Marriage commissioners in a district of Amsterdam will be forced to undergo annual evaluations to ensure they support same-sex “marriage” after revelations that two commissioners had refused to officiate at the ceremonies.
Since 2007, the government in Amsterdam’s Nieuw-West district has only employed commissioners who agree to perform same-sex “marriages,” and officials apparently believed the district was free of “conscientious objectors.”
... In Canada’s province of Saskatchewan, the government promised in January to fire any marriage commissioner that refuses to “marry” homosexual couples. That move followed a ruling by the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal that commissioners’ constitutional rights to freedom of religion and conscience are outweighed by homosexuals’ right to freedom from discrimination.
Bronx Assemblyman Michael Benedetto, who supports legal gay marriage, sort of inserted himself as a referee, issuing a statement about the tone of the argument between Diaz and advocates:
"The state legislature has been presented with an important and historic issue and whenever topics of such import fall before the house a civil and rational dialogue is required. Unfortunately, in the discourse between the Senator and bill proponents things are getting out of hand. The Senator is entitled to his views and to vocalize his support of those views. His critics are entitled to challenge them and respond to them. However, there is a responsibility that both sides must adhere to: to carry on their discussions in a manner that is respectful to both sides of the debate. Threats of bodily harm, profanity and overly harsh statements do not contribute to the debate and only serve to cheapen the importance of the issue."
Saratoga's State Sen. Roy McDonald remains undecided, as the msm focused on a billboard asking him to vote yes. Another of the "undecideds" State Sen. Kemp Hannon, has moved into the "no" column, according to Your News Now. With just seven undecided votes left, YNN says, "at least five Republicans would need to join with 29 Democrats to approve the measure.":
"Meanwhile, other undecided legislators like Senator Greg Ball say they'll keep listening to residents back home.
"I have my ear to the ground in my community to listen to what my constituents care about and we're hearing from both sides and the response from both sides has been pretty overwhelming," said Ball."
Keep up your calls, letters and visits, it's down to the wire in New York.
Gay-rights groups such as Marriage Equality Rhode Island and Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders said a House floor amendment that added religious protections goes further than similar measures in any other state. MERI, in a statement issued Thursday, said the bill would “legalize discrimination” and enable “faith-backed health-care organizations to ignore the legal status of same-sex couples.”
Other speakers, such as Joseph Cavanagh, of the National Organization for Marriage’s Rhode Island chapter, said the bill does not provide enough religious protections and would leave business people — photographers and bed-and-breakfast owners, among others — open to lawsuits if they do not provide services for civil-union ceremonies or events.
“People should not be forced to recognize something like this, and be charged with discrimination,” Cavanagh said.
... Asked when the Senate Judiciary Committee will vote, Chairman Michael J. McCaffrey, D-Warwick, said “the decision will be made whether to post it, if it’s going to be posted, within the next couple of weeks.”
America’s economic revival is tied to the revival of a strong marriage culture, according to a new study.
Compared with other family arrangements, marriage offers the best economic outcomes for men, women, children and the nation, said Patrick Fagan, head of the Marriage and Religion Research Institute at the Family Research Council (FRC), in an analysis released late last week.
Only 5.8 percent of married families lived in poverty in 2009, he noted in the new study, called “Marriage and Economic Well-Being: The Economy of the Family Rises or Falls With Marriage.”
... Mr. Fagan argued that the federal government’s welfare and anti-poverty safety net - which now accounts for $112 billion a year - is needed in part because of the social costs from high rates of cohabiting, divorce, unwed childbearing and single-parenting.
These unmarried family forms are associated with lower incomes and less wealth, according to data from the 2007 Survey of Consumer Finances cited in the FRC report.
Christelyn Karazin notes at Family Scholarsthat one South Carolina midwife's efforts to reduce the out-of-wedlock birthrate in the black community are being challenged by the elites, but supported by other midwives:
... what gave me pause and encouragement, were the comments from 122 women who weighed in on Urban Midwifery. From the sounds of it, attitudes about normalizing the abnormal may be starting to change.
One reader said this:
I applaud this sister for taking a stand on an issue that has been plaguing the black/Latino communities for almost 30 years. Regardless of whether you believe marriage is for you, you have to be blind not to see how damaging the baby mama epidemic is to the success of our culture.
…and frank talk I can appreciate from another:
Black women are the only ones who settle for crumbs or settle for having several kids – not just one – without expecting the man to marry her.
Overwhelmingly, [the midwife's] work was supported quite plain. It looks like people are feeling more free to say “the sky is blue,” and that’s a very, very good thing.
Hopefully, her example may lead to midwives working in other communities, including the Euro-American community, to do the same.
Prof. Margaret Somerville, founder of the McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law writes in the Vancouver Sun about the "genderless child" being raised by parents in Canada:
With same-sex marriage, we saw the advent of arguments for "genderless parenting" - the idea that all a child needs is love and it's irrelevant whether the loving persons are male or female. Now we have "genderless kids." Kathy Witterick and David Stocker, the parents of Jazz (5), Kio (2) and four-month-old Baby Storm want to rear and love each of their children, not as their daughter or son, not as a girl or a boy, but as just their child.
