We love how Andrew Cuomo's Italian mom loves him no matter what, even for passing gay marriage. But we could not help noticing Mrs. Cuomo's firm belief that some things just cannot be redefined.
"I did not criticize her lasagna," [Matilda] Cuomo said. "All I said is it's not Italian. Cottage cheese and tomato soup might be low on calories, but it's not Italian lasagna."
Did Dean Skelos's $1.7 billion contract with the New York state government influence his leadership on same-sex marriage?
What’s so unfortunate for conservatives is that Republicans in the New York Senate allowed this to happen, especially Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos. Chicago politics has nothing on New York. The fact that Senator Skelos’s company has a $1.7 billion contract with the state government probably weighed heavy on his mind.
The Associated Press:
Legislation to repeal gay marriage is one of the highly charged issues left over from the just-completed legislative session that must be acted on early next year. The two proposed repeal bills would not affect gay marriages before repeal, but would stop new same-sex marriages.
... [Republican state Rep. David] Bates is confident a repeal bill will reach Democratic Gov. John Lynch, but he isn't sure supporters have the votes in the House to overturn Lynch's promised veto. If that happens, he will consider bringing the repeal bill back in the future when a governor who supports it is in office, he said.
An update from Mexico:
The public spokesman of the Mexico City archdiocese has announced that he will appeal a July 1 court ruling that he engaged in illegal political activity when he said that Catholics should not vote for candidates who support same-sex marriage.
Father Hugo Valdemar said that it was “totally false” that his public statement last August was politically motivated. He was merely confirming official Church teaching, he said, after legislators in Mexico City voted earlier in the year to recognize same-sex unions.
Father Valdemar and the Mexico City archdiocese face fines after the country’s highest court ruled that they had engaged in political propaganda. --Catholic Culture
The Associated Press:
And if they’ve been waffling on marriage, some [same-sex] couples may now have to decide whether to take the plunge if their employers now restrict domestic partner benefits to the lawfully hitched.
“There’s just a lot of rumors going around,” said Erica Freudenstein, a 46-year-old freelance photographer from New York City who plans to wed her longtime partner, television video editor Cybele Policastro. Freudenstein has been covered under Policastro’s health insurance.
“She has to pay taxes on it for my health insurance, and now for New York state I think she won’t,” she said. “So it’s a benefit. It’s all about the benefits.”
Related: "NY Law Professor Explains Why She Doesn't Want to Marry Her Same-Sex Partner"
Buy life insurance for the surrogate:
"It is vital to cover the surrogate with both health and life insurance. Life insurance is important because having a child is still dangerous and, if something should happen, the surrogate’s family will need to be compensated. It is rare that a surrogate dies but it is very important to plan for the worst." - Donor Concierge
"Follow the Money", a public service hosted by the National Institute on Money in State Politics reveals that gay multi(hundred)millionaire Tim Gill gave $53,800 to New York politicians who were instrumental in passing NY's SSM bill, including senators Jim Alesi, Roy MacDonald, Stephen Saland and Governor Andrew Cuomo. $10,000 was given to the Republican Campaign Committee.
Huffington Post was right: "Money Was the Key Ingredient"
According to the Huffington Post Karl Rove protege Ken Mehlman was responsible for this in New York. The Rove proteges are now seeking to build from the New York model to take over the Republican party in other states, using the power of the purse to shut down pro-marriage Republicans.
Too strong a reading? Remember this story about another Rove protege's appointment to the RNC inance committee specifically to elect "pro-equality" Republicans.
Read HuffPo yourself and see what you think:
The passage of historic legislation legalizing same sex marriage in the state of New York last Friday was owed in large part to a compelling political motivator: money.
... Increasingly, a cadre of deep-pocketed Republican donors is joining in the charge. And the enticements they are using to sway lawmakers are not just conservative arguments for civil liberties or public opinion polls that show a generational divide on gay rights, but the promise of contributions or other forms of political support.
One of the hallmarks of the postmodern Supreme Court is an increasing creativity in developing new doctrines that expand the Court's power, while attempting to rest that expansion of power in the actual Constitution.
The 6th Circuit just struck down a law passed by the people of Michigan that makes admission to public universities race and gender neutral, on the ground that race neutrality violates the equal protection clause.
Huh?
Building off Romer v. Evans, Justice Anthony Kennedy's decision striking down a Colorado state amendment that forbade orientation protection in local government. The federal courts are developing a new doctrine that makes state constitutional law suspect, because it is harder to overturn than legislative enactments.
Not good news for Prop 8, if the Supreme Court upholds this.
Not good news for democracy, either.
Mark Grisanti was not just opposed to same-sex marriage. He said publicly and privately he would never vote for gay marriage. Here is an example of a person lied to directly by Grisanti -- Dr. Kevin Backus of the Conservative Party:
"At the outset of the last election Mark Grisanti and I had lunch. As he was seeking my support for his election, I asked the candidate several questions. At the top of that list was his position on same-sex marriage...
Mr. Grisanti clearly stated that, while he would vote for civil unions, I could be sure he would never vote for “anything that had the word ‘marriage’ in it.” Mr. Grisanti committed himself, in the strongest terms possible, to people desiring a senator who would defend traditional marriage."
