The New York politician leading the charge for true marriage in the state says he has faced death threats and a barrage of hate calls as a result of his stand.
... Though Diaz’s colleagues in the legislature have failed to defend him – with one Bronx source telling New York Daily News it’s because “the feeling is that you reap what you sow” - Diaz was supported June 3rd by the New York Catholic Conference, the public policy arm for New York’s Catholic bishops.
The fierce attacks the bishops received when they opposed same-sex “marriage” in 2009 is “small potatoes” compared to the “hate speech” that’s been thrown at Sen. Diaz, wrote executive director Richard Barnes in a Facebook note.
Anthony Weiner's escapades infuse a whole new meaning into one of my favorite words from the movie "Bambi": twitterpated.
... Twitterpated. It's as good an explanation as we're likely to get.
Of all the questions left unanswered by Anthony Weiner's astonishing press conference on Monday, the most unanswerable is this: "What were you thinking?"
A grown man, 46 years old, repeatedly sends lewd and graphic photos and texts to multiple young women he's never met.
How could he expect that was going to work out for him?
What were you thinking, Anthony?
... Watching Weiner flounder, I had a flashback to a recent Heritage Foundation panel, "Sexual Economics: The Forces Shaping How Young Americans Meet, Mate and Marry.
In the past year, Rhode Island sexual minorities have witnessed implosions and cutbacks at no less than three pro-equality organizations: Marriage Equality Rhode Island, Queer Action Rhode Island, and the Providence Equality Action Committee.
PEAC was placed in hibernation by its founders in mid-2010 due to low attendance; QuARI was silenced in January 2011 amid leadership strife; and MERI lost two of its respected officials this spring amid strategic disagreement over civil unions and declining donations.
But despite polls showing majority support for marriage equality, grassroots advocacy has been weaker than the opposition's -- and that advocacy may be even weaker in defense of the state's strong antidiscrimination laws.
The author goes on to call for his progressive readers to "confront" local businesses over their lack of explicit public support for the gay movement's legislative priorities in Rhode Island and elsewhere.
Lawyers for Catholic Charities in the dioceses of Springfield, Peoria and Joliet are seeking an emergency injunction that would protect religious agencies who turn away unmarried couples who want to become foster parents -- including couples in civil unions.
In a petition filed today in Sangamon County Circuit Court, the three Catholic Charities agencies sued the Illinois Attorney General and Department of Children and Family Services for threatening to enforce new policies that accommodate civil unions, which went into effect last week...
In March, the attorney general’s office issued a letter stating that the office “received notice that Catholic Charities … discriminates against Illinois citizens based on race, marital status and sexual orientation” in the provision of foster care and adoption services and demanded that Catholic Charities turn over a wide range of documents in response.
The charities ask the court to declare that they are legally justified to preserve their current policy of exclusively granting licenses to married couples and single, non-cohabiting individuals and referring civil union couples to other child welfare agencies.
“Religious and faith-based entities need not check their beliefs at the door when providing vital social services for the benefit of needy and vulnerable children and families in Illinois,” said lawyer Tom Brejcha of the Thomas More Society, which is representing the charities in the lawsuit.
Steven Roach, executive director for Catholic Charities in the Springfield Diocese, said child welfare advocates should know it’s in children’s best interest for Catholic Charities to stay in the foster care business.
“It’s tragic that there are people who believe unnecessarily disrupting the lives of thousands of vulnerable children is an acceptable outcome in this situation,” Roach said.
"Despite high rates of nonmarital childbearing in the United States, little is known about the health of women who have nonmarital births. We use data from the NLSY79 to examine differences in age 40 self-assessed health between women who had a premarital birth and those whose first birth occurred within marriage. We then differentiate women with a premarital first birth according to their subsequent union histories and estimate the effect of marrying or cohabiting versus remaining never-married on midlife self-assessed health.
...Results suggest that premarital childbearing is negatively associated with midlife health for white and black women, but not for Hispanic women. We find no evidence that the negative health consequences of nonmarital childbearing are mitigated by either marriage or cohabitation for black women.
For other women, only enduring marriage to the child’s biological father is associated with better health than remaining unpartnered.
Children struggle with maths and making friends when their parents divorce, a study has found.
They often fall behind classmates whose parents stay married, suffering from anxiety, loneliness and feeling sad – and may never catch up academically.
Contrary to some previous research, children through primary school did not show any negative effects before the parents decided to split, the U.S. study found.
But as soon as the divorce process started, the children suffered a range of problems that persisted, a report in the American Sociological Review said.
The five-year study compared emotional and academic development of children of divorce with those whose parents stayed together, by following 3,585 children from around the age of four.
Last weekend NOM Chairman Maggie Gallagher was at the second annual Faith and Freedom conference. Alex Parker of U.S. News & World Reportcaught up with her to get her take on the conservative movement today:
Organized by former Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed, the event included a mix of culturally conservative speakers as well as famous fiscal conservative activists such as Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform.
