictate one’s morality.

Tufts Daily: Tufts Democrats and Tufts Republicans last Thursday joined the leaders of 49 other collegiate Democrat and Republican organizations in a statement supporting marriage equality for LGBTQ couples.

KECNTV.com: Under the current “Romeo and Juliet” defense, both sexual partners are legally protected as long as they’re older than 14 and within three years of age of each other. But that protection doesn’t apply to homosexual teens.

Missoulian: After a half-hour of emotional debate, both for and against the measure, the House voted 64-36 to endorse Senate Bill 107 – one day after House members narrowly voted to remove it from the House Judiciary Committee, where it had been tabled on a party-line vote with Republicans in favor.

AP: The Senate Governance and Finance Committee voted 5 to 2 to move the first-of-its-kind bill to the Senate Appropriations Committee for review.

Ken Blackwell at Townhall: We can all agree that the topic of same-sex marriage draws intense emotions from both sides. But those emotions do not justify branding people who disagree with us as liars or bigots. That’s a cheap way to silence dissenters, when there is real and substantive debate to be had. It’s also a grave insult to honest, truth-seeking individuals, and a violation of the principles of American society. All people should be free to explore and define their beliefs. And all should be free to speak, act, vote and advocate according to their beliefs.

American Independent via Huffington Post: In addition to NOM, the brochure’s listed sponsors included the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Family Research Council, and the Heritage Foundation, all social conservative groups based in Washington, D.C. The first “consequence[] of redefining marriage” listed in the brochure is that, “Redefining marriage would hurt children. Decades of social science – including very recent and robust studies – show that children do better when raised by a married mom and dad.” The endnotes cited Regnerus’ New Family Structures Study findings to support this claim.

SCOTUS Blog has posted its most recent Petitions to watch. Alliance Alert readers may find a couple of cases of particular interest.

CBN: Senator Rand Paul: “I think it’s important that people know that for the country to get better it needs more than just politicians. Politicians aren’t enough and it needs resurgence through churches, through revivals through a spiritual cleansing of the people.”

News9.com: Two freshman Democratic senators from conservative states, Joe Donnelly of Indiana and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, have joined the growing chorus of lawmakers who say they support gay marriage.

Newson6.com: The House approved the resolution Monday on an 84-0 vote. House Democratic Leader Scott Inman and openly gay Rep. Kay Floyd of Oklahoma City were among more than half of the chamber’s 29 Democrats who walked out of the chamber instead of voting.

Patheos: I have to admit that even I didn’t see this coming. As you read this, try to remember that homosexual couples aren’t infertile. It is simply physically impossible for them to procreate. But if gay marriage is, in fact, equal to marriage, then this is the kind of thing that no one will be able to stop.

CNSNews: Sen. Rand Paul (R- Ky.) said keeping the same-sex marriage debate at the state level will allow supporters of traditional marriage to turn public opinion that he said is shifting to the other side.

NPR: The court could, as some predict, strike down the section of the law banning federal recognition of same-sex marriages but leave unsettled questions related to state recognition of such unions. If that happens, health coverage problems for same-sex couples could persist, say advocates.

Jonathan Capehart at Washington Post: “I’m a lot, like other people said, my views have evolved on this. But my state has a very strong constitutional amendment against gay marriage, and I think I have to honor that,” Landrieu said. Wait. So, she believes that same-sex couples should be able to marry, but because her state has etched discrimination into its Constitution, she cannot be on the right side of the issue and of history? She can’t show some leadership?

Huffington Post: Here’s why: As the combat exclusion for women comes to an end and open service for gay, lesbian and bisexual Americans edges closer to truly equal service, it becomes more and more obvious that there is no longer any rational basis on which to bar qualified transgender people from serving in our armed forces.

5 News Online: I am opposed to gay marriage,” he said in an e-mail. “In the interview with KFSM done on April 5, I also discussed whether gay couples should receive benefits if they work for the federal government. On the benefits issue, I said to ‘put me down in the undecided category.

LA Times: Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts who supports gay marriage has asked the Federal Election Commission to determine whether gay couples have the right to make joint contributions to political candidates.

