My Dear Friends,

Is gay marriage inevitable? Someone forgot to tell New Hampshire, where Democrats railroaded a gay marriage bill through the legislature in 2009, before losing an election to GOP legislators who ran promising to restore marriage.

The New Hampshire House Judiciary Committee voted 11-6 THIS WEEK to send a bill restoring the definition of "marriage" as the union of one man and one woman to the full House after Christmas.

"I have no apologies for my current efforts to correct a bad policy decision," the bill's sponsor, Rep. David Bates, said. "I, and many people in New Hampshire, believe that those who pushed through this law in 2009 simply did not have the right to redefine marriage for our entire society."

As Citizen Link reports,

"Approximately 75 percent of the 400 legislators in the state's House of Representatives are Republicans—many of whom ran on platforms of restoring the definition of marriage. Given that, HB 437 has good prospects of eventually landing on Gov. John Lynch's desk next year."

You don't often hear about the many signs there are showing that the American people are not on board the "inevitability" train. But the people have reversed gay marriage before, in California and Maine.

And it's looking as though New Hampshire will likely be the next state to step back from gay marriage and restore our traditional understanding of marriage. (Online polls are notoriously unscientific, but if anyone wants to weigh in on one such poll, you can do so here. As of mid-day Thursday, 55% of respondents agreed that New Hampshire should repeal same-sex marriage—although that percentage was reversed in a couple of hours as hundreds of gay marriage supporters inundated the site Thursday evening.)

Advocates of gay marriage know they are not really winning the battle for hearts and minds, and so they are unleashing a new set of arguments.

Meanwhile, Democrats who control the U.S. Senate are meeting in committee to vote on repealing the federal Defense of Marriage Act, the one federal law which protects marriage as the union of husband and wife!

Our thanks go out to the hundreds of you who responded to our email alert asking you to let Senators know: You oppose repealing DOMA!

If you haven't yet sent an email, go here, right now, and speak up for marriage!

New meme alert!

A gay-marriage activist group has issued a "report" which, naturally, was carried by all the mainstream media.

It claims that gay marriage is necessary to protect children. Two million children, it claims, would benefit if we redefine marriage.

Redefine marriage for the children! I expect you will hear that claim a lot, especially in any states considering marriage definitions.

Meanwhile the Census Bureau says that there are just 112,000 same-sex couples raising children in the whole country. And 80 percent of those children, according to the leading gay demographer, the Williams Institute, are the product of previous heterosexual relationships.

There's no particular evidence that the so-called "legal benefits" of marriage protect children. (We know this because children with remarried parents do not do any better, on average, than children of solo mothers.)

Social science evidence tells us that marriage protects children to the extent that marriage makes it more likely children will be born to and raised by their mom and dad in the same family.

No same-sex marriage does that.

There's not even an iota of scientific evidence that civil same-sex marriage makes it more likely that a gay couple will stay together (compared to either domestic partnerships or private and personal commitment ceremonies).

Gay marriage is being advocated as a personal and individual "right" in the gay community, not an authoritative moral norm.

Is gay marriage a serious proposal to protect children? Let's go through the numbers.

Let's assume that half of 112,000 same-sex couples raising children would be interested in marriage (a random but generous guess). That's 56,000 same-sex couples. Let's assume that each of these couples is raising two kids (again probably a very generous assumption), or 112,000 children. Eighty percent of these children are the product of a previous heterosexual relationship, meaning if the child's gay parent married their lover, that would be a stepfamily with no known benefits to the child.

That leaves 20% of 112,000 children who might be in some sense the child of both members of the same-sex couple: about 22,400 children.

In 2010, the Census reported that there are about 75 million children under the age of 18 in this country.

So how many kids might potentially benefit, if it turned out to be true that gay marriage has any benefit at all for children (a proposition for which there is no scientific evidence)?

0.03 percent!

That amounts to three-one hundreds of one percent of all American children.

Gay marriage is about the desire of adults, not a serious proposal to address the needs of children.

That much is very clear!

Gay marriage results in the exclusion of people and religious institutions who believe most strongly that children need a mom and dad.

The longing of children for the love of their mom and dad gets subordinated to the desire of adults to have the equality of their sexual relationships affirmed by government.

That much too is very clear!

That's what keeps me, and you, and millions of other decent, loving, law-abiding Americans from hopping aboard the gay marriage train.

Too much of this movement is grounded in fantasy, in the idea that they can make up any message they want and transform it, with the imprimatur of the mainstream media, into "truthiness"—a secular Gospel.

You and I know that cannot happen.

The voices of reason, experience, and faith come together in the marriage movement: in the common-sense understanding that marriage is unique for a reason.

God bless you for your courage in standing up for God's truth.

At NOM we will keep fighting for your rights, and for the rights of children to know and be known by, to love and be loved by, their mom and their dad.

Faithfully,

Brian S. Brown
President
National Organization for Marriage

P.S. What can you do today to protect marriage? Whether you can give $20 or $200, or a monthly donation of just $5, you can make a difference in our world!