Local WMUR TV covers the rally. You can hear a pro-SSM protestor trying to shout down one of the speakers at the podium (0:18-0:26).
State representative David Bates says the other side is claiming "The marriage debate is over. It's time to move on." Rep. Bates asks the crowd, "What do you think? Is this debate over?" They respond: "NO!" He asks, "Do you think it's time to move on?" The crowd roars: "NO!" He continues: "I think it's time to move back to the true meaning of marriage."
A new SurveyUSA/5 EYEWITNESS News poll shows more Minnesotans in favor of a marriage amendment to the constitution than against it.
SurveyUSA interviewed 600 Minnesota adults by phone between Jan. 31 and Feb. 2, asking whether they intended to vote for, against or not at all for the proposed amendment, which would define marriage as between one man and one woman.
Of the 542 respondents registered to vote, 47 percent said they would vote for the amendment and 39 percent said they would vote against it. Ten percent of respondents said they would not vote and 4 percent said they were unsure.
As we've noted before, marriage amendments tend to outperform advancing polling on voting day.
Heather Haddon of the Wall Street Journal on Tim Gill, whose massive campaign purse has helped push SSM in the past, but who is not as involved this year in New Jersey as he has been in the past:
Advocates heading into an 11th-hour push to legalize gay marriage in New Jersey are facing a vastly altered fund-raising landscape since their original unsuccessful effort in 2009.
This time, gay-rights supporters have more political support but less money on hand. One powerful group, the Gill Action Fund, isn't directly giving money in New Jersey this time around, after having raised $1 million for the 2009 effort, according to people familiar with their spending.
The Denver-based group founded by Tim Gill, the software developer behind Quark, has funneled millions of dollars into states considering gay-marriage legislation and referendums. Its support helped tip the balance in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage in New York last year.
... the absence of Mr. Gill's group would likely be felt. It has spent $5.1 million to defeat ballot referendums banning gay marriage across the country, according to an analysis by the National Institute on Money in State Politics. In New York, it courted legislators on the fence and funded attack ads against three opponents in the Senate who later lost their seats.
"Their contributions have made a difference," said Colorado political analyst Floyd Ciruli, who has followed Mr. Gill since he first got involved in politics in the 1990s. "He's just very political and very strategic and very wealthy."
It wasn't immediately clear why the group was remaining on the sidelines.
NOM co-founder Maggie Gallagher interviewed by Reuters:
"...opponents of same-sex marriage sought to downplay the [9th Circuit] decision, and said it would help them persuade voters to restrict marriage to unions between a man and a woman.
"This decision fires up the base and the resentment that elites, political and judicial, are imposing gay marriage without the consent of the governed," said Maggie Gallagher, co-founder of the National Organization for Marriage.
"I think it's going to make it easier, not harder, to get the signatures and to put it to the people," she said.
The New Jersey-based National Organization for Marriage is backing efforts to hold a referendum in November aimed at repealing any Washington law before it would go into effect.
Our co-founder Maggie Gallagher hosted a panel discussion Saturday morning at CPAC which included, among others, our Chairman Prof. John Eastman.
Here is a video of John Eastman's speech for those of you who missed it -- the packed ballroom responded really enthusiastically to his contributions, even giving him a standing ovation -- see for yourself!
NOM Co-founder Maggie Gallagher moderated a CPAC panel at 11:40 AM (EST) discussing "The Phony Divide Between Fiscal & Social Conservatives: Protecting Marriage as a Case Study". Joining her were be the following panelists:
You can find more information about CPAC 2012 and archives of the live feed on the CPAC 2012 website.
Here is a photo of the packed ballroom (live updates below):
LIVE UPDATES:
12:30PM: Panel concludes with applause.
12:25PM: Goeglein: Obama promised to transform America, and he said elections have consequences. We can summarize and conclude that in the history of the United States presidency we've never had a President who has more radically and intentionally savaged and attacked man-woman marriage, the dignity of every human life, and has begun to systematically redefine and therefore attack our basic religious liberties and consciences, and it's unacceptable.
