Jackie Gingrich Cushman writes:
My father, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, has been in politics as long as I can remember.
And as long as I can remember, media coverage about him has contained misstatements of facts. The vast majority are simple mistakes that are easily corrected, understood and rewoven into an ongoing storyline.
But one of them seems to have taken on a life of its own, and simple corrections have not sufficed to set the record straight. Why does this happen? I can't be sure, but I suspect that the narrative created by these untruths proves to be so much more compelling and more dramatic than what actually happened that it proves irresistible.
I'm talking about the story of my father's visit to my mother while she was in the hospital in 1980.
For years, I have thought about trying to correct the untrue accounts of this hospital visit. [Continue reading]
One of Gay multi-millionaire Tim Gill's tactics is to help elect gay-friendly politicians without bringing up gay issues during the campaign - in essence electing "sleeper cell" candidates who take Tim's money but don't mention what they've promised to do in return.
Joshua Green writes in The Atlantic about how this successful strategy may soon be "franchised" for other issues besides attempting to redefine marriage:
[Here's] how the Gill strategy worked. His team would swoop into races at the last moment, make major donations to favored candidates and attacks against opponents that wouldn't show up in public disclosure statements until well after the election. In Iowa, this strategy helped tip the legislature to the Democrats (although Gill says he supports or opposes politicians in both parties based only on their position on gay rights). When the state supreme court voted to legalize gay marriage, conservative opponents had no avenue to override the decision.
As a political strategy, this ought to be replicable on other issues. And two of Gill's top strategists, Bill Smith and Patrick Guerriero, are planning to do just that. They're starting their own political strategy firm--name still to be determined--to apply this approach to other problems.
It's hard to see how more Tim Gill-style politicking will help Americans be capable of fairly deciding the serious questions being put to them today.
David Mamet, a left-wing icon as a great playwright, has moved right and has published a book declaring his political conversion began when he first tried to write an explicitly political play in 2004:
"“This was after the 2004 election,” he told me in an interview last month. “I’d never met a conservative. I didn’t know what a conservative was. I didn’t know much of anything."
What an honest, and honestly embarrasing admission.
I lived in New York City for 15 years. Most of the people I met had never met a conservative, other than me. My best friend used to introduce me at parties as "her conservative friend Maggie," until I finally got fed up and told her "I don't introduce you with ideological warning labels, I assume my friends know how to behave at parties."
The chief advocates for diversity live in enclaves where they never have to know those they denounce as narrow-minded, provincial and intolerant.
The profile by Andy Ferguson, "Converting Mamet" is very interesting for a number of reasons. But that leaped out for me.
On his blog, Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York talks about what motivates people to defend marriage against redefinition:
We are not anti anybody; we are pro-marriage. The definition of marriage is a given: it is a lifelong union of love and fidelity leading, please God, to children, between one man and one woman.
History, Natural Law, the Bible (if you’re so inclined), the religions of the world, human experience, and just plain gumption tell us this is so. The definition of marriage is hardwired into our human reason.
To uphold that traditional definition, to strengthen it, and to defend it is not a posture of bigotry or bullying. Nor is it a denial of the “right” of anybody. As the philosophers remind us, in a civilized, moral society, we have the right to do what we ought, not to do whatever we want. Not every desire is a right.
To tamper with that definition, or to engage in some Orwellian social engineering about the nature and purpose of marriage, is perilous to all of us. [Continue reading]
Add the newest Supreme Court Justice to the list of people who think Paul Clement did the honorable thing:
At a crowded reception at Georgetown University Law Center on Thursday for lawyers who practice before the Supreme Court, Kagan recognized former solicitor general Paul D. Clement for his “integrity, professionalism and honor.”
Kagan said it was not a surprise that Clement would resign from his law firm “rather than abandoning a client.” Those who criticize Clement “misunderstand the traditions and ethics of the legal profession,” she said. --WaPo
Chuck Donovan, a senior research fellow at Heritage, writes on their Foundry blog:
... last November, when the Defense Department’s working group unveiled its recommendations regarding implementation of a prospective repeal of the law, it noted repeatedly that DOMA made it “legally impermissible” to treat same-sex couples as married under the military’s family policy.
