Marriage Watch / Maggie Gallagher

Heather McDonald has just published a very thoughtful and brave piece on National Review online.

It begins this way:

An image from a TV ad for gay marriage, reproduced in the January18 New Yorker, provides a Rorschach test for reactions to America'songoing revolution in family structure. Two men in black suits stand shoulder-to-shoulder in a group of people, looking into each other'seyes. In their arms are two newborns in white baby clothes and blankets. Though it's not immediately apparent from the photo, the men are at a baptism for their infants. The ad, still being test-marketed, is called "Family Values," and is intended to emphasize the "conventionality of gay couples," explains The New Yorker.

If your reaction to the image is: "Where's the mother(s)?" you may not yet be fully on board the "conventionality" bandwagon. If your reaction to the foregoing question, however, is: "Why does it matter?" then you are keeping pace with the revolution. "Why does it matter?" may ultimately prove the more appropriate response, but no one should pretend that it represents anything other than a radical revision of the traditional relationship between parents and children - one whose consequences no one can predict.

Marriage Watch / Maggie Gallagher

NOM filed this letter regarding Rule 77-3:

January 27, 2010 

Hon. Phyllis Hamilton
Chair of the Rules Committee
United States Courthouse
1301 Clay Street
Oakland, CA 94612

Re: Local Rule 77-3

Dear Judge Walker,

My objection to televising high-profile trials is not theoretical.  It emerges directly from the experience of the attempt to televise the trial for Proposition 8.  Two-thirds of the expert witnesses-people who had been willing to sit for deposition, to prepare testimony, to fly to Sacramento to testify-dropped out under the prospect of having their faces and names televised.  I understand their reluctance, because I know (personally) the kind of hatred and threats that adopting a high-profile position against gay marriage now generate.  Many people I know who had a low profile-donors of a few hundred dollars or less-unexpectedly faced a tidal wave of hate that has impacted their personal and professional lives. People I know have been attacked on the street for holding up a "Yes on 8" sign, received death threats, and lost their jobs. Read More »

Marriage Watch / Maggie Gallagher

What do Olson and Boies think they are doing? Watching accounts of this trial unfold this week  I had a big "aha" moment. It's now clear:    Ted and David think they are conducting the Scopes trial!  

When this trial began I told you: gay marriage activists were putting 7 million Californians on trial.  (Ed Whelan over at National Review has a brilliant series "Judge Walker's Witch Hunt" . . . explaining how intellectually absurd it is to conduct a "trial" into the subjective motivations of 7 million voters, constitutionally speaking.). But this week it got worse:  They are clearly putting Christianity itself on trial.  Why else have an expert read statements of Catholic and Southern Baptist doctrines into the record?

And why put a Stanford Prof. named Gary Segura on the stand to testify ""religion is the chief obstacle for gays' and lesbians' political progress."

Could the zero-sum nature of the game be any clear?  Rights for gays and lesbians, in their minds, depends on invalidating the voting rights of religious people when it comes to gay marriage, because their votes are influenced by their religion--i.e. bigotry.  

Here's their brilliant legal strategy: Ted and David want  the Supreme Court to rule that Catholicism and Southern Baptism and related Christian denominations are bigotry.  

(That's why their next move is to subpoena --i.e. drag into court against their will--two San Diego Christian pastors who emerged as leaders in the Prop 8 fight, Pastor Jim Garlow and Pastor Miles MacPherson.  Why should participating in democracy give somebody a right to drag you to Sacramento to court?)  

I know many  gay people do not agree with this anti-religion strategy. And I also know  many gay rights activists  are getting increasingly worried about the legal strategy and tactics employed by these two  legal eagles may backfire.  (See the Jan. 17 Los Angeles Times story, "Gay Marriage Supporters fear Supreme Court's Ruling was an Omen," and also Dale Carpenter's comment about the "bad start" for pro-gay marriage advocates.)

Ted Olson and David Boies think they can persuade the Supreme Court that Science with a capital "S" proves the voters are wrong about the natural family.  Then they want to pit Science with a capital "S" against "Big Religion," 

I bet Ted and David lay awake late at night think "Hey!, maybe someday someone will make a movie about us!"

Oh wait, somebody is.

Frustrated by the fact that Supreme Court intervened to block the televising of this trial, according to the gay press one gay marriage advocate is planning to film daily "re-enactments" of the trial, based on anti-Prop 8 bloggers accounts, and post them on you tube.  No, I am not making that up.