12:20PM: McIntosh: Real America is a place where faith is respected, and family life is honored. All of which is threatened, including the institution of marriage. Our very Constitution is under attack. And I won't stand by and watch that happen.
12:15PM: Eastman: Judge Reinhardt tried to say there was no rational basis for defending marriage. To do so, he has to redefine it, from complementarity of the sexes, to being about the sexual choices of adults. Marriage becomes all about adults, and not about children. If marriage is no longer about children, what is it? This is a fight we have to have.
Marriage is an equation that makes sense: one man and one woman equals marriage and children. The narrative we have to write is: does the Supreme Court want play a role in destroying the institution which has been the bedrock of society since time immemorial?
Mr. Eastman's last words are also met with a standing ovation.
12:10PM: Eastman: Why not have marriage "open to everybody?" Well, what does marriage do? There's a false claim that defenders of Prop 8 entered no evidence for their claims. There were thousands of pages to document the simple fact that you need men and women to make babies. Marriage is founded in nature, and modified by civil society. The proponents of same-sex marriage entered into their evidence: that redefining marriage would transform it.
12:05PM: Goeglein: Social and economic conservatism go together. Alexis De Tocqueville came here in the 1830s and he made remarkable observations. He said: "There is certainly no country in the world where the tie of marriage is more respected or conjugal happiness is more worthily appreciated." What does that mean? It means that the response of those of us who are proudly conservatives is to categorically and unapologetically defend this division of roles rights and duties for what it is - the most important personal relationship we have, the relationship that binds a man and woman in marriage.
12:00PM: Goeglein: We're living in a values revolution. Marriage is the most important institution we have, period. The breakdown of the nuclear family is very expensive. Strong families equal a strong economy and a confident country. The family is the centerpiece of nurturing and preparing the rising generation of young Americas. What have we gotten for our $1 Trillion spent on welfare programs?
11:55AM: Shlafly: Our social policy threads throughout our tax code. Social policy costs us greatly on the fiscal side. Our income tax system has gradually devalued traditional marriage. Even Obamacare contains a "marriage penalty". If you care about our fiscal health, we must address the social problem of marriage absence. Social and fiscal issues cannot be separated! (Standing ovation.)
11:50AM: Schlafly: it's the absence of marriage that causes poverty. Social issues cause fiscal issues. Federal programs are guilty of fueling social decline. President Reagan said: "If we subsidize something, we get more of it." Why are we subsidizing social breakdown and the breakdown of families?
11:45AM: Maggie Gallagher introduces Phillips Schlafly, “one of the founding mothers of the conservative movement”. As well as Tim Goeglein, Hon. David McIntosh, and Prof. John Eastman.
BBC:
The police have been called in after racist abuse was sent to the Archbishop of York following comments he made opposing gay marriage.
Dr John Sentamu said in the Daily Telegraph that marriage must remain between a man and a woman.
The archbishop's office said he had received a "small number of abusive and threatening emails of a racist nature" and had reported them to police.
... [The bishop's] interview prompted a demonstration by more than 50 supporters of gay marriage outside York Minster.
The University of York's Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) group, which organised the demonstration, said Dr Sentamu was opposing equality.
Dave writing for the Marriage Matters blog:
Moviemakers may like us to believe that “The Kids Are All Right,” but global evidence to the contrary is mounting.
Mitch Pearlstein, a former officer in the department of Education and now the president of the Center for the American Experiment in Minneapolis, has been gathering the results of family research from all over the world for a long time and has compiled the data in his latest book, From Family Collapse to America’s Decline (Rowman and Littlefield, 2011). What he has found is that “family fragmentation”—today’s preferred term for “out-of-wedlock births, churning relationships, separation, and divorce—is the source of a lot of the deep problems facing America. Children in these situations are at a much higher risk of a whole host of maladies: medical, economic, social and educational. Pearlstein’s thesis is that the economic weakness shown by the United States, as well as the growing failure of people at the bottom of the economic rungs to move up, are largely (though not completely) attributable to the breakdown of the family.
