Sen. Rick Santorum accuses the political class of cowardice, and calls on Americans to boldly defend marriage from the courts:
"With the exception of a core group of conservatives, most politicians - including the president - continue to publicly back marriage while eagerly awaiting the day when judges will take this issue out of their hands. In this case, silence, as my former colleague Zell Miller once said, is not golden; it's yellow."
This went up on one of the demonstration organizer's facebook page:
1. Declaración de la Presidente de la Organización Nacional en favor del Matrimonio, Maggie Gallagher (Estados Unidos):
“Lo que están haciendo este día es un servicio extraordinario, no solo para su país, sino para otros países de Sudamérica y del mundo. Aplaudimos su coraje para defender la verdad sobre el matrimonio. El matrimonio es la unión de hombre y mujer, porque esa es la única unión que puede dar vida y crear un vínculo de amor de esos chicos con su madre y su padre. Esto no es intolerancia. Esto no es odio. Esto es sentido común, y preocupación por el bien común. Felicitaciones por negarse a ser indiferentes y por no permitir que una pequeña elite sin representación transforme el matrimonio en la Argentina. Los ojos del mundo están puestos sobre ustedes. Son inspiración para muchos.”
Yesterday, a massive demonstration protesting politicians’ plans to push SSM took place in Argentina:
The demonstration's organizers counted 200,000; mainstream media originally reported 70,000, and are now whittling that down to 50,000. Here's an eyewitness report:
"The march was a huge success. We think there were maybe 200.000 people. The newspapers counted up to 70.000 people. Mostly families with children and youngsters. The LGBT movement called for a parallel march: they gathered just 300 people (following the newspapers that endorse their cause).
Our march was peaceful. We sang some folk songs and pop. No prominent stars in the stage. Just simple people. A big screen showed the different marches that took place in the Provinces to defend marriage between a man and a woman. In the “inner Argentina” as we call it, there is an important opposition to gay marriage.
The march took place in the front of the Parliament. Tomorrow, the vote will be in favour or against ssm, without any other option.
There is another one: the UCR (the historical opponent of the “peronist” ruling party), has had several losses in the last ballots. The leaders made an alliance with a progressive party (the socialists). SSM was offered as a part of the bargain by the leaders of UCR to the socialists. Even if the legislators of the party do not agree, the party pressures its legislators to vote accompanying our leading party (peronists)…. They betrayed the people literally in front of them, because the meeting took place during the march in the building of the Parliament.
Tomorrow, apparently, the legislators who favor a civil union bill or reject ssm, have threatened not go to the premises (of the Parliament)."
UPDATE: New development. Progressives are now floating the idea of abolishing marriage from the civil code and replacing it with the "egalitarian familial union." Whatever happened to the fundamental right to marry?
In the July 13 Daily Caller, NOM President Brian Brown highlights the Obama Administration’s “sabotage” of DOMA. Unable to repeal DOMA legislatively, the Obama Justice Department is cutting the legs out from under DOMA in the courts:
President Obama and Elena Kagan Sabotage DOMA Defense
Last Thursday, Judge Joseph Tauro, in an absurdly poorly written opinion, struck down portions of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). In striking down DOMA, Judge Tauro overturned a law that was passed by large bipartisan majorities, was signed into law by Pres. Clinton, and that merely clarified and codified the law of marriage.
In the process, Judge Tauro also struck a dagger into the heart of our democratic processes and our constitutional system of government.
Congress passed DOMA because of a credible threat that courts were going to impose gay marriage over the will of the voters. Judge Tauro’s outrageous ruling certainly validates this basic concern of the legislators.
But if there is any excuse for Judge Tauro’s ruling, it lies in this fact: no-one in that courtroom in front of him tried to defend the law. President Obama’s Justice Department (with Elena Kagan’s participation as Solicitor General) pretended to defend DOMA, while actually sabotaging the law and ensuring its overthrow by the courts.