Washington Times: The CNN/ORC poll released Monday showed that 52 percent of Americans approve of Mr. Obama’s policies toward gays and lesbians, while 42 percent disapprove.

Huffington Post: Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) is not joining the ranks of his fellow senators who have come out in recent days and endorsed marriage equality. But he is backing civil unions for same-sex couples, saying he believes it could be a way to preserve “traditional marriage” for heterosexual couples.

Christian Post: Long-time evangelical Left leader Jim Wallis, founder and CEO of Sojourners, has changed his position on government recognition of same-sex marriage. He announced his support in a Friday interview with The Huffington Post.

National Journal: Call it Rainbow Spring, where lawmakers are coming out in support of gay marriage faster than raindrops refract colors across the land. (Note: It rather could be colored purple, red, or pink — see The Atlantic’s brief history of color use in LGBT-rights campaigns).

Chicago Tribune: State Rep. Ed Sullivan Jr. of Mundelein said Sunday he will support a bill to allow gay marriage in Illinois, becoming the second House Republican to do so and first among leadership.

AP: South Dakota Sen. Tim Johnson says he now supports legalizing gay marriage.

NECN: New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez is drawing criticism from a liberal advocacy group for vetoing legislation that would have required the state to expedite the occupational and professional licenses of domestic partners of gay military members.

Liberty News: The headline for the Daily Mail article focuses on David Epstein’s equation of sex with his biological daughter with homosexual sex, but I was stunned by the admission that a member of the Political Science staff at Columbia was having sex with his adult child . . .

First Things: Studies compete for the most accurate representation of the risk to a marriage posed by living together before the wedding, but most estimations predict somewhere around a 33 percent increased risk of divorce. Regardless of magnitude, however, they all claim the same thing: that premarital cohabitation is highly correlated with unsuccessful marriages.

Wesley J. Smith at National Review: Leave it to my state of California to head off in radical and expensive directions. Legislation has been filed that would require group insurance to cover gay and lesbian infertility treatments just as they do heterosexual. But, as I note elsewhere, AB 460 . . .

Newsbusters: Melissa Harris-Perry declaring in an ad that we must “break through” the “private notion” that “your kid is yours” because “kids belong to whole communities” is an outrage. This isn’t what Mediaite called “a collection of tired progressive cliches on steroids.” This is shredding the notion of family, replacing it with the commands of the state.

Religion Clause Blog: In In re M.M., (OR App., April 3, 2013), the Oregon Court of Appeals upheld the authority of a juvenile court to order immunization of children who are wards of the court, even though the children’s mother and father have religious objections to immunization.

Meg McDonnell at Public Discourse: Young adults desire stable marriage and family life even while they engage in unmarried sex and parenting. We should encourage and help young adults achieve these goals instead of trying to make birth control “sexy.”

NY Daily News: The case of a same-sex Connecticut couple accused of repeatedly raping and abusing two of their nine adopted boys is headed for trial.

LifeSiteNews: “Gay marriage is inevitable.” That’s what we’re told by gay activists. It’s a taunt devised to pick off the more faint-hearted clingers-on of traditional marriage by exploiting the human instinct to be on the winning side. And sometimes it works.

MSNBC: Ella explains who a person can and can’t marry and how in New York a person can marry anyone they love. “Girls can marry girls and boys can marry boys in New York and a girl can marry a boy in New York too,” Ella told Krystal.

Austin American Statesman via InsuranceNews.net: In December, conservative groups Texas Values and the Alliance Defending Freedom submitted a brief to Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott asking that his office find the Pflugerville district and other government entities in violation of the state constitution.

World Magazine: Now that the future of marriage is center stage, Kellie Fiedorek hopes that the Supreme Court does not offer a radical ruling that cuts short the debate. A lawyer with Alliance Defending Freedom, Fiedorek, 29, sat in the courtroom as the justices heard the arguments. She’s been to seven states this year testifying before legislatures about the ways redefining marriage would interfere with religious freedom. She’s learned that many citizens have never had to think about the meaning of marriage and why it matters. Now that people are alert, social conservatives have the opportunity to make their case to a young generation that has both rallied for life and dealt with the aftereffects of divorce. “I think that, as more young people engage in the issue, we will see more of them eager to defend marriage, recognizing how important it is to parents and children,” Fiedorek said.