Dr. Backus says Grisanti is now hinting that Gov. Cuomo may be very helpful to him when it comes to redistricting in ways that could help him keep his seat.
Have voters had enough of Albany politicians who cut secret backroom deals while lying to voters?
We'll find out.
Dr. Backus again:
We supported Mr. Grisanti, and he called upon that help several times during the election. I was there watching the vote come in when our Island put him over the top. I was there in Albany to celebrate his inauguration. I’ve spoken with the senator on this issue repeatedly since he took office. I’ve been assured by him personally and been asked to assure others that he’d never vote for anything with the word “marriage” in it. Mark committed himself to that position, even while saying publicly he was studying the issue, was torn, and was undecided. As recently as 11 days before the vote was taken, Mark was firm in this position.
In the First Things blog On The Square:
The vote in New York did not represent the end of a movement, but it did, just maybe, mark the beginning of one. In the wake of the vote I heard from many friends, most of them young, who took the Empire State vote as a call to rebuild a vibrant marriage culture, both in their religious communities and in society at large.
Already there is a movement of young Catholics, Evangelicals, Jews, and Mormons (some of whom I have the privilege of knowing) to revisit the assumptions embedded in no-fault divorce and same-sex civil marriage. These young people—including the young leaders of the Love and Fidelity Network, Princeton University’s Anscombe Society, and Harvard University’s True Love Revolution—believe that they are required in charity to work to reclaim a marriage culture that balances the desires of adults alongside the needs of children for a mother and father.
Of course, it is far from certain how this movement will proceed or what success it will have, but I draw hope from its youth, intelligence, and good nature. Like the pro-life movement before it, it will be motivated by a concern for unseen victims and a respect for the self-evident facts of nature. I firmly believe that the witness of these brave young leaders will give many more the courage to join them.
Kathryn Lopez in National Review:
Chuck Donovan is a man with a plan. A longtime advocate of family-friendly public policy, and senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society, he has come up with “A Marshall Plan for Marriage: Rebuilding Our Shattered Homes.” Donovan discusses the peril to marriage — and his plan to shore up that institution — with National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez.
KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: A “Marshall Plan.” Is that a little overly dramatic?
CHARLES A. DONOVAN: No and yes. The problem of family disintegration is approaching that scale. The nation’s out-of-wedlock birth rate is more than 50 percent higher for all women of childbearing age than it was for the black American subset that so troubled the late Pat Moynihan when he wrote his study for the Labor Department in the 1960s. The poverty rate for children born to single parents is nearly five times higher than it is for children born into intact families.
Marriage breakdown, or failure to form families, is creeping upward into the middle class, as Brad Wilcox’s studies have pointed out, and it’s tied to diminished economic prospects for men. We don’t live in the aftermath of a war zone, but Detroit and some of our other cities, denuded of economic opportunity and mother-father families, rival post-World War II conditions.
But, yes, the phrase “Marshall Plan for Marriage” is overly dramatic. But being overly dramatic in the defense of marriage is no vice. I’m not proposing massive new investments — we are at a horrific stage of the cycle when even our bootstraps are frayed.
In New York, gay money talked, the NY Capital News reports:
New Yorkers United For Marriage, a coalition composed of gay rights groups such as the Empire State Pride Agenda and Marriage Equality New York, and underwritten in part by the Gill Action Fund, reportedly spent $3 million on the spring campaign to pass the marriage bill.
In 2009, supporters of the bill spent $1,193,275 and its opponents spent $745,371. Supporters also spent $419,678 on individual candidates last year, outstripping the bill’s opponents by tens of thousands of dollars, and the most recent campaign filings are expected to show exactly how much LGBT groups spent in the final months of their campaign for the bill’s passage.
Bill Mahoney, an analyst for the New York Public Interest Research Group, expected the amount to be the second-largest lobbying expenditure of the year.
We warn you that you may not want your kids to see this gay pride parade. But of course Jon Stewart has a huge audience of young people:
Apologies many of our readers will not find this fit for a family website. Sometimes we have to let you know what your kids' friends may be watching. Welcome to the world after SSM!
Mark Oppenheimer's extensive New York Times interview with Dan Savage (who started the "It Gets Better" campaign) is titled "Married, With Infidelities":
Savage believes monogamy is right for many couples. But he believes that our discourse about it, and about sexuality more generally, is dishonest. Some people need more than one partner, he writes, just as some people need flirting, others need to be whipped, others need lovers of both sexes. We can’t help our urges, and we should not lie to our partners about them. In some marriages, talking honestly about our needs will forestall or obviate affairs; in other marriages, the conversation may lead to an affair, but with permission. In both cases, honesty is the best policy.
... “The mistake that straight people made,” Savage told me, “was imposing the monogamous expectation on men. Men were never expected to be monogamous. Men had concubines, mistresses and access to prostitutes, until everybody decided marriage had to be egalitarian and fairsey.” In the feminist revolution, rather than extending to women “the same latitude and license and pressure-release valve that men had always enjoyed,” we extended to men the confines women had always endured. “And it’s been a disaster for marriage.”
... There is one subculture in America that practices nonmonogamy and equality between partners: the sizable group of gay men in open, or semiopen, long-term partnerships. (A study published in 2010 found 50 percent of gay male couples in the Bay Area had sexual relationships outside their union, with their partner’s knowledge and approval.)