... Pearlstein does lightly touch on the movement for same-sex marriage and how it relates to his own thesis in his book. What his studies have shown is not that children are not simply better off with any two adults:
. . . I would also argue that one of the unfortunate byproducts of the campaign for same-sex marriage is that commentators of all sorts often work overtime at avoiding words like “mother” or “father” when they can get by with the safer and all-encompassing “parents” instead. It’s as if they fear supporters of same-sex marriage—be they gay or straight—are apt to be offended by the more gender-based terms, so they neutralize the two by generically combining them. Glossing over and sometimes denying the distinctive and vital contributions of men-as-fathers and women-as-mothers is an unfortunate idea whose time should not have arrived but has.
I often hear the claim that we don’t have much data showing that kids raised by same-sex parents are worse off or “harmed.” This may be true given the small number of such children and the newness of the phenomenon. Yet, this was the same argument given when no-fault-divorce and other legal “innovations” were being put forth. Given the massive amount of information we do have on the critical importance of “women-as-mothers” and “men-as-fathers,” what we get from studies like Pearlstein’s is a warning about gambling with family structures that have already been shown to be something more than simply culturally conditioned curiosities. In fact, since Pearlstein’s book has come out, yet another peer-reviewed study has been released showing that, across cultures, the differences in personality traits between the sexes is larger than previously thought. What we need are not generic parents, but married moms and dads.
FOLLOW NOM AT CPAC!
NOM is co-sponsoring this year's Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, D.C. The event, which began yesterday and runs through Saturday, brings together conservative organizations, activists and elected officials from across the nation.
NOM Marriage Pledge signers Governor Rick Perry and Congresswomen Michele Bachmann spoke Thursday, with Perry denouncing the Obama administration's "war on faith." Presidential candidates Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney, and Newt Gingrich, all signers of NOM's Marriage Pledge, will be speaking Friday. Also on Friday, NOM's President Brian Brown, Chairman John Eastman, and Co-Founder Maggie Gallagher will be present to discuss the ongoing battles to defend marriage and religious liberty across the nation. And on Saturday, Gallagher will be moderating a panel discussion in which Eastman is participating, the topic being "The Phony Divide Between Fiscal & Social Conservatives: Protecting Marriage as a Case Study."
Follow NOM on Twitter, Facebook and at NOMblog.com throughout the weekend for updates from CPAC 2012.
My Dear Friends,
The fight is on!
In California, two judges on a divided Ninth Circuit panel just decided to take away the right of 7 million California voters to determine their own state's constitution, correct an out-of-control state supreme court, and restore the public meaning of marriage as the union of one man and one woman.
What is the evidence these judges offer that Prop 8 violates our beloved federal Constitution?
In a decision that NOM co-founder Maggie Gallagher rightly called "ill-natured and illogical," the Ninth Circuit actually said that the evidence that the 7 million Californians who voted for marriage are irrational bigots who hate gay people is: Prop 8 didn't take away any practical benefits from same-sex couples.
That's right, because Californians decided to focus on protecting the idea and the ideal of marriage, without restricting gay people from doing things like seeing one another in the hospital—that is the proof that they were motivated by unreasoning hatred towards homosexuals.
Ill-natured, illogical, and, I, would add: totally illicit. These were two judges with no empathy for those who disagree with their own liberal values, with a predetermined agenda they wanted to enact, with no respect for the original text or meaning of the Constitution.
The 14th Amendment, put in place to correct the serious evil of slavery, is not a license to import into the federal Constitution any vision of "equality" invented by Harvard faculty and do an end run about basic principles of democracy.
