"A Saskatchewan marriage commissioner says the government will have to fire him if it expects him to perform same-sex marriages.

Larry Bjerland of the east-central Saskatchewan community of Rose Valley said he was "very disappointed" by a Saskatchewan Court of Appeal opinion Monday dealing with proposed changes to the Marriage Act.

The province's highest court ruled that two proposals from the Saskatchewan government that would let marriage commissioners opt out of performing same-sex marriages on religious grounds would be unconstitutional.

The decision was hailed by gay rights advocates, but Bjerland said it may result in his losing his appointment.

"I do not intend to marry any gay couples and so, therefore, I’m not going to resign," said Bjerland, who has been a marriage commissioner for 10 years. "They’ll have to fire me."

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John Jalsevac is amused:

Today I came across a video by the Human Rights Campaign “exposing” the pro-family organization the National Organization for Marriage (NOM). It has to be one of the most embarrassing and ultimately hilarious pieces of propaganda ever produced.

With the breed of creepy music, and foreboding, overstated voice-overs usually reserved for the grittiest crime shows about grisly homicides and serial killers, the Human Rights Campaign explains that while NOM would have you think that its mission is to “protect marriage” (“Ah, such a noble cause isn’t it?” says the creepy voiceover), there’s a much darker (duh-duh-duh!) purpose behind NOM.

Oh yes, the HRC has dug deep, has done its research, has snooped about in seedy bars with nothing more than a notebook, a hidden tape recorder and an instinct for a scandal; they’ve pored over the dusty records in the archives, they’ve found and interrogated anonymous sources – and they have uncovered NOM’s deep dark secret: NOM exists *gasp* to fight same-sex marriage.

In the words of HRC: “their only purpose is to deny the rights of marriage to loving and committed same-sex couples and their families.” (Well, that’s not actually true: NOM would also deny marriage to homosexual couples who can’t stand each other and aren’t committed in the least.).

Out of curiosity I immediately went to NOM’s (publicly accessible) website, and clicked on the “About us” section. And indeed, just as HRC had said, in the first sentence NOM claims that their mission is to “protect marriage.”

You have to read all the way to the second sentence to find out that NOM was founded “in response to the growing need for an organized opposition to same-sex marriage in state legislatures.”

Do you see how NOM hides its true purpose, purporting to be something that it isn’t? Can you evenbegin to grasp the level of dishonesty and depravity it takes to bury your real purpose all the way in the second sentence on your about page on your publicly accessible official website?! It takes your breath away.

But wait, there's more!

This column by Ed Holiday is causing waves in Mississippi, one of the few states with elections in 2011. Why? Because of this line: "In 2011 a vote for a Democrat anywhere has become a vote for gay marriage everywhere."

Constitutional scholar Hadley Arkes marks the feast of the Epiphany with an epiphany of legal opinion arguing that donor information of traditional marriage groups should be kept confidential because of the intense intimidation tactics used by the radical homosexual lobby.

Arkes discloses that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is the court’s strongest advocate of this protection, and Arkes also cites the legal precedent to support this conclusion: “The hard nut to crack here, though was the famous case of NAACP v. Alabama (1958). A law in Alabama required the NAACP along with other organizations to reveal their list of members and donors. Teachers who were members could be threatened with the loss of their jobs, and sympathetic whites faced with ostracism or other forms of retaliation. The Court struck down that requirement of disclosure. And from that decision some of us drew this lesson: that the freedom to engage in a legitimate association may entail the freedom to engage in that association with confidentiality – if there was reason to think that disclosure could subject a person to acts of intimidation and retaliation designed to discourage him from participating in an association quite legitimate.”

Read Arkes whole column here.

Over at the Ruth Blog, Dr. J has a great post discussing her entry into the same-sex marriage debate, and how the SSM issue fits into the larger cultural dialog over marriage, its meaning and purposes:

Some of our commenters seem to be surprised that the Ruth Institute is "transitioning away from its anti-gay advocacy.. Why is there an article about abortion here?" Actually, if you look over the life of this blog, you will see a lot of discussion about abortion, contraception and artificial reproductive technology. You will also see discussions of divorce, cohabitation, out of wedlock childbearing, abstinence education, adultery, the demographic winter, what makes for a happy marriage, welfare policy and much else. The common thread is marriage: the significance of marriage to society and to children, and all the social, legal and cultural practices that affect marriage. You will see very little about homosexuality per se...

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