A lively debate took place on marriage last night: Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum vs. Jon Huntsman and Ron Paul.
Watch it and tell us what you think! Who was the greatest marriage champion on the stage last night?
Here's more on the poll they refer to showing tjat 58% of Iowans believe support of same-sex civil unions is a "deal-killer" when it comes to their support.
The results of this recent poll conducted by the Des Moines Register surveying 400 likely Iowa Republican caucus-goers was brought up in last night's GOP debate.
As you can see, support for civil unions is the biggest deal-breaker of any single issue (click here for full-size version):
Two more interesting facts from the poll: respondents say their two top picks are Mitt Romney (23%) and Michele Bachmann (22%) -- both candidates have signed the NOM Marriage Pledge -- and 21% of respondents say this year will be their first time participating in the Iowa caucus.
ABC News reports on gay activists' ricochet strategy of boycotting any business that supports someone who promises to protect marriage:
It’s not easy being a Super PAC donor.
Especially if you’re giving to the pro-Mitt Romney Super PAC – “Restore Our Future” – which in just one week has seen two donors receive flack for their contributions.
... this week, the president of the popular shoe company New Balance issued a statement distancing the brand from a $500,000 donation made to the PAC by the company’s chairman, Jim Davis, after threats of boycotts emerged.
The statement from Rob DeMartini came after customers unhappy with Romney’s recent support of a marriage pledge opposing gay marriage threatened to boycott New Balance.
Scott Rose, a gay marriage activist, penned an open-letter to New Balance, which concludes:
I have no idea whether you are going to choose to do the right thing, Jim and [his wife] Anne, but I can promise you that if you don’t, I together with LGBT rights activists around the world will do everything we can to see New Balance boycotted.
So marriage doesn't deserve a vote of the people but casinos do?
Gov. Andrew Cuomo has directed his staff to examine the idea of allowing privately owned Las Vegas-style casinos in the state.
Options to permit more casinos are being weighed, Cuomo said Tuesday when asked by the Times Union to state his position on a constitutional amendment to legalize casino gambling in the state. --Albany Times Union
Dear Marriage Supporter,
The fight for your values is heating up in Iowa—and NOM is there to make sure your voice is heard!
Gov. Tim Pawlenty helped kick off our "Votes Have Consequences" Values Voters Bus Tour across 22 towns and cities in Iowa leading up to the Ames Straw Poll, the traditional kickoff for the GOP presidential campaigns.
The tour is jointly sponsored by NOM, the Susan B. Anthony List, and the Family Research Council. If you are in Iowa, come say hi! Let the candidates know that your values matter, and your votes have consequences! Go to www.NationForMarriage.org/BusTour for more information.
Thanks to each of you who reached out to make sure Gov. Pawlenty understands the importance of fighting for marriage. Gov. Pawlenty has long been a fighter for marriage in Minnesota, and after taking a few extra days in a busy campaign to think it over, he easily and enthusiastically signed on to NOM's Marriage Pledge, and he has joined the Values Voters tour.
NOM's Chris Plante was there when Gov. Pawlenty spoke:
We launched the Values Votes 'Votes Have Consequences' Bus tour at the foot of the state house, on Tuesday. A beautiful Iowa morning, a cool breeze, a crowd of media and major Iowa political figures, including the polished and attractive Lt. Gov Kim Reynolds.
Gov. Rick Perry, who has not yet announced his candidacy, made an appearance in the form of 12 or 15 college kids wearing bright orange t-shirts—the color of the University of Texas!
Gov. Pawlenty was up front, clear and confident in making the case for the importance of life and marriage to our nation.
As the Des Moines Register reported: "Pawlenty highlighted his record as a state lawmaker and governor on restricting abortion, defining marriage as a bond between a man and a woman and appointing judges who demonstrated 'restraint and humility.'"
Here's some local coverage of Gov. Pawlenty's speech on life and marriage from KCCI.com:
Sen. Rick Santorum, one of our greatest marriage champions, spoke this week at the Cedar Rapids Values Bus stop, on the importance of marriage and life to our nation.