As for the idea that marriage is and always has been a union of male and female for a reason—that these unions are different than any other kind because they make new life and connect children to their mother and father—what did the Ninth Circuit say about that?
These two biased judges rudely dismissed these core concerns by claiming no rational person could imagine that publicly redefining marriage could affect the public meaning of marriage, or the way the next generation thinks about marriage:
"Because under California statutory law, same-sex couples had all the rights of opposite-sex couples, regardless of their marital status, all parties agree that Proposition 8 had one effect only. It stripped same-sex couples of the ability they previously possessed to obtain from the State, or any other authorized party, an important right—the right to obtain and use the designation of 'marriage' to describe their relationships. Nothing more, nothing less.
"Proposition 8 therefore could not have been enacted to advance California's interests in childrearing or responsible procreation, for it had no effect on the rights of same sex couples to raise children or on the procreative practices of other couples. Nor did Proposition 8 have any effect on religious freedom or on parents' rights to control their children's education; it could not have been enacted to safeguard these liberties."
Really?
Courts threaten to take away the roadmap to marriage. Rewrite the institution's public meaning. Brand traditional ideas about marriage as uniting male and female in love so children can have mothers and fathers as irrational bigotry. The public schools will teach the government's newly redefined marriage ideas to your children and grandchildren.
Gee, how could any reasonable person committed to our marriage tradition believe such a radical redefinition of marriage could matter?
The Ninth Circuit's opinion striking down Prop 8 is government of the judges, by the judges, for the judges, and I promise you it will not stand.
Here I am debating one of the leading architects of the campaign to impose gay marriage by judicial tyranny, Evan Wolfson, on ABC 7 News:
Thanks to the hundreds of you who responded to our "money bomb" request to raise $100,000 for the defense of Prop 8. We helped get Prop 8 on the ballot. We helped form and fund the winning coalition that passed Prop 8. And we are going to see this fight through to the sweet victory at the end!
If you haven't yet had the chance, click here to help defend marriage, democracy and the rule of law!
Between now and the Supreme Court decision that will (or will not) impose gay marriage on all 50 states, there is an important election for president of the United States.
Three GOP candidates have not only responded to NOM's Marriage Pledge, they quickly spoke out against federal courts redefining marriage, and taking away the sovereignty of We the People:
Newt Gingrich said on Twitter, "Court of Appeals overturning CA's Prop 8 another example of an out of control judiciary. Let's end judicial supremacy."
Mitt Romney: "Today, unelected judges cast aside the will of the people of California who voted to protect traditional marriage. I believe marriage is between a man and a woman and, as president, I will protect traditional marriage and appoint judges who interpret the Constitution as it is written and not according to their own politics and prejudices."
And Rick Santorum on Facebook: "Today, activist judges in the 9th Circuit stripped away the rights of 7 million California voters by striking down Proposition 8. These judges inserted a right into our Constitution that isn't a right at all, but a privilege. The radical actions of the 9th Circuit underscore the need for a constitutional amendment which would define 'marriage' as between one man-one woman. Study after study shows that traditional marriage, as it has always been defined—one man and one woman—creates the best possible environment for our children. And strong families are a key part of a strong America.
"This issue is far too important to allow for 50 different definitions of marriage at the state level. And this issue should certainly not be decided by a few activist judges..."
(In our press release we also noted that Rick Santorum has been an early and staunch supporter of the National Organization for Marriage, signing fundraising letters for us, among other good deeds.)
We are very proud that the three leading candidates for the GOP nomination are all willing to speak up for marriage.
NOM is a cosponsor at CPAC (the Conservative Political Action Conference) this year, serving as a proud voice for marriage within the conservative movement as well as outside. Maggie is moderating a panel on the importance of uniting social and economic conservatives and NOM's new Chairman of the Board Prof. John Eastman will be speaking there too.
