August 11, 2011 at 1:21 pm
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.
August 11, 2011 at 1:00 pm
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.
August 11, 2011 at 12:00 pm
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.
August 11, 2011 at 11:00 am
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..."
August 11, 2011 at 10:45 am
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.
August 11, 2011 at 9:00 am
George Weigel writes about the attempt to dismiss those who believe in marriage as "homophobes" -- and proposes what is actually the heart of the matter:
The Washington Post’s culture critic, Philip Kennicott, recently took to the pages of his paper to note the “cognitive dissonance” between ingrained “habits of homophobia” in American culture, on the one hand, and a recognition that “overt bigotry is no longer acceptable in the public square,” on the other.
... Philip Kennicott’s line of attack nicely demonstrates the truth of Oscar Wilde’s famous observation that the only way to rid oneself of temptation is to yield to it. For crying “homophobia” is a cheap calumny, a crypto-totalitarian bully’s smear that impresses no serious person.
Here's what Weigel says is actually happening in the debate over marriage:
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.
If the state can redefine marriage and enforce that redefinition, it can do so with the doctor-patient relationship, the lawyer-client relationship, the parent-child relationship, the confessor-penitent relationship, and virtually every other relationship that is woven into the texture of civil society. In doing so, the state does serious damage to the democratic project. Concurrently, it reduces what it tries to substitute for reality to farce.
August 11, 2011 at 8:00 am
The Washington Times reports:
[Maryland Sen. Allan Kittleman] was the only one of 55 Republican state legislators who spoke out in favor of a gay-marriage bill that passed the Senate but died in the House because of seemingly unanimous Republican opposition and resistance from nearly one-third of Democrats.
... Party colleagues have expressed disappointment in mostly reverent tones, but Mr. Kittleman has insisted that feedback has been about 60 percent supportive within his mostly Republican district. He says much of the support has come from younger Republicans.
But:
... Delegate Warren E. Miller, Howard Republican who serves two-thirds of Mr. Kittleman’s district, said the residents who contacted him during last session’s debate “overwhelmingly” opposed to gay marriage.
“It wasn’t a bunch of form letters. It was probably one of the highest amounts of contact for any piece of legislation i’ve ever dealt with,” said Mr. Miller, a delegate since 2003.
Maybe Mr. Killteman should make sure he's checking his messages.
August 10, 2011 at 3:18 pm
Thanks for helping to get our Values Voter Bus Tour off to a great start yesterday!
Joined in Des Moines by Governor Tim Pawlenty, one of our Presidential Marriage pledge signers, the day included rallies in Oskaloosa, Washington, Muscatine, and Davenport before wrapping up in Iowa City.
As the 22-stop tour continues, we look forward to having Rep. Michele Bachmann, Sen. Rick Santorum, and Rep. Thaddeus McCotter join us, as well as Congressmen Steve King (R-IA) and Louie Gohmert (R-TX).
If you haven't already done so, I hope you'll find a tour stop near you and come out and join us as we hear from these national leaders first-hand about the importance of protecting marriage and the family everywhere from rural Iowa to Washington, D.C. Together, we are rallying Iowans to stand up for marriage, urging them to support pro-marriage candidates at the Ames Straw Poll on Saturday. So bring your friends, grab a lawn chair, and come stand for marriage!
Here's the list of tour stops – a complete and updated list can be found at www.valuesbus.org.
- Wednesday, August 10th
- 8:30 – 9:00 AM: Cedar Rapids
Cedar Rapids Marriott, 1200 Collins Road NE
- 10:30 AM – 11:00 AM: Dubuque
Washington Park, 351 W 6th Street
- 12:45 PM – 1:15 PM: Waterloo
Lincoln Park, 451 E 4th Street
- 3:00 PM – 3:30 PM: Mason City
Central Park, 75 1st Street NW
- 5:45 PM – 6:15 PM: Dickinson County
Barefoot Bar, 24457 178th Street, Okoboji
- Thursday, August 11th
- 8:30 – 9:00 AM: Sioux City
Holiday Inn Express Sioux Center, 100 Saint Andrews Way
- 9:30 AM – 10:00 AM: Le Mars
Bob's Drive Inn, Highway 75 South
- 10:45 AM – 11:15 AM: Sioux City
Sergeant Floyd Monument, 2701 S Lewis Blvd/Old US Highway 75
- 1:30 PM – 2:00 PM: Council Bluffs
Bayliss Park, 159 South 6th Street
- 3:15 PM – 3:45 PM: Atlantic
Atlantic City Park, 51 W 6th Street
- Friday, August 12th
- 10:00 AM – 10:30 AM: Webster City
Wilson Brewer Park, 280 Ohio Street
- 11:15 AM – 11:45 AM: Fort Dodge
City Square Park, 120 N 5th Street
- 1:30 PM – 2:00 PM: Carroll
Carroll County Courthouse, 595 Court Street
- 3:15 PM – 3:45 PM: Boone
Pizza Ranch, 1703 South Story Street
- 5:00 PM – 5:30 PM: Marshalltown
Susie Sower Park, 60 N 2nd Avenue
And if you spot the bus on the road this week, be sure to give a friendly honk and a wave!