The Sioux City Journal reports:
Santorum stressed the importance of family and moral foundations to the strength of the nation. The recent debt ceiling crisis was the result of a number of moral failings, including financial institutions taking advantage of risky housing markets, he said.
Foundational rights, such as the right to life and traditional marriage, "have been eroded by judges ... unelected and unaccountable," Santorum said.
He warned that as those foundational rights are usurped by the federal government Americans will enjoy less freedom.
"When you control the rights, when everyone does, you can grow a strong, healthy society, and that's what happened here," he said.
The Eastern Iowa Government headlined their story, "Santorum Talks Marriage During Bus Tour." A blogger videotaped Sen. Rick Santorum's off-the-cuff remarks on marriage in one of his many Iowa stops.
Watch Rick stand tall for marriage here:
Watch the mainstream media try to beat up on him, too, for standing strong for marriage! They have gotten the marriage story wrong at every turn and misunderstand how the issue is playing out nationally in this election season.
All the major GOP announced candidates have now signed NOM's Marriage Pledge (and we predict that Gov. Rick Perry, if he throws his hat in, will too). What does that mean? It means 2012 will be unlike 2008—marriage will be an issue. The GOP's major candidates for 2012 have now all done what Sen. John McCain refused to do: endorse a Federal Marriage Amendment, and commit to concrete actions to protect marriage.
Meanwhile President Obama's famous attempt to muddy the water in 2008 by claiming to Rev. Rick Warren that he supports traditional marriage will no longer work in 2012.
We're in a whole new strategic terrain in 2012. With a very big and clear public difference between whoever is the GOP nominee and the Democrats' champion Pres. Barack Obama, marriage voters can help tip the balance in key battleground states.
Someday soon the mainstream media will notice it! Meanwhile, thank you for making the Marriage Pledge and all NOM's important work possible!
I'm excited as well by some great news that just crossed my desk: Our friends over at the American Principles Project have secured a vitally important Presidential Debate in South Carolina on Sept. 5—and NOM's own founding Chairman, Prof. Robby George, will be the moderator along with Sen. Jim DeMint and Iowa's Rep. Steve King.
This means that for the first time, we can count on the concerns of social conservatives being taken seriously. All the candidates will have to voice their values on marriage, life, and religious liberty—and you will have a chance to discover whether their values are your values too.
Remember, values imply actions, not just words. What we are not willing to act to protect, we do not really value.
For the first time, social conservatives have a forum in the presidential process where their concerns are going to be heard, alongside (not instead of!) the other core concerns of what we might call "constitutional conservatives"—those committed to the principles of America's Founding. Visit www.americanprinciplesproject.com for more.
While you are there, you will notice that APP has launched a new internet TV show called "The Maggie Report." It's aimed at covering the latest developments on social issues for Tea Party and other conservatives. Go to www.MaggieReport.com and click on the little TV screen to see NOM's Chairman Maggie Gallagher in action.
One person who hasn't missed the immense strategic significant of NOM's Marriage Pledge is the Human Rights Campaign's Joe Solmonese—who is trying to use it to raise money to help support Pres. Obama:
"In just the last few weeks, four of the major GOP presidential candidates have pledged to support a constitutional amendment to ban marriage equality.
"The right wing is lashing out at our recent victory in New York by trying to turn marriage equality back into a national wedge issue—the same political play that helped keep George W. Bush in the White House for eight disastrous years.
"The election may still be months away, but the radical right's single-minded attempt to undermine progress is well underway. And this new marriage pledge is just a stark, ugly reminder of how critical our fight for equality is."
One thing Joe "you are a hater" Solmonese and I agree on: It's time to rev up our engines and fight for what's right. NOM will be there with you every step of the way to make sure your voices and your values will be heard!
God bless you!
Brian S. Brown
President
National Organization for Marriage
P.S. You can ensure that your voice is heard! Whether you can give $20 or $200, you can make a difference and stand up for marriage.