The battles continue: Washington state just passed a gay marriage law, weeks before they found the time to close a humongous budget gap. It will take a tough fight to get a referendum to the people. In New Jersey and Maryland, liberal legislators promise to impose gay marriage without a vote of the people.
In two states this year, the people will have a chance to pass state marriage amendments defining marriage as one man and one woman.
In New Hampshire, a vote to repeal same-sex marriage takes place soon.
The fight continues. The rewards for fighting the good fight are not supposed to be felt in this world.
But the chance to be your voice for your values is the benefit I most cherish in earthly terms—the chance to put my shoulder to the wheel, to work and to fight and to link arms with loving, decent, law-abiding Americans of every creed and color on behalf of something so important, and so good, as marriage. That's what no one can ever take away.
Thank you.
There's a profile of NOM's co-founder Maggie Gallagher in Salon by a New York Times columnist who favors same-sex marriage. He tries, but he can't make head or tail of Maggie's principled defense of marriage—or yours either!
At the end he reports being befuddled by Maggie Gallagher's strong and idealistic belief that gay marriage is not the future:
"I have no doubts who will win in the end," Gallagher says. "One hundred years from now the globe will not be full of societies that endorse same-sex unions as marriages. What happens between now and then is going to be less certain and full of struggle. In the long struggle, I'll bet on human nature to overwhelm ideology. The thing about same-sex marriage is it's based on a fundamental untruth: same-sex unions are not the same as opposite sex unions. They are not marriages."
Thank you for making this fight possible, with your prayers, with your words, with your financial sacrifices, with your friendship.
God bless you,
Brian S. Brown
President
National Organization for Marriage
P.S. Remember that we are fighting for the future of marriage! We will win, but we need your help to do it. Can you pledge $100 or $150 today for marriage? Or can you make a monthly donation of just $15? Every dollar makes a difference as we work to secure marriage for you, for your children, and for your children's children.
Orin Kerr, Professor of Law at George Washington University writes at the legal expert blog Volokh Conspiracy:
...I have no idea what the Supreme Court might do in the Perry case. But my own sense is that Judges Walker and Reinhardt are not quite as clever as some people seem to think. Or, at the very least, the reasoning of their opinions don’t really matter very much. First, I think it’s unlikely that the particular reasoning of either opinion will have a substantial influence on the Justices. The issues in Perry are extremely important, and they’re the kind of issues that force the Justices to fall back on first principles. The details of how the lower courts reached the results they reached matter a lot less in that kind of case than in an ordinary case. Consider how Judge Reinhardt dealt with Judge Walker’s extensive factual findings: He basically ignored them.
Second, to the extent the reasoning of the lower court decisions matter — which, as I said, I tend to doubt — the fact that both opinions are widely understood as advocacy briefs to Justice Kennedy from judges who are same-sex marriage supporters probably hurts the same-sex marriage cause more than helps it. The Justices aren’t dumb: They get it. And when they get the sense that the lower courts were crafting their opinions to try to maneuver a single Justice into a desired result in such a high profile case, that kind of heavy handedness runs a risk of backfiring. It creates a sort of patina of unreliability. I think a more clever strategy would have been to be more subtle: Create more of a sense of the opinions as routine legal opinions and less as advocacy briefs. And if you’re Reinhardt, make the opinion “per curiam” so it doesn’t come to the Court with your name on it.
Matthew Franck, Director of the William E. and Carol G. Simon Center on Religion and the Constitution at the Witherspoon Institute, in Public Discourse:
..In short, Judge Reinhardt has cooked a dish intended to appeal especially to Justice Kennedy, the author of Romer. Since that decision, its six-justice majority has probably declined to just five, with the replacement of Sandra Day O’Connor by Samuel Alito. Kennedy’s own vote for same-sex marriage is therefore indispensable to the success of Reinhardt’s perfectly transparent agenda.
