Most of the media ignored what actually happened, but this NBC video captures the truth.
Police stood by as protestors stormed the podium, surrounded Brian Brown and tried to prevent him from speaking. Only Brian's grace under fire, and the law-abiding, prayerful, and peaceful crowd prevented this from turning even more ugly.
Why stop at the word marriage? Other words can be redefined as well. Take "monogamy"and "fidelity." They call them "San Francisco relationships," as the SF Chronicle is proudly reporting on the release of a new study of over 500 couples. The study, by Colleen Hoff, shows that the majority of gay couples are not monogamous and that "planned infidelity" was good for their relationships -- including marital ones, according to the Chronicle.
The Chronicle reports on a second study by an Oakland gay couple Lanz Lowen and Blake Spears who interviewed 86 couples with at least eight years together in open relationships:
Three out of 4 people described non-monogamy as a positive thing, and said it gave them a sexual outlet without having to lie. Participants reported it helped relationships survive by providing honest options and minimizing deceit, tension and resentment. Some "played" independently, others as a threesome, and about 80 percent agreed to tell all or some details of their encounters, the rest preferring a "don't ask, don't tell" policy.
Sexual fidelity, these "San Francisco" relationships assert is not necessary in marriage. "At least half those interviewed were married, having taken their vows during one of the two brief times when it was legally sanctioned in the city or the state.
"It's a redefinition of marriage," Spears said.
Yes it is.
Many, many thanks to all of you who came out (even with the threat of thunderstorms!) to stand for marriage as we kicked off our Summer for Marriage RV Tour yesterday in Augusta! 
It was wonderful to meet so many of you, and your energy and enthusiasm made for the perfect start to our 33-day, 23-city tour that will take us from the Northeast to the upper Midwest, then down to Florida before finishing in our nation’s capital on August 15th.
Take a minute to check out our tour coverage at www.marriagetour2010.com, including photos and videos from yesterday, ongoing tour coverage, and much more! Even the press is starting to pay attention, and we’ll have the media coverage posted as well.
We are simply thrilled that so many of you came out yesterday, and for those who didn’t make it, you missed a good time as we took a public stand for marriage, made new friends, and left inspired with messages from Rev. Emrich, Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, and Charla Bansley.
If you’re able, in addition to standing publicly at the state house yesterday (or for those who couldn’t), please consider standing with us financially during this summer tour. Over the next five weeks, we will be meeting with thousands of new marriage supporters all across the eastern U.S. Your gift of $25, $50, or even $100 would be a great help as we take the message of marriage directly to the American people, meeting new activists, supporters and friends all along the way. Click here to make your donation today!
We can win this battle for the future of marriage in our nation. And with God’s help, we will!
From Maggie Gallagher's nationally syndicated column:
"President Obama's Justice Department colluded with gay marriage advocates to make sure the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act was overturned by the courts.
That's not just my view -- it's pretty close to the searing conclusion drawn by professor Richard Epstein in a piece for Forbes:
'This controversial case might well go up on appeal. But if so, it looks almost like collusive litigation, unless some true defender of DOMA is allowed, as an intervener, to defend the statute on the merits.'"
Governor Lynch’s address to Tim Gill’s Political OutGiving conference this spring is creating quite a stir in New Hampshire – just in time for the Summer for Marriage Tour coming to Manchester.
Lynch lauded by national gay rights advocates
Manchester Union-Leader, July 13, 2010
Staff Report
CONCORD —Gov. John Lynch’s support for a same-sex marriage law in New Hampshire earned him a featured position at a recent private meeting of national leaders and donors in the gay community.
The Washington Blade has reported that Lynch was among four governors and several other elected officials who attended “a closed-door conference of wealthy LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) political donors” in mid-May in Chicago. The conference was known as “Political OutGiving,” described by the Blade as “a highly confidential event for a network of more than 200 big-stakes LGBT contributors to political campaigns.”
. . .
The conservative National Organization for Marriage earlier this year spent about $200,000 on television ads claiming that “Lynch lied” on several issues, including samesex marriage, by signing the bill into law after saying in a 2006 gubernatorial debate that “I do not support gay marriage.”
Lynch said in April he was “disgusted” with the ad and accused the out-of-state group of “meddling.” The “LynchLeads” site and a related television ad were created in response.
NOM to be in Manchester
NOM will be in Manchester on Thursday as part of a “Summer for Marriage: One Man-One Woman Tour” rally at City Hall Plaza, presumably to continue to criticize Lynch.