We've been following along with the NOM Values Bus tour via its Twitter account. They tweeted this photo a little while ago during their stop in Sioux City:
"These Iowans [are] ready to send a prolife & marriage message at Straw Poll."
You still have time to visit the Values Bus on the road - check the website to find out where it's heading next!
The Values Bus is covering 1,305 miles this week in four days with events in 22 cities, passing along the way through 47 of Iowa's 99 counties. Here's a round-up some of the earned local media coverage:
Associated Press (Des Moines):
During the statewide bus tour, activists will also promote other conservative social causes, such as opposing same-sex marriages. The effort is timed to Saturday's Republican presidential straw poll in Ames, which is drawing national attention to Iowa this week.Radio Iowa (Des Moines/Cedar Rapis):
Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty joined the “Values Voter Bus Tour” stop in Des Moines this morning. Another candidate — Rick Santorum — will join the tour’s stop in Cedar Rapids on Wednesday morning.Globe Gazette (Mason City):
Representatives from several national and state conservative organizations touring the state by bus stopped in Mason City on Wednesday to encourage voters to support GOP presidential candidates who are pro-life and support traditional marriage.Quad-City Times (Davenport):
With just days before Iowa's Republican straw poll, representatives of the Faith Family Freedom Fund, the National Organization for Marriage and the Susan B. Anthony List rolled into Davenport on Tuesday with their Values Voter Bus Tour. "Marriage and pro-life are winning issues," [NOM-RI's Christopher] Plante said. "We're starting at the grassroots level," he said. "The people of Iowa will start the process of voting for a pro-marriage, pro-life president."Eastern Iowa Government (Coralville):
Speakers on the Value Voters Bus Tour, which, for a few stops, included former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, touted an anti-abortion message to Iowans in six cities Tuesday.Telegraph Herald (Dubuque):
On Wednesday, Aug. 10, the Susan B. Anthony List, along with FRC Action's Faith Family Freedom Fund and the National Organization for Marriage will stop in Dubuque as part of the "Values Voter Bus Tour" that will cover 1,305 miles in four days with events in 22 cities. The tour stops in Dubuque from 10:30 to 11 a.m. at Washington Square.
... and more to come!
The Christian Post reports:
The National Organization for Marriage (NOM) in support of the top four presidential candidates, who have signed NOM’s Marriage Pledge, is ensuring that marriage will be a major factor in voters’ decision on which candidate to back in the upcoming Ames Straw Poll.
NOM, along with FRC Action and Susan B. Anthony list, is promoting the “Values Bus Tour.”
The tour, which started Tuesday morning, August 9, offers the chance to talk to GOP presidential candidates about their support for the sanctity of marriage.
Christopher Plante, executive director of NOM Rhode Island, told The Christian Post, “Governor Tim Pawlenty was with us and the tour kicked off to a great start, [with] a good crowd.”
“The message is clear. It’s the values voters that will redirect this whole country – we believe in life, marriage, and family,” said Plante
A major issue in the Straw Poll and in selecting Iowa’s GOP nominee in the caucuses next year will be reinstating marriage as a union between one man and one woman, said Brian Brown NOM president in a statement Monday.
Brookings is consistently ranked as one of the most influential and most quoted think tanks in America.
Prof. Brad Wilcox (Director of the National Marriage Project) and Prof. Andrew Cherlin (Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at Johns Hopkins University) take a look at the factors influencing the decline of a healthy marriage culture from a conservative and liberal perspective. They also propose six policy ideas designed to strengthen marriage and family life among moderately-educated Americans.
This from the abstract (download the brief here as a PDF):
This policy brief reviews the deepening marginalization of marriage and the growing instability of family life among moderately-educated Americans: those who hold high school degrees but not four-year college degrees and who constitute 51 percent of the young adult population (aged twenty-five to thirty-four).
Written jointly by two family scholars, one of them a conservative (W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project) and the other a liberal (Andrew J. Cherlin, professor at Johns Hopkins University), it is an attempt to find common ground in the often bitter and counterproductive debates about family policy.