President Obama is afraid he cannot deliver on his promise to overturn DOMA in Congress, so he’s bringing in courts to do his dirty work. It was an underhanded trick, a sham trial, by folks who have sworn to uphold the law of the land. If the Justice Department lawyers couldn’t defend the law, they could have at least stepped aside. To pretend to defend, while actually undercutting DOMA, was and is a low blow.
How did President Obama’s Justice Department, with Elena Kagan as solicitor general, sabotage DOMA? Let me count the ways.
"What you are doing this day is an extraordinary service, not only to your own country, but to others in South America and the world. We applaud your courage in standing up for the truth about marriage. Marriage is the union of husband and wife, because these are the only kind of unions that can make new life and connect those children in love to their mother and their father. This is not bigotry. This is not hatred. This is common sense, and concern for the common good. Congratulations on refusing to stand by and permit a small unrepresentative elite transform marriage in Argentina. The eyes of the world are upon you. You inspire many."
More on the story we highlighted a few days ago. University of Illinois Religion Professor Ken Howell was fired for telling students in his “Modern Catholic Thought” class that he agreed with the Church teaching on marriage and sexuality.
AP coverage of Ken Howell’s firing is below. You can read the email that got him in so much trouble here.
U of I instructor fired over Catholic comments
The Associated Press
Posted Jul 09, 2010 @ 10:22 AM
Last update Jul 09, 2010 @ 03:05 PMURBANA -- The University of Illinois has fired an adjunct professor who taught courses on Catholicism after a student accused the instructor of engaging in hate speech by saying he agrees with the church's teaching that homosexual sex is immoral.
The professor, Ken Howell of Champaign, said his firing violates his academic freedom. He also lost his job at an on-campus Catholic center.
Howell, who taught Introduction to Catholicism and Modern Catholic Thought, says he was fired at the end of the spring semester after sending an e-mail explaining some Catholic beliefs to his students preparing for an exam.
"Natural Moral Law says that Morality must be a response to REALITY," he wrote in the e-mail. "In other words, sexual acts are only appropriate for people who are complementary, not the same."
An unidentified student sent an e-mail to religion department head Robert McKim on May 13, calling Howell's e-mail "hate speech." The student claimed to be a friend of the offended student. The writer said in the e-mail that his friend wanted to remain anonymous.
"Teaching a student about the tenets of a religion is one thing,"the student wrote. "Declaring that homosexual acts violate the natural laws of man is another."
Howell said he was teaching his students about the Catholic understanding of natural moral law.
"My responsibility on teaching a class on Catholicism is to teach what the Catholic Church teaches," Howell said in an interview with The News-Gazette in Champaign. "I have always made it very, very clear to my students they are never required to believe what I'm teaching and they'll never be judged on that."
NOM's man in Argentina reports: "Much excitement that Ignacio Arsuaga, president of Hazte Oir, who helped get 1 million people out in support of life and marriage on the streets of Spain, is in Argentina to offer his support and advice. Today he lunched with major leaders, and spoke at the Universidad Católica Argentina and explained how to motivate civilians to participate in huge political debates. Tomorrow he heads to Austral University and will talk about the importance of building an academic network and of using the new technologies in the transmission of ideas."
In his column in Forbes, the country's most respected libertarian legal scholar, Richard Epstein, defends DOMA against Judge Tauro's judicial activism and the Obama Administration's apparent "collusion" in killing off DOMA through judicial activism.
Although Prof. Epstein both favors SSM personally and opposes DOMA personally (he's not only pro-gay marriage, he's pro-polygamy!), he recognizes something is seriously wrong when a judge like Tauro takes the law and the Constitution into his own hands:
Justice Antonin Scalia, prescient in dissent, noted that courts would find it hard to draw a principled line between the two. In Gill and Massachusetts, Judge Tauro didn't even try. Rather, he pushed hard in two inconsistent directions. He first claimed that the definition of marriage was exclusively a function of state sovereignty, . . . Indeed, he went so far to make the weird claim that even the federal power to tax and spend did not allow it to define marriage for the purposes of federal expenditures.
