Some creative minds came up with a poster comparing NOM to the KKK. It's outrageous of course. We wouldn't normally bother to notice such stuff, which is par for the course, but even on the gay blogs circulating it a lot of fair minded people are questioning that kind of over the top rhetoric.
So we point out once again, for the fair minded on either side of this debate: When a man came to a NOM rally with a hateful sign, he was immediately told he wasn't welcome. This is why the photo of the hateful sign is not of a sign being held up at a NOM rally but a sign discarded across the street.
Just to make it crystal clear, we then issued a statement denouncing violence, harassment or threats of violence against any one on any side of the marriage debate, including against gay people and gay marriage supporters.
Which we are happy to reiterate again for our gay readers--we know we have many: We stand with you abhorring any threat to the person and property of gay people, or gay marriage supporters. We hope you do the same for marriage supporters.
But we do it because it's the right thing to do not because anyone demands this of us.
There are good people on both sides of this debate, and we need to have a country where even intense moral disagreements can be aired without violence or threats or incivility.
Kathryn Lopez interviews Tom Messner, a lawyer and visiting fellow at the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society, on what role did religious freedom play in the negotiations over same-sex marriage in New York. Here's a sample:
KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: It’s been said that protections for religious freedom were the key to winning the swing votes on the same-sex-marriage bill in New York. What do you think about that?
TOM MESSNER: If that’s true, it’s regrettable. The marriage debate is first and foremost a debate about the meaning and public purposes of marriage, not a debate about religious freedom. Yes, people on both sides of the marriage debate now recognize that same-sex marriage threatens religious freedom. But the religious-freedom consequences of redefining marriage are a threshold issue of concern to everyone, not an escape hatch for people who would rather avoid difficult issues.
Even if the religious-freedom issues were not on the table, proponents of same-sex marriage would still need to explain why marriage should no longer have any intrinsic connection between children and mothers and fathers and why people who think it should are morally equivalent to racists. Lawmakers would need to squarely confront the core issues presented by genderless marriage, even if threats to religious freedom were not a factor.
In other words, no matter what someone thinks about the merits of genderless marriage, threats to religious freedom from same-sex marriage present serious concerns about redefining marriage. On the other hand, even if same-sex marriage posed no threats to religious freedom at all, the core reasons to support marriage as one man and one woman remain just as compelling and must be addressed.
Public Policy Polling -- a Democrat polling firm that we've talked about before -- is asking questions in key states for the 2012 election, including what their voters thing about marriage.
FLORIDA
"Do you think same-sex marriage should be legal or illegal?" (July 6th)
Illegal: 53%
Legal: 37%
Unsure: 10%
NEW MEXICO
"Do you think same-sex marriage should be legal or illegal?" (July 5th)
Illegal: 48%
Legal: 42%
Unsure: 10%
(Democrats outnumber Republicans 51-32 in New Mexico)
A statement from NY State Senator Rev. Ruben Diaz, the lone Democrat Senator to vote against the same-sex marriage bill:
On June 24th I voted my conscience and opposed Governor Andrew Cuomo's key piece of social legislation in the New York State Senate that redefines our marriage laws away from the traditional definition of one man and one woman. I was the only Democrat in the Senate to vote against this legislation, and I wear my vote as a badge of honor.
I have been congratulated by religious leaders and constituents not only from my district, but from districts all over New York State. I have received messages of encouragement and gratitude from people throughout the United States.
... Although Republican Senate Leader Dean Skelos ushered the gay marriage vote to the floor in order to make the 11:00PM news, and even though the vote passed, the hatred that has spewed in my direction before June 24th continues.
... [but] In the great spirit of interfaith unity I will continue to work to promote what the late Pope John Paul II called the Culture of Life and continue to highlight the actions of the opposition which is still not pleased even with their declared victory in New York against traditional marriage.
Political Science major Ryan Normandin at M.I.T. writes in their student newspaper The Tech:
It is unfortunate that there is such a growing stigma attached to arguing against gay marriage — at least here in the liberal bastion that is Massachusetts. If one is opposed to legalizing gay marriage, it is automatically assumed that the opposition rests on a basis of hate, homophobia, or other such negative motivations. There are, in fact, legitimate, substantive reasons as to why gay marriage should not be legalized.