According to a media advisory, “The tour covers many of the key battleground states in the ongoing fight to protect and preserve marriage as one man and one woman.”
The New Hampshire-based self-described “pro-family” Cornerstone Action, the political arm of Cornerstone Policy Research, e-mailed supporters yesterday criticizing Lynch’s attendance at the gay leaders meeting and asking for donations to “keep the liberals away.”
It also asks supporters to call Lynch’s office “and tell him how hypocritical it is for him to denounce the involvement of NOM in New Hampshire one month, only to fly out to Chicago one month later to meet with the nation’s wealthiest gay donors!”
The Cornerstone group also filed a right-to-know request with the governor’s office asking for “all correspondence, invitations and travel records between Lynch and his staff related to his meeting in Chicago with Tim Gill.”
Group executive director Kevin Smith said Lynch “has officially sold out to the radical gay lobby” by attending the meeting “presumably to beg for money for his fledgling campaign.” . . .
Gay marriage advocate (and--like Ted Olson, the lawyer opposing Prop 8--a Federalist Society member) and law professor Dale Carpenter recently said he was advising a Minnesota gay rights group on how they could lawfully exclude a street preacher from handing out literature against homosexuality at a large gay pride even in a public park that 200,000 folks will attend.
Prof. Carpenter argues that the New York City St. Patrick’s Day Parade, which had a right to exclude pro-gay rights groups from marching, is the relevant paradigm. A federal judge just said "no go guys." If the First Amendment means anything it means you can speak, preach, and hand out literature in a public park. Nobody is going to think that the gay rights groups authorized his speech. "As a festival attendee in a public forum, Johnson is entitled to speak and hand out literature, quintessential activities protected by the First Amendment, so long as he remains undisruptive," Judge Tunheim wrote in the 19 page ruling, according to the WSJ.
A win for the First Amendment. But look how many establishment and "conservative" gay rights figures now believe the First Amendment means: we get to restrict your rights to disagree?
Salon asks David Boies to describe the arguments for marriage as the union of husband and wife. Boies is clueless.
These are the guys who keep lauding each other as brilliant?
In a few days, NOM will be launching our Summer for Marriage Tour 2010, taking the message for marriage directly to the American people and building support for marriage all across the eastern half of the United States.
Over 33 days, we’ll travel more than 6000 miles, holding rallies in 23 cities from Maine to Minnesota to Atlanta and Tampa before heading back to Washington, DC for the tour finale on August 15th.
Many of the states we’ll be visiting are key battlegrounds in this critical debate, as we work to organize grassroots support for marriage as the union of a husband and wife at both the state federal levels, building support for state marriage amendments and opposing the repeal of DOMA.
Please visit www.marriagetour2010.com for the latest tour information, including the bus schedule, a chance to register for email alerts from the tour, and video footage of each tour stop.
We need your help to make this summer’s tour a success! Please click here to make your online contribution today. $60 would cover a penny per mile! $115 would be $5 toward the costs of each rally. Whatever you can give will go far as we work together to organize support for marriage all across the nation!
Then tell your friends and come out to see us when we come to your hometown this summer!
NOM's founding Chairman of the Board, Robby George, is a renaissance man. Here's a photo of Robby at the Becket Fund gala (which I attended) where he was honored with the Canterbury Medal for his contribution to the religious liberty of all faith communities.
We here at NOM certainly understand that SSM and related laws based on the assumption that Christian and other traditional faiths' views of marriage and sex are somehow akin to racism are serious threats to religion in America and the world. We are grateful to Robby and to all defenders of religious freedom!
Dear Friend of Marriage,
Black Democrats to the rescue of marriage!
Saturday I had the honor of attending the D.C. State Democratic Convention with Bishop Harry Jackson.
African-Americans for marriage turned out in force, shocking the D.C. establishment!
I wish you could have been there. Strong marriage supporters, unafraid of the media or anything else, chanting "Let us vote! Let us vote!" If the mainstream media were what it should be, this would be the picture in every living room in America: Politicians blocking the door to the voting booth against citizens of D.C. in order to impose gay marriage on an unwilling populace.
The political establishment was shocked when all these newfound activists almost knocked off Harry Thomas in the straw poll the DC Dems conducted. His opponent, Delano Hunter, is a strong marriage supporter, eager to knock off a politician who ignored the will of his constituents and voted for gay marriage.
