The scientists in question appear to be very forthright that they are interested in this question so that they can help change attitudes attaching folks to the idea and ideal of the natural family. Not exactly the beau ideal of academic neutrality, here.
The Ford Foundation, the Harvard Crimson reports, has awarded $730,000 to research by the Face Value Campaign examining "public perceptions of LGBT sexuality with a focus on how the public thinks contact with LGBT adults affects children" in order to "craft messages that will change attitudes for public policy."
“This grant allows us to really understand what is it about children in relationship to gay people that translates into a perception of harm, and investigate how can we translate that to positive association,” said the Executive Director of Face Value Julie R. Davis...
“Homophobia is the thing that harms children, not homosexuals,” said Timothy P. McCarthy, (who will oversee the research)
---Breaking news from Indiana, the state marriage amendment passed the committee by a vote of 7-3. Word is the fight will be over whether to amend it on the floor to permit civil unions. Any amendment kills the bill, because it has to pass both the House and the Senate in exactly the same version.
Julea Ward was forced out of her School of Counseling graduate program at Eastern Michigan University for refusing to counsel a man in a homosexual relationship, citing her Christian views.
She tells her story to Speak Up University:
The Michigan Attorney General has also gotten involved in the case, coming to the defense of Mrs. Ward, as the Detroit Free Press reports:
Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette has waded into a closely watched federal appeals case, siding with an Eastern Michigan University student who claims her dismissal from the university for refusing to counsel gay and lesbian patients violated her religious belief against homosexuality.
Schuette is the latest entrant in a case that has drawn conservative and religious groups, public universities and civil liberties organizations.
Maggie's syndicated column this week is a shorter and slightly different version of her NOM blog post:
The arguments for gay marriage get ever stranger:
This week in Indiana, Jill Cook, an executive from engine-maker Cummins Inc., testified that a proposed state marriage amendment "jeopardizes our ability to be competitive in global markets."
I hope Cook was not testifying under oath, because that's an amazing whopper of a claim, and one that we are hearing more and more often. [Continue reading]
Joan Desmond writes in the National Catholic Register about the internal debates among Catholics that took place leading up to SSM eventually being defeated in Maryland earlier this month:
The Maryland House of Delegates “killed” a bill March 11 that sought to legalize same-sex “marriage” in the state.
The House of Delegates sent the bill back to the Judiciary Committee — a move described in The Washington Post as “an acknowledgment by supporters that it did not have sufficient votes to pass on the floor.” It was an unexpected conclusion to an intense political fight that pitted key Democratic lawmakers who are Catholic, but whose votes were contrary to Church doctrine, against the leaders of their Church.
Local Catholic pastors applauded the outcome, yet the disconnect between the public stance of the Maryland Catholic Conference and prominent Democrats like Gov. Martin O’Malley remains unresolved. Is the source of the problem a failure of catechesis or the triumph of partisan loyalties — or both? Certainly, the battle lines underscored the difficulty of changing minds and hearts in a society that increasingly views same-sex “marriage” as a fundamental civil right.
Author Jennifer Moses writes in the Wall Street Journal, "Women of a liberated generation wrestle with their eager-to-grow-up daughters—and their own pasts":
Why do so many of us not only permit our teenage daughters to dress like this—like prostitutes, if we're being honest with ourselves—but pay for them to do it with our AmEx cards?
I have a ... theory. It has to do with how conflicted my own generation of women is about our own past, when many of us behaved in ways that we now regret. A woman I know, with two mature daughters, said, "If I could do it again, I wouldn't even have slept with my own husband before marriage. Sex is the most powerful thing there is, and our generation, what did we know?"
Ms. Nossel [deputy assistant secretary of state for international organizations] said the United States was proud to be taking a leading role in promoting the idea that gayrights are human rights — among the sharper foreign policy redirections that occurred after President Obama took office.
Christopher Wolfe, emeritus professor of Political Science at Marquette University, writes in the Public Discourse about the (past and future) threats to marriage:
It has been said that marriage has survived many social events, including the sexual revolution, and it will survive gay marriage too. I don’t think marriage survived the sexual revolution. Every war has winners and losers, and, as others have argued, the boys [or rather, the bad boys] won the sexual revolution (since it legitimized non-marital and recreational sex, gave them the option of deserting their wives for younger and better offerings, and even induced many women to adopt more male attitudes toward sex or accede to male demands in the sexual marketplace). The most prominent victims of the sexual revolution were the children who have been deprived of the enduring husband-and-wife family that should ordinarily be their birthright.
... But if it is true that heterosexuals have already damaged marriage as a social institution deeply, that still leaves the question of whether these wounds already inflicted on marriage justify the further infliction of additional wounds, in the form of legitimizing homosexual marriage, with its much more radical separation of marriage and children. The more sensible path, I think, would be to resist further erosion of the institution, and to undertake substantial efforts to re-constitute marriage as a stable institution in our society.
A Mississauga Roman Catholic high school's decision to bar students from launching a gay-straight alliance doesn't gel with Ontario's education policy on equity, Premier Dalton McGuinty said Monday.
“We are making it perfectly clear to all our school boards, all our schools, all our principals, all our teachers and all our students that it is unacceptable in Ontario to discriminate based on race, gender, religion or sexual orientation,” the Premier said in Question Period.
... NDP education critic Rosario Marchese also said the Premier's response was a non-answer.
“The policies are quite clear,” Mr. Marchese said, referring to a ministry's memorandum from October, 2009. “There is absolutely no ambiguity and it applies to both public and Catholic schools.”
The memorandum reads that “boards must also help school staff to give support to students who wish to participate in gay-straight alliances and in other student-led activities that promote understanding and development of healthy relationships. Schools must also engage their school councils and student councils to support these student-led activities.”
PRIME Minister Julia Gillard revealed yesterday that her personal stance against gay marriage was due to her conservative upbringing.
Ms Gillard said she was "on the conservative side" of the gay marriage issue "because of the way our society is and how we got here".
"I think that there are some important things from our past that need to continue to be part of our present and part of our future," she said. "If I was in a different walk of life, if I'd continued in the law and was partner of a law firm now, I would express the same view, that I think for our culture, for our heritage, the Marriage Act and marriage being between a man and a woman has a special status.
Kathryn Lopez, editor-at-large of National Review Online, interviews Maggie about marriage and Maryland over at Headline Bistro:
Gallagher, God bless her, was actually on the winning side of the marriage debate this month in Maryland. That’s because “gay marriage” is not inevitable, just as the sexual revolution did not irreversibly cast asunder what is true.
Despite the conventional expectation that she was on the losing side, black churches in particular raised their voices in opposition to the bill seeking to legalize same-sex marriage. Two of the bill’s cosponsors jumped ship in response to the citizen lobbying against it.
“Truth matters,” Gallagher said, reflecting on the win. “Same-sex unions are not marriages, and the American people are proving remarkably stubborn in refusing to pretend otherwise.” In over thirty states and counting.
Reflecting on the politics of marriage, Gallagher added: “They keep saying, ‘It’s a done deal.’ Then it turns out we win. As my favorite political consultant says, ‘It's not a done deal. If it were, it would be done already.’” [Continue reading]