And that’s OK for social conservatives. “We really have an economic crisis,” says Deal Hudson, an influential Catholic conservative activist who spoke at the conference. “I don’t have a problem with an appropriate amount of attention to that.”
Other activists pushed home the message of a common goal. “The divide between the Tea Party and the social conservatives is a false divide,” says Maggie Gallagher, chairwoman of the National Organization for Marriage. “They all have a vision of American, and they’re concerned that it’s being overturned by elites.”
Sen. Greg Ball, R-Patterson, Putnam County, said he's undecided on the same-sex marriage bill but would support civil unions, which would afford gay couples equal rights but not the ability to marry...
Ball said after passing civil unions, New York could pass a law allowing for issues to be on the ballot — called initiative and referendum — and then let voters decide whether to make gay marriage legal.
"I believe we could immediately pass the most comprehensive civil-union bill in the country and at the same time find a way to constitutionally package an initiative and referendum on gay marriage and put it out to the people," Ball explained.
Modern technology raises the question, and this forum in the Sydney Australia Morning Herald pits the opinions of the only person actually conceived by donor insemination against the carefully nuanced words of adults who have an interest (personal, medical or financial) in permitting a no-holds-barred fertility industry.
Damian Adams, who was donor-conceived, writes:
What occurs as a result of posthumous conception is a deliberate and preplanned deprivation of a meaningful relationship that that child should have had. Such situations do occur, such as when one of the parents dies, or abandons the child and parental responsibilities. As a society we recognise the loss incurred to that child as a result. However, by sanctioning and condoning posthumous conception we are making a statement that this loss is acceptable provided it was intentionally induced.
Research data from donor-conceived people in loving homes (after all, they were wanted, too, and their parents also went to extreme lengths) shows a significant proportion still want to know, meet and have a relationship with their donor. It is clear that their progenitor has meaning to them. Not only is it a matter of kinship but also of identity. Without having one of the mirrors of themselves that they see in their genetic parents, there is the potential they will have trouble forming their identity.
Sociological data shows that children growing up in fatherless or motherless households have myriad problems such as increased promiscuity, teenage pregnancy, imprisonment, substance abuse and poorer educational outcomes. This is not to say that these things will occur, rather that they occur at higher incidences than in the two-parent scenario. This does not take into account how the child may feel about being created from a deceased person. Some donor-conceived people already report feeling like an experiment and having trouble dealing with their artificial conception.
In a world where adults seem able to obtain anything they want, is it ethically sound to presume our desire and love for a child is so great that it will automatically ameliorate any negative consequences the decision has on the child?
... The millions of people conceived from donated (or sold) gametes argue, like adoptees, that knowledge of who you come from is important. We believe that genetic heritage has meaning and value, and that nobody has the right to withhold significant, personal information about someone from that very person.
This is not the same as wanting a parent, and certainly should have nothing to do with financial support. Neither adoptees nor offspring expect or want that. Nor can we claim any right to a relationship, and indeed the BC adoption law, while insisting on the birth parent’s identity’s being available to the grown child, it also allows for a contact veto. But like adoptees, we do want the right to know.
Why? Of all the arguments, the most obvious is the medical one. With thousands of diseases now known to have genetic origin or influence, family history is an important diagnostic tool. Those who don’t have this information are being treated differently. With us and with adoptees, we have created a sub-class of people who have fewer rights to health than others. And this is more than a theoretical issue for many offspring. Just last week, I heard the story of a young woman offspring of sperm donation in another country who was diagnosed with an aggressive, and heritable form of cancer that might have been curable had she known she was at risk and thus treated earlier. Anonymity and secrecy can kill.
Charles Donovan at the Heritage Foundation writes in the Kansas City Star:
Our nation's simmering conscience wars have claimed another victim: the Catholic Diocese of Rockford, Ill. Once again, the conflict centered on the legal redefinition of marriage and family. But at a deeper level, what's at stake is the future of moral and religious liberty.
... The news from Illinois points up the fact that even civil unions legislation can threaten religious conscience, particularly if legislators refuse, as they did in Springfield, to approve meaningful conscience exemptions.
... The argument that laws like those of Massachusetts and Illinois are really about non-discrimination and tolerance rings hollow. In both jurisdictions, Catholic Charities was willing to refer unmarried couples, including homosexuals, to other agencies that had no moral objection to placements outside the traditional family.
"Diversity" in such matters implies a variety of agencies and policies, not state-imposed uniformity. Would our nation have more diverse grocers if the state mandated that every establishment offer the same product line? Tolerance on matters of religious and moral conviction is meaningless if individuals and institutions are shorn of their liberty to act in keeping with their core values.
A federal magistrate judge has permitted Congress to intervene in a case challenging the Defense of Marriage Act as unconstitutional. Southern District Magistrate Judge James C. Francis issued a 12-page order and memorandum yesterday saying Congress has a right to intervene in Windsor v. United States, 10 Civ. 8435, now that the U.S. Justice Department has said it will no longer argue that the act is constitutional.
