Tag Archives: Topic: Marriage

Illinois Review: Gearing up for another attempt to legislate gay marriage in the Land of Lincoln, Illinois Unites for Marriage, the umbrella organization for the same-sex marriage effort, announced that they have hired a campaign manager to lead the effort to get the bill passed this year.

Christian Institute: Teachers and registrars who disagree with gay marriage need more civil liberty protections, Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights says. ‘Transitional’ safeguards should be introduced for those already employed as registrars, the Committee says in a report released last Friday.

Legal Times: “It is not unreasonable for the American people to have an opportunity to hear firsthand the arguments and opinions that will shape their society for years to come,” Durbin wrote to Roberts in a letter released Tuesday.

The Week: In fact, it wasn’t even close, say Paul Hitlin, Amy Mitchell, and Mark Jurkowitz at Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. In nearly 500 articles and TV segments from March 18 to May 12, “stories with more statements supporting same-sex marriage outweighed those with more statements opposing it by a margin of roughly 5-to-1.” . . . No kidding, says Rich Lizardo at The American Spectator. “The report might as well have been titled ‘The Sky Is Blue’ because this only confirms what everyone already knew.”

Tim Roder at Washington Post: Terms like husband, wife, mother, and father become up for grabs, and in effect meaningless. When terms become meaningless, it becomes more difficult to teach the realities they are meant to convey and to encourage young people to take such realities seriously. When the law and the culture it shapes say that mom and dad are interchangeable, it becomes harder to teach your kids otherwise.

Pew Research: Latinos’ views of same-sex marriage have changed dramatically in recent years. In 2012 for the first time, more Latinos said they favored same-sex marriage than opposed it (52% versus 34%) according to a Pew Hispanic Center survey.

Ryan T. Anderson at National Review: A hallmark of democratic self-government is that the people should discuss, debate, and vote on important policy matters. And in America their votes should count, except when they clearly violate the people’s more settled will as expressed in the U.S. Constitution. Where the Constitution is silent, the task of a conscientious judge is to respect the constitutional authority of citizens and their elected officials . . . To fill this void, the Heritage Foundation has worked with our allies at the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Family Research Council, and the National Organization for Marriage to produce a pamphlet using everyday language to explain, in Q&A style, why marriage matters. (You can download a free e-book at TheMarriageFacts.com.)

SCOTUS Blog: Following Monday’s decisions, there are fourteen merits cases from October Term 2012 that have not yet been decided. Although we do not know which decisions the Court will issue on which days, we expect the Court to issue all of these remaining decisions between tomorrow, Thursday, June 20, 2013, and the end of June, when the Court traditionally breaks for its summer recess.

USA Today: Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska has endorsed same-sex marriage, becoming the third Republican senator to do so. In a statement posted Wednesday on her website, Murkowski said supporting same-sex marriage is consistent with her values as a “lifelong Republican” who believes in “promoting freedom and limiting the reach of government.”

Washington Post: Federal employees have pushed as hard as anyone to get the Defense of Marriage Act overturned. The Supreme Court will rule on it within days.

Christian Institute: The former Commons Speaker Michael Martin has raised concerns about plans to make the Commons chapel a multi-denominational venue for gay weddings.

Matthew J. Franck at Public Discourse: Should the truth about marriage—that it unites men and women so that children will have fathers and mothers—be defied by the laws of the land, we cannot expect the religious freedom of those who believe in that ancient truth to be respected under the new dominion of falsehood. After all, if redefining marriage to include same-sex couples accords with justice and moral truth, there is no good reason for the new legal order to make room for “conscientious” religious dissenters, for clearly their consciences are malformed and unworthy of respect. Thus the fate of religious freedom, for scores of millions of Americans, stands or falls with the fate of conjugal marriage itse

Huffington Post: ”The question is, do those people have a standing to come before the court and defend it? Under Supreme Court precedent, they probably do not have standing,” Boies said. “The court is very restrictive in terms of to whom they grant standing, and they never granted standing to private citizens who do not have a fiduciary relationship to the state. And one way that the court could solve this particular case is to hold that these people do not have standing.”