The report included an acknowledgement of the federal court cases challenging DOMA and referred to them as an “evolving legal landscape”—a somewhat inaccurate locution given the fact that most state and federal court challenges to traditional marriage have been defeated...
The decision announced by the navy chief of chaplains, Admiral Mark Tidd, to suspend his previous guidance until further notice brings the navy policy back into line with those of the other service branches, which had rightly maintained their fealty to DOMA and the rule of law. As Representative Todd Akin and 62 colleagues wrote to Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus, “It is not the place of any citizen of this country to pick and choose which laws they are going to obey. We expect citizens sworn to defend those laws to set the example in their application.”
And we expect the Department of Justice to defend the laws as written too, but that seems too much to ask.
ADF Senior Vice President Jordan Lorence writes about his experience debating marriage at Stanford recently, and debunks a persistent false argument used to promote SSM:
Last week I participated in a discussion sponsored by the Federalist Society at Stanford Law School in California on redefining marriage to include same-sex couples, and its collision with the First Amendment rights of those who define marriage as one man and one woman only. We had a great discussion [... but] what I did not expect at Stanford was a debate on the relevancy of the 1967 Supreme Court decision striking down Virginia’s law banning interracial marriage, Loving v. Virginia.
Many who support redefining marriage to include same-sex couples are convinced that this case greatly supports their position. It does not. I have found that many people have not read the decision, or do not understand what the Supreme Court ruled in that case. The decision doesn’t help them. So it is a dreadfully flawed argument and a non sequitur to argue as many do that ”just as a ban on interracial marriage was unconstitutional, so a ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional.”
... The Virginia law only banned white people from having an interracial marriage. An African American man could marry a woman of Asian descent under the Virginia law struck down by the Supreme Court. That interracial marriage was OK because it did not include any white people. The obviously uneven application of the law based on race is why the Supreme Court struck it down. These despicable laws did not say, “whites can only marry whites, blacks can only marry blacks, Asians can only marry Asians,” etc., but many wrongly assume that is what those laws said.
... Race has not been a universally-accepted part of the definition of marriage. For example, not all states banned white people from having an interracial marriage. Some states, like Virginia, allowed whites to marry nonwhites for many decades before imposing a ban on whites marrying nonwhites. The existence of miscegenation laws is a sordid historical fact. The court decisions striking down those laws offer no principle of law that compels legalizing same-sex marriage.
Elizabeth Marquardt writes at FamilyScholars.org:
At the National Catholic Register reporter Steve Wetherbe has a solid story on how researchers are squelching the science, as the gay marriage debate makes scholars otherwise aware of the research on marriage, divorce and child well-being unwilling to say what they used to say.
Here's an excerpt of Wetherbe's article:
... Political correctness is involved too in the suppression of findings.
[David Blankenhorn, head of the Institute for American Values] tells of being lambasted by the head of one family research organization back in the mid-2000s for using one of that organization’s studies to support an article he wrote for the Los Angeles Times against same-sex “marriage.”
“She didn’t claim I’d used the data wrongly. She just didn’t want her research associated in any way with being anti-same sex ‘marriage.’ She actually tried to forbid me from ever doing it again.” Blankenhorn says he used “blunt language” to stand up for his right to use the data as he chose.
Diane Sollee, founder and director of Smart Marriages, a national coalition of marriage and family educators, says traditional, biological marriage is too important and beneficial for social scientists to soft-pedal.
“Society is telling people a lie: that if you married a jerk then you’ll be better off and your children will be better off if you dump him. ‘It’s not your fault: You just married the wrong person.’
“But what people need to hear is what research really shows: that your children will be much better off — much better off, according to every measure researchers can think of — if you can hang in there with the father of these children and make it work.”
For those who can “hang in there,” it gets even better: “Longevity studies show the mother will live longer, the father will live longer, and the children will live longer. They also show that the majority of couples who reported being deeply unhappy in their marriage and for whatever reason stayed in the marriage, in five years reported being happy, and many couldn’t even remember being unhappy.
Thanks to all of you who contacted your senators in advance of this week's 38-27 vote to pass the Minnesota marriage amendment. The bill now goes to the House where we are hearing rumors that some House members are talking of tabling the amendment until next year.