We come to this brief with somewhat different perspectives. Wilcox would emphasize the primacy of promoting and supporting marriage. Cherlin argued in a recent book, The Marriage-Go-Round, that stable care arrangements for children, whether achieved through marriage or not, are what matter most.
But both of us agree that children are more likely to thrive when they reside in stable, two-parent homes. We also agree that in America today cohabitation is still largely a short-term arrangement, while marriage remains the setting in which adults seek to maintain long-term bonds.
Thus, we conclude by offering six policy ideas, some economic, some cultural, and some legal, designed to strengthen marriage and family life among moderately-educated Americans. Finally, unless otherwise noted, the findings detailed in this policy brief come from a new report by Wilcox, When Marriage Disappears: The New Middle America.
In ThirdAge:
Ann Coulter, conservative author and commentator, is joining the advisory council of GOProud, a conservative organization whose membership is primarily homosexual.
The group announced Tuesday that Coulter is now an "honorary chair" and her official title will be "gay icon."
... Coulter joins anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, online media mogul Andrew Breitbart, and Republican strategist Roger Stone, all of whom serve on the organization's advisory board.
"I am honored to serve in this capacity on GOProud's Advisory Council, and look forward to being the queen of fabulous," Coulter said in a statement.
Caitlin Dickson at The Daily:
Taking a page out of the Bee Gees‘s playbook, researchers asked scores of married Americans one simple question: How deep is your love?
In spite of the 50 percent divorce rate in the United States, the answer was encouraging to anyone who believes in everlasting love.
Of the 274 married Americans randomly surveyed by a team at Stony Brook University in New York, 74 percent of couples married 10 years or more consider themselves “very in love,” “intensely in love” or “very intensely in love.”
... Indeed, married love seems to grow stronger with age. While individuals in their second decade of marriage didn’t gush over their spouse quite as much as those married 10 years or less, “for those married over 30 years, 40 percent of women and 35 percent of men reported being ‘very intensely in love,’” Jacobs notes.
In LifeSiteNews:
A majority of Brazilians continue to express their opposition to the homosexual agenda in their country, despite a recent ruling by the nation’s Supreme Federal Tribunal creating homosexual civil unions, according to a recent poll.
The survey, conducted by the Brazilian polling agency Ibope, revealed that 55 percent of respondents opposed the Tribunal’s decision, and 45% favored it.
On individual religious liberty, he says:
"We have now created a super-right to sexual freedom -- it's not in the Constitution but the courts have created it. And it will let me assure you, with future court decisions, trump religious rights. You see it happening in international laws, international courts, where the right of conscience has to be subjugated to the right of sexual freedom..."
The Columbus Dispatch reports:
In a 4-3 decision yesterday, the [Ohio Supreme Court] justices upheld lower-court rulings that a Cincinnati woman did not agree to shared legal custody of her daughter, now 5, despite planning the in-vitro pregnancy with her partner and naming her a "co-parent" in power-of-attorney documents.
Biological mom Kelly Mullen voided those documents after she and Lucy, then 2, moved out of the house they shared with Michele Hobbs in 2007. Hobbs' name appears on the ceremonial birth certificate, and she helped raise and financially support Lucy.
The legal dispute is one of several in Ohio and nationally to test the parental rights of people who are not biologically related to a child but have assumed parental responsibilities.
... Columbus lawyer Doug Dougherty, who represented Mullen in the Supreme Court, applauded the court for affirming biological parents' constitutional right to raise their children.
Michael Foust writes:
In remarkably different court filings that highlight America's cultural divide on marriage's definition, the U.S. House and the Obama Justice Department have come to opposite conclusions as to whether children need a mother and a father in the home.
At issue is the Defense of Marriage Act, the 1996 law which defines marriage in federal law as between a man and a woman and gives states the option of not recognizing another state's gay "marriages."
In its legal briefs arguing that the law should be upheld, the legal team hired by the U.S. House says DOMA, as it's often called, is naturally tied to procreation and children benefit from having both a mother and father in the home. The Justice Department has discounted the procreation argument and argued that the gender of parents does not matter.