Chris Geidner at Buzzfeed: Many outcomes are possible in the challenges to California’s Proposition 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act that are due to be decided by the justices in the coming weeks. A complex path got the cases — and the country — to a moment of waiting.

The Oregonian: The growing number of same-sex marriage laws in the United States has had no effect on the marriage rate among heterosexual couples according to new findings by researchers at Portland State University’s School of Community Health.

MO Family Policy Council: Dale Schowengerdt, senior legal counsel for ADF, says the state of Washington is “constitutionally precluded from compelling Barronelle Stutzman to use her artistic skill to personally craft floral arrangements for a same-sex ceremony when it violates her religious beliefs and her conscience to do so.” “Stutzman believes providing this service would compel her to express a message with her creativity that violates God’s commands,” Schowengerdt adds. “She believes that creation of the floral arrangements would be perceived as an endorsement and celebration of same-sex ‘marriage.’” “Family business owners are constitutionally guaranteed the freedom to live and work according to their beliefs,” Schowengerdt continues. “In America, the government is supposed to protect freedom, not use its intolerance for certain viewpoints to intimidate citizens into acting contrary to their faith convictions.”

CBN: The New York Times recently recognized Anderson and other movement leaders like Caitlin Seery, who directs the Love and Fidelity Network on college campuses.

Rick Klein, Olivier Knox, Richard Coolidge, and Jordyn Phelps at Yahoo News: Moran says the justices “don’t want to be the judges of America when it comes to this issue” and predicts that they will find a way to defer to the states in the two cases dealing with same-sex marriage. “They see this roiling democratic debate that’s happening state-by-state, and the betting at the Supreme Court is that they’ll find a way to decide this issue by getting themselves out of it,” Moran says. “They won’t declare gay marriage legal all over the country or illegal. They’ll say, ‘Let the states handle it.’”

NPR: As the Supreme Court prepares to rule on two cases involving same-sex marriage, a new documentary takes a look at what same-sex marriage means for African-Americans. Host Michel Martin speaks with Yoruba Richen, the director of The New Black to find out what inspired the film.

USA Today: The Supreme Court rulings are not as simple as whether gays and lesbians can marry or not, and whether they become eligible for federal benefits.

LifeSiteNews: Almost three-quarters-of-a-million Croatian citizens have said they want to decide for themselves whether to change the nation’s definition of marriage, but the left-leaning coalition government is trying to move the democratic goal posts.

AZ Central: A nonpartisan group calling itself Equal Marriage Arizona filed paperwork Monday with the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office for an initiative to redefine marriage as “a union of two persons.” The state constitution currently defines it as only between one man and one woman.

NPR: “People forget that durable rights don’t come from courts, they come from consensus and strong support from society,” says Jonathan Rauch, author of Denial, a recent memoir about growing up gay. “We are winning the right to marriage in a bigger, deeper way by winning it in the court of public opinion.”

Deborah Savage at Public Discourse: To demand that we recognize same-sex romantic relationships as marriages, and teach our children so, is to prevent them from discovering reality.

Yahoo News (AP) (includes video): Jim Campbell, a lawyer for Alliance Defending Freedom, said the court should not short-circuit a vigorous national debate. “The vast majority of the states have decided to retain the traditional view of marriage that has existed throughout Western civilization. This decision belongs to the people and should be decided by the people,” Campbell said.

WI Family Action: The Wisconsin Supreme Court has agreed to weigh in on the full meaning of Wisconsin’s marriage amendment and whether it authorizes the creation of other marriage-like unions.

Catholic New World: Nonetheless, the legal creation of what is naturally impossible is not inevitable. Cultural change can be redirected so that the long road to obtain respect that has been traveled by many homosexually oriented persons can be maintained without destroying the institution of natural marriage. Since the difference between men and women is different from racial difference, same-sex marriage is not a civil rights issue. A newly invented civil right cannot be used to destroy a moral good, lest society itself go into decline.