Exciting times!
They keep telling us "the culture has changed, gay marriage is the future." When they stop blocking the path to the voting booth, when they accept the legitimacy of elections like the one which passed Prop 8, then maybe they would have something believable to say about that. Let the people vote!
It's going to be a hard fight through the courts to vindicate the people's right to vote in D.C., but we are fighting for their rights and the rights of all Americans. Just as in Prop 8 last week, NOM's Chairman Maggie Gallagher was there, and NOM's Prop 8 Legal Defense Fund is helping fight for our constitutional rights.
If you believe in the right to vote, can you help us defend the Constitution from these ongoing attacks? We need to raise $8,479 in the next 48 hours for NOM's Legal Defense Fund, which supports not only Prop 8's able lawyers and the legal campaign to win back the right to vote in D.C., but also litigation designed to protect voters and donors from campaigns of harassment and intimidation. I am looking for 150 people willing to donate $57 each. Will you step forward to be one of NOM's 150 for the Legal Defense of Marriage?
Not everyone has money to give, we understand. (With six kids, believe me, I understand!) So here's something else you can do for marriage this week. Republican leaders have put up a website, America Speaks Out. But it's being slammed by liberals trying to create the impression that Republicans support gay marriage. We asked for your help on this before, but the website had glitches. Here's the good news: They've been fixed. Go here, login and vote "Thumbs Up" to protect marriage between a man and a woman.
Thank you!
How many times have you heard that you and I are like racists because we know that to make a marriage you need a husband and wife? Gay-rights advocates say this over and over--most recently, former judicial conservative Ted Olson stood before Judge Vaughn Walker and repeated this point ad nauseam. They don't just say we are racists; they try to get courts to rule as if marriage were akin to racism, founded only in bigotry. They use this argument in D.C., San Francisco and all across this country as their principle justification to taking away our right to vote for marriage.
Good news. Heritage Foundation's Tom Messner just published a devastating critique of "the race analogy" in National Review Online. It’s posted here. Check it out.
His sensible conclusion?
"Defending marriage is not similar to defending racism. Loving didn't fundamentally redefine the natural understanding of marriage. Rather, the 1967 decision rescued marriage from an extreme ideology that sought to hijack marriage for purposes unrelated to marriage itself. Today, the courts faced with Perry and similar litigation should do the same."
In other words, it is gay-rights advocates who (like the racists of old with their bans on interracial marriage) are trying to hijack marriage for ideological purposes that have nothing to do with marriage's core mission.
Of course their motivations are "progressive" rather than racist and that makes a difference, but it doesn't change the fact that gay marriage is an illegitimate attempt to "take over" a natural institution and reality and use it for new ideological purposes.
As Chuck Cooper pointed out in the final arguments in San Francisco last week, race was never part of the natural definition of marriage. Interracial marriage had to be "banned" because people understood that these were marriages; the bans were designed to keep two races separate so one race could oppress the other. That's what the 14th Amendment was designed to prevent, not the common-sense understanding of marriage.
Thanks Tom for speaking out for the truth, common sense, and sound and intelligent understanding!
And thank you, my friends and fellow comrades in this great battle for God's truth about marriage, for all that you make possible.
We've got big plans for this summer: to fight back against out of control judges, and to defend the votes of millions of Americans from out-of-control judges and an out-of-touch political elite. I can't tell you more right now but stay tuned, it’s going to be exciting.
Let me end on a small grace note. We do so much here at NOM that I can only tell you a part of it. But one young college student recently wrote to thank us, in this case Maggie.
"I recently wrote a college paper on marriage as public policy, and I could not have done it without the extensive work you have done on the subject. I've read your newspaper columns before, but until I started researching this topic I was unaware of the exhaustive treatment you had given the matter. I am now more fully prepared to discuss and defend traditional marriage with any who wish to confront the issue. Your writings on the matter are at the same time intellectually challenging and emotionally compelling. Thank you for making so much information available. I hope anyone who wavers finds your work and is strengthened by it as I was."
The next generation. That's what it's all about, isn't it?
You are the reason we can do so much. God bless you and strengthen you and your family, this day and always.
Semper fi!
Faithfully,
Brian S. Brown
President
National Organization for Marriage
2029 K Street, NW, Suite 300
Washington, DC 20006
bbrown@nationformarriage.org