It is worth noting that Reinhardt says as little as possible about Lawrence v.Texas in 2003, a 5–4 ruling also authored by Justice Kennedy, which held on due process grounds that a state cannot prohibit homosexual sodomy. That is no doubt because Kennedy had flatly denied in Lawrence that a constitutional right to same-sex marriage was implied by the Court’s holding in that case. “No, Justice Kennedy,” Judge Reinhardt seems to say, “don’t look over there at Lawrence, look over here at Romer!”
Perhaps Judge Reinhardt thinks Justice Kennedy is a slightly addled puppet, who can be made to dance as one wishes if only the right string is pulled. But Justice Kennedy should find all this obvious targeting of himself to be deeply offensive. For Reinhardt’s assimilation of Perry to Romer is ably rebutted by the dissent of Judge N. Randy Smith, who notes that California’s Prop 8 has a much narrower reach than did Colorado’s Amendment 2.
Once again, same-sex civil unions are not enough for gay marriage activists:
A year after gay couples gained the option of civil unions in Illinois, some lawmakers are beginning a push to authorize same-sex marriages.
Three legislators filed what they call the “Religious Freedom and Marriage Fairness Act” on Wednesday. It would eliminate the part of state law that now explicitly prohibits gay marriages and would offer same-sex couples the marriage rights now exclusively available to heterosexual couples.
... Lawmakers might be hesitant to support the legislation in an election year, and the measure is likely to trigger strong opposition from conservative groups.
... The gay rights group Equality Illinois said that legalizing civil unions were a step forward, but remain a poor substitute for same-sex marriage.
“Separate is not equal,” said the group's CEO, Bernard Cherkasov. -- Chicago Tribune
Two-time Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times parts with his liberal brethren to acknowledge the importance of marriage for lifting individuals and societies out of cycles of poverty:
Liberals sometimes feel that it is narrow-minded to favor traditional marriage. Over time, my reporting on poverty has led me to disagree: Solid marriages have a huge beneficial impact on the lives of the poor (more so than in the lives of the middle class, who have more cushion when things go wrong).
One study of low-income delinquent young men in Boston found that one of the factors that had the greatest impact in turning them away from crime was marrying women they cared about. As Steven Pinker notes in his recent book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature”: “The idea that young men are civilized by women and marriage may seem as corny as Kansas in August, but it has become a commonplace of modern criminology.” -- The New York Times
A statement from Mitt Romney on his campaign website:
Mitt Romney made the following statement regarding the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision striking down Proposition 8 as unconstitutional:
“Today, unelected judges cast aside the will of the people of California who voted to protect traditional marriage. This decision does not end this fight, and I expect it to go to the Supreme Court. That prospect underscores the vital importance of this election and the movement to preserve our values. I believe marriage is between a man and a woman and, as president, I will protect traditional marriage and appoint judges who interpret the Constitution as it is written and not according to their own politics and prejudices.”
Via Sunshine State News:
Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich ripped into a panel of federal judges that decided on Tuesday in a 2-1 decision on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that Proposition 8 -- a measure approved by California votes to recognize only traditional marriage in the Golden State -- was unconstitutional.
“With today’s decision on marriage by the 9th Circuit, and the likely appeal to the Supreme Court, more and more Americans are being exposed to the radical overreach of federal judges and their continued assault on the Judeo-Christian foundations of the United States,” Gingrich said in a statement released on Tuesday. “I was drawn back into public life by the 9th Circuit’s 2002 decision that held that the words ‘under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance were unconstitutional. Today’s decision is one more example that the American people cannot rest until we restore the proper rule of the judicial branch and bring judges and the courts back under the Constitution.
“The Constitution of the United States begins with ‘We the People’; it does not begin with ‘We the Judges.’ Federal judges need to take heed of that fact,” Gingrich continued. “Federal judges are substituting their own political views for the constitutional right of the people to make judgments about the definition of marriage."
Gingrich went on to compare the decision to the Dred Scott decision and to Roe v. Wade.