Politico: Conservative leaders say it would be wrong to read too much into the speeches Thursday. There’s no question, they say, that in the event of a sweeping Supreme Court ruling in favor of gay unions, the Republican Party’s leadership and its field of 2016 candidates would take the side of social conservatives.

Telegraph: Openly gay clerics will be questioned about the intimate detail of their sex life on behalf of the Archbishops of Canterbury or York before they can be considered to be a bishop, the Church of England has disclosed.

Ryan Anderson at the Blaze: At stake in the two cases expected to be decided by the Supreme Court later this month is whether citizens and their elected officials have the constitutional authority to make laws that reflect the truth about marriage.

Erik Stanley on the Zeb Bell Show to provide an updated on Pulpit Freedom Sunday. | MP3 audio 14:35 mins

Ryan Anderson at Christian Post: To fill this void, we are working with our allies at the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Family Research Council, and the National Organization for Marriage to produce an easy to read pamphlet to explain why marriage matters in everyday language. Download a free e-book version today at TheMarriageFacts.com.

Washington Post: Gay rights advocates are already pressing Obama to immediately broaden the federal government’s recognition of legally married same-sex couples if the court strikes down a ban on providing federal benefits to them.

Indy Star: Rick Sutton and Micah Clark have opposite views on whether gays and lesbians should be allowed to marry. But both agree that the pending Supreme Court decisions on gay marriage are unlikely to stop the fight in Indiana over a constitutional amendment banning same-sex unions.

The Hill: “If this bill has in it something that gives gay couples immigration rights and so forth, it kills the bill,” Rubio said Thursday on the “Andrea Tantaros Show.” “I’m gone, I’m off it, and I’ve said that repeatedly. I don’t think that’s going to happen, and it shouldn’t happen, this is already a difficult enough issue as it is.”

John M. Smoot at Public Discourse: Redefining marriage will make it harder for our children to develop their self-understanding and will sanction procreative methods that treat children like commodities.

Ken Connor at Townhall: When we gaze across the pond at our European cousins, the general assumption is that we’re looking at our future. From food and fashion to politics and culture, Europe is on the cutting edge – the avant garde. Depending on your ideological sympathies, this is either seen as a good thing or a bad thing.

Nathan Cherry at Engage Family Minute: The first thing we need to understand is that the issues of life and marriage are not merely cultural, social, or political issues. They are first and foremost biblical moral issues. They have, unfortunately been so politicized however that many pastors have failed in their duties to preach and teach on these critical issues in light of the Gospel

Reuters: Whatever the U.S. Supreme Court decides this month, gay marriage appears destined to face several more years of legal debate and at least one more round of argument at the high court.

Patheos: However, Ms Stutzman hasn’t rolled over. She has filed a countersuit through the Alliance Defending Freedom. Her lawsuit is based on federal constitutional protections of religious freedom and protections in the Washington State Constitution.

Engage Family Minute: My encouragement to every pastor is to take a Sunday in June or July and be part of this movement to stand for the biblical principles our nation was founded upon. America, now more than ever, needs men of God that are more concerned with what God thinks than what man or the government thinks. If we don’t speak now, we can’t complain when our right to speak is taken away.

Sherif Girgis , Ryan T. Anderson , Robert P. George at National Review: In What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense and in various follow-up pieces, we have argued for several ideas: Reducing marriage to the more general category of sexual domestic partnership is a deep mistake. Marriage — the human good that marriage law should foster — is rather a union of persons at every level (mind, heart, and body) and for the whole of life, inherently oriented to family life

Forbes: Any day now, the Supreme Court will rule on whether same-sex married couples have the right to file joint federal tax returns. But Yale tax law professor Anne Alstott has me wondering whether the entire debate over the tax consequences of the Defense of Marriage Act is missing the point.

GOPUSA: Power in Washington is growing exponentially, but even now, most pastors are not warning their flocks of the danger. They could start by participating in the Alliance Defending Freedom’s Pulpit Freedom Sunday events. And they can start talking about the little girl who was nearly condemned to death for being 10 years old.