Epstein goes on to note:
This novel Tenth Amendment argument looks to leave those states that reject gay marriage in the clear. But not really, for at the same time Judge Tauro also claimed that the Equal Protection Clause, which in 1967 was used to strike down state antimiscegenation laws in Loving v. Virginia, invalidated any state ban on same-sex marriage. . . .
Nor, as it turns out, could the federal government keep DOMA as it applies to federal benefits. More legal magic. In Bolling v. Sharp, the companion case to Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court held that the Equal Protection Clause that binds states under the Fourteenth Amendment had to be read into the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment that binds the federal government. . . .
Congress advanced four such justifications for this statute. . . . The Justice Department disavowed them all. So much for tradition. Its sole defense of DOMA was that it was needed to preserve the status quo until matters were sorted out politically. Given that open invitation Judge Tauro concluded that all of the justifications offered in DOMA flunked even the lowest "conceivable" standard of rationality. Religious people will surely take umbrage at his one-sentence rebuttals of centuries of tradition.
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. As a supporter of gay marriage, I still think that the DOJ's faint-hearted advocacy is no way to run a legal system. Nor is it wise for courts to use the Equal Protection Clause as a club against conventional morality, deeply felt.
Prof. Epstein concludes, "We don't need a judicial precedent that will spark a nation-wide rerun of California's Proposition 8. We need courts to back off to democratic processes, imperfect as they are."
The rapid collapse of the family in Ireland has been accompanied by a rapid rise in pressure to recognize gay unions as marriages. David Quinn of the Iona Institute does a brilliant job defending marriage as common sense for the common good. Watch!
For more on the Irish debate go to www.ionainstitute.ie.
An anonymous correspondent writes, "Yesterday, Sen. Liliana Negre president of the Comission of General Legislation at the Senators Chamber accused President Cristina Kirchner of using illegitimate political pressures to try to push a gay marriage bill through the legislature. While the adiministration has claimed this is a free vote of conscience, they are now putting pressure on party members to vote for gay marriage. The movement against same sex marriage continues to grow, now expecting more than 130.000 people for the demonstration on Tuesday."
The Presbyterian General Assembly (PCUSA) rejected same-sex marriage. That's good news. At the same time, this top legislative body for the Presbyterians did something very curious--it proposed stripping the requirement that candidates for the clergy "live either in fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman, or chastity in singleness." Under the pressure of a perceived need to accomodate gay folks, the Presbyterian leadership voted to remove any explicit standard of sexual conduct. A metaphor for our times? Many doubt the new rules, which must be confirmed by a vote of the presbyteries, will be accepted by the Presbyterians in the pews.
An adjunct professor at the University of Illinois says he was fired for "hate speech." The professor who teaches a course in Catholic thought, says he was asked by a student if he agreed with the Church's teaching on sexuality--sex is appropriate only in the context of a marital union, which the Catholic Church defines as one man with one woman.
In an email, he said yes, "Natural Moral Law says that Morality must be a response to REALITY . . . In other words, sexual acts are only appropriate for people who are complementary, not the same."
The email was forwarded to his department head and he was fired, Fox News is reporting. Perhaps this isn't the whole story. But if this is what happened it's outrageous. But not totally unexpected.
When Ted Olson and David Boies read the Catholic Catechism into the judicial record as evidence of hatred and bigotry, we can expect powerful others to act like this too.
New poll shows, "The vast majority of people in Guatemala oppose the notion of allowing homosexuals to marry, according to a poll by Cid-Gallup. 85 per cent of respondents disagree with same-sex marriage."
Do you agree or disagree with allowing homosexual couples to get married, just like heterosexual couples do?
Agree 12%
Disagree 85%
Not sure 3%
Source: Cid-Gallup
Methodology: Interviews with 1,200 Guatemalan adults, conducted from Jun. 7 to Jun. 17, 2010. Margin of error is 2.8 per cent.