Yahoo News: “The Republican Party is going to be torn on this issue. The bulk of the party is going to be very resistant and is very supportive of traditional marriage, and parts of the party are going to flake off. Parties do that,” Gingrich told a group of reporters at a breakfast meeting at National Review magazine’s Washington, D.C., office. “The country is gradually evolving. The country is thinking this thing through. It creates complexities.”

NPR: Lexicographers know they’re on the hot seat as they confront the changing uses of the word. When Merriam-Webster revised its definition a few years ago, it went with a two-state solution. It kept an older definition for “marriage” as “the state of being united to a person of the opposite sex,” but it added a second definition as “the state of being united to a person of the same sex in a relationship like that of traditional marriage.” Not surprisingly, that triggered headlines like “Webster’s Redefines Marriage” on conservative websites.

Miami Herald: In a letter to the American Civil Liberties Union, Spring Independent School District stated that Tony Zamazal, a transgender student at Spring High School, may wear a dress, pump-style shoes, makeup and a wig to the school prom on May 11 . . .

ACLU: Representatives of religions that do not have ordained ministers must be permitted to perform marriages on the same basis as ministers, priests, rabbis, and other ordained clergy, Chief Judge Dennis J. Smith of the Circuit Court of Fairfax County ruled on Friday.

Carson Halloway at Public Discourse: The oral arguments on Proposition 8 at the Supreme Court suggest that there is very good reason to believe that the declaration of a “right” to same-sex marriage will set us on the path to polygamy.

Chicago Tribune: With the measure a dozen votes or less shy of the 60 required for final approval, advocates on either side of the issue consider the 20 black House members key swing votes in the spring session.

Indian Congressman Marlin Stutzman has issued this press release that includes this: “Regardless of any ruling, referendum, or law, marriage is the union of one man and one woman,” said Stutzman. “Washington cannot redefine marriage any more than it can govern gravity. As the cornerstone of society throughout history, marriage is a unique institution and the safest environment for raising children. My commitment to marriage is matched by my abiding commitment to the civil rights of all individuals—every American must be treated with dignity and respect. However, marriage is neither a civil right nor a political platform . . . ”

The Hill: Salmon continued that his father’s opposition centers on the definition of marriage. “As far as it goes with marriage for him it’s a matter of what marriage means to him — to him marriage is defined as between a man and a woman,” Salmon said. “It has nothing to do with the way he views a person’s relationship, and that’s the thing that I think is hard for people to understand.”

Kellie Fiedorek at Washington Examiner: In their recently filed brief before the U.S. Supreme Court, advocates for redefining marriage argued that “gay men and lesbians are a suspect class” and thus need special judicial protection of the “politically powerless.”

Ilya Somin at Volokh Conspiracy: Co-blogger Eugene Volokh recently linked to a Virginia state court decision striking down as unconstitutional a state law that allowed religious societies without official clergy to designate only one member as having the power to perform wedding ceremonies, while religious groups that do have clergy can designate more. The court concluded that the First and Fourteenth Amendments bar this law because “The General Assembly [Virginia's state legislature] cannot favor one type of religion over another without a compelling government interest and a narrowly tailored method.”

CNSNews: Anyone who has ever been through a grocery store checkout knows the answer to that is a big “yes!” Cosmo’s status as the gutter of women’s magazines earned it the No. 10 spot on Morality in Media’s “Dirty Dozen List” of “the top 12 facilitators of porn in America.”

AP: The results are a marked changed from 1995 when only 34 percent said they moved in together. Now it is 48 percent. Back then, 39 percent said they married first, compared to 23 now.

Washington Times: The Federal Communications Commission is mulling a change to a policy that, in effect, would open the doors to more obscenity on television and radio.

Ross Douthat at NY Times: The notion that nobody would have entertained what Drum later calls the “esoteric” idea that marriage has an essential link to the way that human beings procreate if desperate social conservatives hadn’t grasped at it is apparently quite a popular view, judging by the fact that other writers raised it on Twitter over the weekend, and its popularity testifies to the way that the gay marriage debate has encouraged a strange historical amnesia about the origins of marriage law.