LA Times: The USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll . . . found that 58% of the state’s registered voters believe same-sex marriage should be legal, compared with 36% against, a margin of 22 points. When the same pollsters asked that question three years ago, 52% favored gay marriage and 40% opposed it, a 12-point spread.

Christian Institute: The Queen has been dragged into the debate over gay marriage because some MPs are demanding Parliament’s Anglican chapel be used for gay weddings.

NY Times: But where are the weddings among all those TV gays? The American Civil Liberties Union would like to know, and is unveiling a new marriage-equality campaign along those lines. I find it interesting for several reasons.

Robert Knight at Washington Times: They could start by participating in the Alliance Defending Freedom’s Pulpit Freedom Sunday events. And they can start talking about the little girl who was nearly condemned to death for being 10 years old.

ChristianNews.net: “When the church is silent, the culture suffers,” Stanley said. “The church is integral to the moral stability of a society. Every day that pastors are intimidated into silence on issues like life, liberty, the family, and marriage is another day the cultural erosion continues unchecked. Pulpit Freedom Sunday is just one opportunity for pastors to speak up and make a difference for the good of their congregations and the culture.”

Alan Sears at NC Register: In the past, our cases at Alliance Defending Freedom were all about how the role of religion in America is defined. Sadly, today, they have become more about whether religion has a role at all. The lawsuits we have filed against Obamacare, for example, are in sharp contrast to legal cases of the past that dealt with differences of opinion on what the state may limit when it comes to religion. With Obamacare, on the other hand, the administration is now trying to expunge religious expression altogether by arguing that Christian entrepreneurs cannot exercise their religious convictions even in running their own businesses. The same applies in the marriage arena. Not too long ago, activists seeking to redefine marriage were content with branding Christians who believe in a biblical ethic regarding sexual behavior as “bigots.”

GodDiscussion.com (video embedded): Pulpit Freedom Sunday, an annual gathering originally meant to protest tax regulations that prohibit churches from benefitting from tax exempt status if they endorse or oppose candidates for office (the Johnson amendment), is to be used this weekend to fight marriage equality. The embedded video featuring Jim Garlow and former politician Edward Meese claims that marriage equality threatens the Godly foundations of America.

Grand Forks Herald: As it happens, also Sunday, the conservative evangelical group, the Alliance Defending Freedom, will hold its sixth annual “Pulpit Freedom Sunday,” in which it says 1,100 pastors from all 50 states have registered to “preach sermons that present the biblical perspective on marriage as the union of one man and one woman.” The Alliance says it is concerned that pastors’ constitutional rights of free speech in the pulpit could be threatened by the growing support around gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender issues.

MPR: Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens shares his views on controversial court decisions and the inner workings of the court, in a candid interview at the JFK Library in Boston May 20, 2013. Stevens comments on Bush v. Gore, Citizens United, affirmative action and same-sex marriage.

Juan Williams at The Hill: It is difficult to see how the Chief Justice arrives at such a consensus with these four culture war cases. It is more likely the decisions will give way to even more heated emotions, including anger and a further erosion of trust in yet another major American institution.

Richard Wolf at USA Today: The consensus view: The justices will limit the expansion of gay marriage rights to California, with few if any implications for the rest of the country. Only on the Defense of Marriage Act, most agree, will the court strike a broad blow against discrimination by striking down the ban on federal benefits for married same-sex couples.

Howard Mintz at Mercury News: But there are about as many twists and turns in what the Supreme Court could do as there can be in a marriage. Among the possibilities . . .

One News Now: The church is integral to the moral stability of a society,” says Stanley. “Yet every day that pastors are intimidated into silence on issues like life, liberty, the family and marriage is another day the cultural erosion continues unchecked.”

Golebiewski, Daniel, Because the Bible Says So: The Impact of Roman Catholic Doctrines on LGBT Rights (May 1, 2013). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2272858 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2272858 Having a long-standing tradition of directly or indirect affecting policy-making in governments across the globe, …

Religion Clause Blog: The focus of this year’s event is slightly different than in the past, lacking the previous years’ avowed defiance of Internal Revenue Code restrictions on non-profits. (See prior posting.) ADF explains . . .