... Same-sex couples are unable to procreate, meaning that there is no compelling interest to subsidize their marriages. At this point, many would argue that the happiness of same-sex couples would be enhanced by gay marriage, thus providing a compelling interest. This, in fact, is not the case. The government has already shown through prohibiting certain types of marriage that it does not view enhanced happiness as a compelling enough interest to encourage marriage of any kind. After all, if “enhanced happiness” was a compelling interest, it could be used to justify government subsidization of chocolate, which is proven to increase happiness through the release of certain endorphins. In fact, one could argue that the government should subsidize anything and everything that makes someone happy. Thus, “enhanced happiness” can clearly not be considered a compelling enough interest to justify the recognition and, therefore, subsidization of gay marriage.
One of the things I've learned since coming aboard the National Organization for Marriage this year is that gay bloggers and activists pay very close attention to what NOM does.
Why? Because NOM matters.
One of the rumors they're trying to circulate now is that I'm trying to "hide" my association with NOM. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact I made my association with NOM public on my personal blog immediately, and I regularly make a point of mentioning my work with NOM whenever I am interviewed on the topic of marriage.
I'm also a big part of the editorial team that provides content for the NOM blog, website, and social media properties. And you'll be hearing a lot more from me soon. Frankly, I'm really excited about what NOM has in store and I'm proud to be serving with the excellent people here who are completely dedicated to protecting marriage as I am.
In case that matters to anyone.
North Carolina State House Speaker Thom Tillis in an interview with local press:
“The defense of marriage is one that a number of folks in our base feel very strongly about,” Tillis said, noting the issue would definitely be brought up in a special fall session. “Generally speaking, it polls fairly high across the voter base. It's not a particularly partisan thing.”
He expects the measure, which can't be vetoed by the governor, to pass the House with the minimum 72 votes and go to voters in 2012.
Andy Birkey of the Minnesota Independent:
Minnesota’s ballot initiative law says that if a voter casts a ballot but does not vote for the specific ballot question, it counts as a “no” vote. The amendment must receive a majority of all votes cast in order for it to pass. In other words, even if the amendment garners more “yes” votes than “no” votes it still may fail if a large number voters skip the question on the ballot but still vote for president, U.S. Senate or local representatives. As Minnesota Public Radio notes, since 1898 when that law took effect, 62 amendments have failed even though they received more “yes” votes than “no” votes.
But, in recent history, voters have still approved nine out of every 10 amendments that have been on the ballot.
Other states, including Hawaii, Tennessee and Utah, have similar rules for constitutional amendments.
The Economist reports that "Traditional marriage has evolved from a near-universal rite to a luxury for the educated and affluent."
Americans with a high-school degree or less (who account for 58% of the population) tell researchers they would like to marry, but do not believe they can afford it. Instead, they raise children out of wedlock. Only 6% of children born to college-educated mothers were born outside marriage, according to the National Marriage Project. That compares with 44% of babies born to mothers whose education ended with high school.
“Less marriage means less income and more poverty,” reckons Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. She and other researchers have linked as much as half of the income inequality in America to changes in family composition: single-parent families (mostly those with a high-school degree or less) are getting poorer while married couples (with educations and dual incomes) are increasingly well-off. “This is a striking gap that is not well understood by the public,” she says.
Do not expect the Democratic Party, however, to make an issue of the marriage gap in next year’s elections. Unmarried women voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama. “You don’t want to suggest to someone who isn’t married and has children that they should be married,” says Ms Sawhill. “That is a denigration of their lifestyle.”
From a Catholic Culture summary:
In a powerful editorial for The Anchor, the official newspaper for the Diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts, Father Roger Landry calls attention to the pastoral damage done by priests who refuse to convey the Church’s teaching on human sexuality, fearful of opposition from gay-rights activists.
A sample:
If doctors and nurses at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute were aware that a patient was chain-smoking cigars and out of a desire not to displease him said nothing, they would be guilty of unconscionable neglect. If the patient was flaunting his cigar-smoking and attempting to persuade others that, rather than harmful, cigar-smoking was a great practice deserving of celebration instead of censure, the destructive consequences of their reticence would be magnified. Similarly, pastors and parishes who are aware that parishioners are unabashedly engaging in practices contrary to the practice of the faith and who do not strive, with patient, tender and firm preaching and accompaniment, to help them eliminate whatever in them is leading them to sin, are culpable of the worst type of pastoral malpractice.
Ross Douthat in the New York Times on Dan Savage's effort to separate monogamy from marriage:
Savage is strongly pro-marriage, but he thinks the institution is weighed down by unrealistic cultural expectations about monogamy.