We need your help today! Gay marriage activists know they aren't likely to defeat the amendment this year—and would like nothing better than to push the vote off for another year.
Please take a moment today to contact your state representative. Let your representative know that a vote to table the amendment is a vote to undermine marriage!
Click here to send an email to your Representative today!
The people of Minnesota deserve a full and open campaign to decide the future of marriage. Putting a vote off until 2012 means an abbreviated conversation about marriage that is overshadowed in the midst of a presidential race. The only ones served by putting this vote off are gay marriage advocates, not Minnesota voters or Minnesota families.
Please, click here to send an email to your state representative today. Tell your representative it's time to vote on the amendment now!
Michael Foust of the Baptist Press reports:
Conservatives have long argued that "gay marriage" legalization would have negative consequences on religious freedoms, and they may have found another example in Canada, where "gay marriage" is legal and where Sportsnet TV host Damian Goddard was fired the day after he stated his opposition to marriage redefinition in a Tweet.
... Goddard's firing followed another controversy that combined sports and "gay marriage." In April Olympic gold medalist gymnast Peter Vidmar signed on as the United States' "chief of mission" for the 2012 London Olympics. But once it became public that he had donated $2,000 in 2008 to help pass California Proposition 8 and appeared at two rallies in support of it, homosexual groups began pressuring him to step down.
A heart-wrenching story from the Australian Herald Sun:
As Queensland's first child born under the state's altruistic surrogacy laws, Connor Harris's arrival was a moment of unbridled happiness for his parents.
For his biological mother "Rosie" (not her real name), there has been nothing but heartache and regret since that historic day last May 11.
"As soon as the baby was born it all changed," the married friend of the couple said.
"I was crying in hospital when he was having his first bath, I couldn't watch, I thought what the hell have I done?"
"I never thought having a child and giving him away would make me feel like this.
"I regret everything, I don't regret Connor, I regret the decision very much, I just wish I'd never done it."
Matt said things changed after Connor was born, with Rosie wanting to be called b-ma (biological mother) instead of auntie Rosie as agreed before the birth.
Hundreds of students and staff from Macalester College and Carleton College in Minnesota attended a 3M shareholder meeting in St. Paul to protest 3M's donation to MN Forward, a group that supported Republican candidate Tom Emmer, and their protests took up most of the meeting, according to the Pioneer Press:
"We're not moralizers; we're a company," [3M Chief Executive George] Buckley said. After the sixth or seventh question from the Carleton and Macalester groups, Buckley joked that "I do compliment Macalester College for having 427 students come here and ask this question."
After the meeting, Buckley said he's "kind of a live-and-let-live guy" on social issues and reiterated that the company doesn't get involved there.
... As for the proposal that the groups from Carleton and Macalester were there to support? Shareholders voted down the proposal from Trillium Asset Management Corp. that would have required 3M to give a more detailed reporting of its political contributions each year.
David Hottinger wrote in response to the story about the protest at 3M's stockholder meeting:
Just out of college myself, I think it's safe to assume most undergrads aren't holding too many shares of 3M Co. stock. So I'm a little sickened by the Carlton and Macalester students' actions at 3M's shareholder meeting May 10 ("3M meeting lite," May 11).
It's one thing to disagree with a company's political contributions. But to hijack a company's shareholder meeting in order to let it know that if it donates to a Republican it is going to pay for it until the Republicans cave on gay marriage?
That's not protest; that's bullying.
Patrick Craine reports from Canada about Sportsnet firing Damian Goddard after he used his personal twitter account to express his views on marriage:
One of Canada’s leading TV sports broadcasters fired one of its anchors Wednesday after he voiced support for true marriage on Twitter.
Damian Goddard, the now-former host of “Connected” on Rogers Sportsnet, had tweeted his support of Burlington hockey agent Todd Reynolds, who created a stir this week when he criticized New York Rangers hockey star Sean Avery for shooting a TV ad backing gay “marriage.”
Sportsnet had distanced themselves from the comments on their own Twitter account. They announced Wednesday that Goddard had been fired and did not specify the reasons.
... Nevertheless, Goddard is standing by the comments. “In terms of what I said, I stand by it,” he told the Toronto Star. “I’m a devout Roman Catholic. It’s not about hate at all.”