ChrisAdamo.com: So perhaps the Supreme Court in its arrogance believes it can forcibly impose a redefinition of marriage on America. Let it next endeavor to strike down the law of gravity as “unconstitutional” on the basis that it clearly affects citizens in a decidedly disproportionate manner and thus is a primary source of “inequality” among the people. Then every concurring jurist, bureaucrat, and countercultural activist who regards the court’s decision as credible will be free to find a high precipice from which to test its merits. We will then see benefit that can actually be reaped from blind faith in liberal arrogance.

Minneapolis Tribune: The fight to legalize same-sex marriage in Minnesota is about to get a new twist at the Capitol as a group of legislators unveil a proposal to allow civil unions for gay and lesbian couples.

Joan Frawley Desmond at NC Register: Cooper would not retreat: “[S]ociety’s interest in responsible procreation isn’t just with respect to the procreative capacities of the couple itself,” he said.
“The marital norm, which imposes the obligations of fidelity and monogamy, Your Honor, advances the interests in responsible procreation by making it more likely that neither party, including the fertile party to that … marriage will engage in irresponsible procreative conduct outside of that marriage,” Cooper continued. “That’s the … marital norm.”

Herb Silverman of the Secular Coaltion at Washington Post: The most obvious and effective lesson atheists are learning from gays (including all LGBTs) is to come out of the closet. Attitudes toward gays changed rapidly when people learned that their friends, neighbors, and even family members were gay. Attitudes about atheists are slowly changing as atheists are slowly coming out.

BuzzFeed: Although most people think sodomy laws have been unconstitutional since the Supreme Court’s 2003 ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli would like to explain why — in his view — that’s not so.

Houston Chronicle: This leaves just seven Democratic senators and 11 House Democrats opposing gay marriage. The trend of flip-flopping on the issue hasn’t hit Texas. Of those 11 House Democrats, three are Texans.

Dallas Morning News: If passed, the bill would outlaw the discrimination of employees or potential employees on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity or expression. That includes segregating the employee or failing to hire them on the basis of gender preference. It would add on to the state labor code that already prohibits discrimination because of race, color, disability, religion, sex or national origin.

AZ Republic: Horne’s decision comes hours after the small southeastern Arizona city of Bisbee ignored vociferous opposition and threats of lawsuits and legalized civil unions for same-sex couples Tuesday night. It was an historic council vote that turned into a political circus, as nearly 100 people packed the chambers in both opposition and support.

David Blankenhorn and Jonathan Rauch at NY Daily News: Gay marriage is here. It is already part of our social fabric. But don’t savor the moment for too long. There’s much more to marriage equality than gay marriage equality. Marriage today is fracturing along class lines.

Susan L. Brown at LA Times: The Beatles sang ‘Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m 64?’ When it comes to marriage, many baby boomers are saying ‘no.’ . . . Until recently, it would have been fair to say that older people simply did not get divorced. Fewer than 10% of those who got divorced in 1990 were ages 50 or older. Today, 1 in 4 people getting divorced is in this age group.

S.E. Cupp at NY Daily Post: When Susan Patton wrote a letter to The Daily Princetonian last week, she probably had no concept of the controversy it would create. What she later described as merely “some good advice from a Jewish mother” has earned her the scorn of feminists everywhere. Why? Because in 2013, you’re not supposed to talk to modern young women at an elite liberal university about the value of getting married.

Marine Corps Times: Two more women have washed out of Marine Corps Infantry Officer Course, putting a quick end to the latest iteration of an experiment into which roles female Marines might be able to fill in combat.

Kentucky.com: The prospective brides of two Kentucky inmates are suing a clerk of court after he cancelled their marriage licenses because their fiancés couldn’t appear in person to acquire the license.

Baltimore Sun: The ACLU of Maryland is calling for legislators to halt funding to religious and private schools, saying that taxpayer money should be put toward the state’s funding obligation to public schools. | ACLU press release

Las Vegas Sun: The American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada filed a lawsuit challenging Nevada’s “infamous crime against nature” statute with the National ACLU Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and AIDS Project. | ACLU press release