Florida Today: “This year, we’re asking pastors to preach a sermon on the issue of marriage,” said Erik Stanley, the senior legal counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom, an Arizona advocacy organization. The reason: upcoming court rulings expected on same-sex marriage, including the U.S. Supreme Court’s expected action on California’s gay marriage ban in the next few weeks. “These two cases could very well redefine marriage as we know it. So there is a sense of urgency and pastors understand what’s happened in the marriage battle over the last year,” he said.

DCist.com: The D.C. Council’s Judiciary and Public Safety Committee approved a bill yesterday that would allow nearly any adult in the District to become a temporary wedding officiant.

Christian Post: “Pulpit Freedom Sunday was started with the purpose of making sure that pastors are free to speak from their pulpit on the moral and biblical issues of the day without fearing any kind of government censorship or intimidation,” said ADF Senior Legal Counsel Erik Stanley in an interview with The Christian Post. During previous events, pastors would preach sermons evaluating political candidates and their positions in light of the Bible’s teachings. They would record these sermons and send them to the IRS “in the hopes of sparking a litigation challenge to the Johnson Amendment,” said Stanley.

MPR: County recorders have an annual statewide meeting this month, where they plan to discuss the wording for marriage applications and licenses for same-sex couples, particularly the section where applications read “bride” and “groom.”

NY Times: A solid majority of Americans opposes a broad national right to same-sex marriage, saying the power to legalize gay unions should rest with the states — even as most support marriage equality for gay people, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

Nearly 1,100 pastors nationwide registered to speak out on marriage as part of annual Alliance Defending Freedom event

Mark Regnerus at Public Discourse: The sexual permissiveness of men will emerge a winner in the contest of ideas as same-sex marital norms begin to shape the larger institution of marriage.

Christian Concern reports: The Church of England has announced that it will no longer fight the same sex ‘marriage’ Bill.

Santa Fe New Mexican: In a news release Thursday, Attorney General Gary King said, “Based on extensive research, we cannot state definitively that New Mexico law currently permits same-sex marriage. “Although state statutes may limit marriage to couples of the opposite sex, this does not mean they will pass constitutional muster,” King said. “New Mexico statutes that preclude same-sex couples from marrying are vulnerable to challenge under the equal protection guarantees of the federal and state constitutions.” | AG Analysis and press release

ElevenMyanmar.com: Local authorities in Rakhine State recently issued a regional order in Maungdaw forbidding multiple marriages for Bengali men, and restricting them to a maximum of two children. Officials from the National Democracy Party and other parties in Sittwe support the order.

The Spectrum: hile growing up, Kristyn Decker, who now lives in New Harmony, was a seventh-generation polygamist on her father’s side. More recently, she has made efforts to share her experiences of growing up in a polygamous community by writing “Fifty Years in Polygamy: Big Secrets and Little White Lies.”

Heritage Foundation: A new Pew opinion poll shows that a majority of Americans believe the redefinition of marriage is “inevitable.” We’ve heard “inevitable” language before, particularly from statists of all stripes. History is filled with supposedly “inevitable” causes that turned out not to be so. Nothing in life is inevitable except death and taxes—and at The Heritage Foundation we’re doing what we can about taxes. So, too, on marriage . . .

Washington Post: Almost three in four Americans believe it’s inevitable that same-sex marriage will be legalized in the United States, including a majority of people who most ardently oppose it, according to a new poll released Thursday. | Related posts

Telegraph: Lord Feldman, the Conservative chairman, will today be personally challenged to stop David Cameron’s gay marriage plans to prevent more desertions by party activists.

Christian Institute: Diagnoses of sexually transmitted infections rose 5 per cent in England last year – leading to a warning that people are continuing to engage in risky sexual behaviour.

Todd Starnes at Townhall: An Army master sergeant was punished after he hosted a promotion party and served Chick-fil-A sandwiches in honor of the Defense of Marriage Act.