By Brian Brown
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Posted in Iowa
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August 10, 2011 at 12:00 pm
Ken Blackwell writes in Town Hall about the true rainbow coalition - the coalition of people of good will who believe marriage is between one man and one woman:
Look behind these numbers [of people supporting marriage in the south]. What you see is clear: A black-white alliance. In addition, the South is increasingly welcoming Hispanic and Asian immigrants. You could not rack up 86% of Mississippi voters, 81% of Alabama voters, and 78% of South Carolina voters without considerable black and white backing.
This is because marriage is not a wedge issue. It’s a bridge issue. That’s why liberals fear it on the ballot. They know that the people do not want marriage abolished. They know it creates a formidable grassroots coalition. How else can we explain the Maryland legislature’s last-minute decision? Lawmakers in Annapolis shelved a bill to force citizens of the Free State to recognize same-sex couples as just-marrieds.
The South was surely wrong on slavery and Jim Crow. For far too long, black Southerners had to endure oppression, violence, and discrimination. White Southerners, too, found their region held back by this historic injustice. It is certainly a hopeful sign when blacks and whites join hands to protect the most important of our civil institutions.
Marriage wins in liberal states, conservative states, and moderate states. It’s not a red state/blue state issue. It’s a red-white-and-blue issue and it wins all over. And that’s not just whistlin’ Dixie!
August 10, 2011 at 11:00 am
A self-identified gay republican activist warns in the Portland Press Herald that gay marriage will go down again if it is put to the people of Maine in 2012 (he would prefer that government "get out of the marriage business altogether"):
If they follow through on their plan to put same-sex marriage on the November 2012 ballot, EqualityMaine and their left-wing followers will be ensuring that Maine will be a red state in the 2012 election cycle.
I say this because by putting this lightning-rod issue on the ballot, they will be bringing all of the socially conservative voters out of the woodwork to vote against it.
... the liberal progressive establishment is showing how clueless they are about the Maine electorate with this move [to put marriage on the ballot].
They think that putting this on the ballot in a high-turnout year is the tonic to cure the ill of getting around the groundswell these ballot questions generate. The problem is that they are going to hit their target yet again, yet miss the goal. In 2009, they planned for a victory with 265,000 votes. They got 267,000 votes. Their problem was that the opposition got 300,000 votes.
August 10, 2011 at 10:00 am
Do Muppets have an orientation? An online campaign tries to get Sesame Street to "marry" Ernie and Bert:
An online campaign to pressure the producers of "Sesame Street" into having lovable roommates Bert and Ernie get married is gathering steam.
Getting hitched would change things for Ernie, who has long sang about how his bath toy, Rubber Duckie, "was the one."
More than 700 people have signed on to the petition, posted at change.org.
"We are not asking that Sesame Street do anything crude or disrespectful," reads the petition for the muppet merger. "It can be done in a tasteful way. Let us teach tolerance of those that are different." --New York Daily News
August 10, 2011 at 9:00 am
Patrick Murray at Central Jersey comments on the media coverage of PPP's new poll describing New Jersey opinions on marriage and civil unions:
"...if you combine the 40 percent who prefer civil unions with the 17 percent who say that no status should be recognized, you arrive at a majority of 57 percent who oppose gay marriage when civil unions are available. Based on this question, a reasonable person — or at least an astute reporter — could conclude that most New Jerseyans do not support legalizing gay marriage.
Unfortunately, the media outlets that chose to report this poll — not everyone did by the way — took the pollster’s headline at face value. They did this even though contradictory results were included in the very first paragraph of the pollster’s own press release.
... The media love reporting on polls and the public love reading about them. That’s because well-conducted polls reflect who we are as a society. But we are being inundated with more and more polls from pollsters and organizations with specific agendas.
Unfortunately, when these less legitimate polls make it into the mainstream media, it stokes the public’s distrust of all polls. And if the media do not distinguish between the good and the bad, how can we expect the public to do the same?