... Forty years ago, Savage’s perspective temporarily took upper-middle-class America by storm. In the mid-1970s, only 51 percent of well-educated Americans agreed that adultery was always wrong. But far from being strengthened by this outbreak of realism, their marriages went on to dissolve in record numbers. This trend eventually reversed itself. Heterosexual marriage has had a tough few decades, but its one success story is the declining divorce rate among the upper middle class. This decline, tellingly, has gone hand in hand with steadily rising disapproval of adultery.
There’s a lesson here. Institutions tend to be strongest when they make significant moral demands, and weaker when they pre-emptively accommodate themselves to human nature.
Critics of gay marriage see this as one of the great dangers in severing the link between marriage and the two realities — gender difference and procreation — that it originally evolved to address. A successful marital culture depends not only on a general ideal of love and commitment, but on specific promises, exclusions and taboos. And the less specific and more inclusive an institution becomes, the more likely people are to approach it casually, if they enter it at all.
Dennis Byrne writes an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune:
The recent legalization of same-sex marriage in New York proves that it's no longer an issue in the United States, right? Gay marriage will eventually, but certainly, become widely accepted everywhere, right?
Not if the American people have anything to say about it.
... Whatever the polls say, a real test of public opinion will come again in another important referendum next year when Minnesota voters will decide whether to amend their state constitution in support of traditional marriage.
Indeed, Illinois' recent legalization of civil unions for gay (and heterosexual) couples does contribute to a growing feeling of isolation among traditional-marriage supporters. Get on board now or get steamrolled, they are warned. The path of history will lead Americans to view traditional-marriage supporters with the same disdain, even disgust, that now is reserved for past supporters of racial segregation, a recent letter writer to the Tribune observed.
Such comparisons, of course, are loathsome, especially to those of us who were around and giving full voice to civil rights advances when doing so was not a popular position. We understand the difference between eliminating the odious institution of Jim Crow and defending an institution that is one of civil society's oldest, most enduring and beneficial — marriage. It was not for nothing that societies for millenniums recognized marriage for its civilizing properties and stepped in to regulate them secularly.
A sample of the New York Times coverage of the four NY Republican Senators who voted for same-sex marriage and must now prepare to face their voters:
... Mr. Alesi is likely to need support from Democrats to win re-election — in the last election, which he won by 7,000 votes, he garnered nearly 8,000 votes from the Conservative Party.
... Not all of Mr. McDonald’s old friends were so forgiving. Bob Roe, the longtime chairman of the Saratoga County Conservative Party, said he had known Mr. McDonald for decades and even campaigned with him. “You can imagine I’m real disappointed,” Mr. Roe said. “I consider him a friend, but I can’t support him.”
... Mr. Saland opposed the measure in 2009, but at home in Poughkeepsie, two powerful forces seem to have quietly nudged him toward a yes vote: his wife, Linda, who wanted him to back the measure, and the rabbi at his longtime synagogue, who is an outspoken advocate of gay rights. And with a margin of victory in 2010 of nearly 20,000 votes, Mr. Saland is not seen as being in any particular danger of being defeated.
... Few senators are in as tenuous a position as Mr. Grisanti. He was a Democrat until he switched parties to run as a Republican last year. His Buffalo-area district is heavily Democratic, and Mr. Grisanti was elected in 2010 by just a 519-vote margin. Now, many voters are recalling Mr. Grisanti’s previous disavowal of same-sex marriage.
George Weigel at National Review Online takes a philosophical look at the efforts to redefine marriage -- and identifies recent historical examples to support his argument:
...modern totalitarian systems were, at bottom, attempts to remake reality by redefining reality and remaking human beings in the process. Coercive state power was essential to this process, because reality doesn’t yield easily to remaking, and neither do people. In the lands Communism tried to remake, the human instinct for justice — justice that is rooted in reality rather than ephemeral opinion — was too strong to change the way tastemakers change fashions in the arts. Men and women had to be coerced into accepting, however sullenly, the Communist New Order, which was a new metaphysical, epistemological, and moral order — a New Order of reality, a new set of “truths,” and a new way of living “in harmony with society,” as late-bureaucratic Communist claptrap had it.
The 21st-century state’s attempt to redefine marriage is just such an attempt to redefine reality — in this case, a reality that existed before the state, for marriage as the union of a man and a woman ordered to mutual love and procreation is a human reality that existed before the state. And a just state is obliged to recognize, not redefine, it.
Moreover, marriage and the families that are built around marriage constitute one of the basic elements of civil society, that free space of free associations whose boundaries the just state must respect. If the 21st-century democratic state attempts to redefine something it has neither the capacity nor the authority to refine, it can only do so coercively. That redefinition, and its legal enforcement, is a grave encroachment into civil society.