... I suggest that we might also gain insights from asking: Are the parents doing this for the kids, as they claim, or are they doing it for themselves? My guess is that they would say and probably believe it's for the kids, but that the main motivation is their own ideological and political beliefs. When the "best interests" of the children and adults beliefs in such regard are concordant in such regards, there is no problem, but when they clash there is. The situation is very similar to a physician asking a patient to participate in a medical experiment. Long ago, as a protective measure, we started to teach patients to ask doctors who approached them to be research subjects: "Are you doing this for me doctor or am I doing it for you?" These kids need someone to ask their parents that question for them.
... There is also arrogance in ignoring millennia of human wisdom of what we need to become as fully actualized persons as we can be.
Just when you think it can't get any weirder or more disturbing, an Oakland public school decided to teach grade-school children about multiple genders, under the banner of preventing bullying.
[Correction: The Oakland class in multiple genders was addressed to fourth-graders, not kindergarteners, and this post has been update to correct the error.]
Watch that video. Look at the children's faces. And then look at the activist from a group called "Gender Spectrum" who wants to embed in these children's minds the idea that we all have a right to make up our own gender(s).
"People can be girls, feel like girls, they can feel like boys, they can feel like both, and they can even feel, like I said, kinda like neither," he teaches them.
This is a movement that knows what it is doing.
This has been our busiest and (so far) most successful spring ever! We've seen victories in Rhode Island, Maryland, Minnesota, and next (we hope) New York.
But this week I want to step back from the incredible flow of events to focus on the great, great challenges we are facing ahead.
I mean what we are facing as a nation, as a civilization founded on moral truth, "conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."
As our Founders understood it, that equality rested on the self-evident decrees of nature and of nature's God.
Could Christianity, which gave birth to America, become an illegitimate stepchild in our own nation?
The evidence is mounting this week that too many advocates of gay marriage aim at nothing less than a revaluation of all values—to create a new, government-backed sexual morality in which those who adhere to traditional views of sex and marriage are demoted to second-class citizens.
"Marriage equality," in other words, means some people will be more equal than others.
I do not believe that most ordinary gay people, or gay-marriage advocates, intend to do harm. Most ordinary Americans are good people, for whom "live and let live" is good enough.
But the architects of this movement, it is increasingly clear, know exactly what they are doing, and why.
What is the evidence?
In Illinois this week, the Rockford Catholic Charities shut the doors to its adoption and foster care program, because a new civil unions bill with the Orwellian title of the "Illinois Religious Freedom Protection and Civil Unions Act" failed to explicitly protect religious liberty. The threat of litigation made continuing to help these children too risky—to the rest of the good work Catholic Charities continues to do.
The state legislator who sponsored the bill says that was not his intent, but too bad. He tried to go back and add specific religious liberty protections later, but too late.
He has regrets, but Illinois activists (who understood from the beginning that religious freedom would NOT be protected) are loud and proud about it.
Benjamin Wolf, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois who represents juvenile wards of the state as part of a court-monitored consent decree with DCFS, even noted that children would be the losers because of the special difficulties in finding good child-welfare organizations.
"Rockford would not be the place I would've chosen to start these transitions," Wolf said. "I am very sorry that they would give a greater priority to their commitment to continue discriminating than the health and welfare of Illinois children."
In other words, drive Christians and other traditional faith communities out of the public square, and then blame the victims for your own intolerance.
In Rhode Island, GLAD (Gay & Lesbian Advocates and Defenders) has actually and actively opposed language in the House bill designed to protect religious institutions like Catholic Charities.
Karen Loewy, Senior Staff Attorney for GLAD, called the exemption "unprecedented," and designed only to inflict "gratuitous harm on Rhode Island's gay and lesbian families."
What about the gratuitous harm inflicted on children when religious adoption agencies are told they are no longer welcome unless they agree with the government's views on adoption? What about the gratuitous harm inflicted on every member of a traditional faith community in Rhode Island, when they are told their institutions and their beliefs make them second-class citizens?
Surely we can find a way to help same-sex couples make medical decisions for each other in hospitals, and fulfill other similar needs, without doing that much gratuitous harm?
But what if it's not gratuitous to the activists proposing these same-sex union bills? What if inflicting that kind of harm on religious institutions and people is part of the point?
It's not the details of religious liberty protections which bother these folks, it's the idea that there is anything worth protecting in the great faith traditions' views of sex and marriage.
The crisis in Illinois was precipitated by the conscious decision of same-sex couples not to go to the many agencies known to do same-sex foster care and adoptions, but to seek out religious agencies so they could lodge discrimination complaints.
A modus vivendi that finds room for all is not their goal. A new government-backed morality, which punishes and stigmatizes dissent and dissenters, is the goal.
Marriage Equality Rhode Island is actually now insisting that the Rhode Island senate revise its own civil unions bill to strip it of religious liberty protection, which in the eyes of these advocates is just a "loophole." Religious liberty—a loophole?
In Great Britain this week, another huge step down that road was taken. A gay man asked a Christian counselor to help him change his orientation, or at least live in accordance with his alleged religious beliefs. But this gay man was a liar. Excuse me, an "investigative reporter." He did not want her help, he wanted to punish her for being willing to help.
One need not agree with reparative therapy to see that this tactic represents a deeply troubling attempt to prevent anyone else from getting a kind of help that you don't want for yourself.
And it worked. This week a disciplinary panel found Mrs. Lesley Pilkington guilty of "professional malpractice," according to the Telegraph: "The ruling stated that her accreditation to the organisation will be suspended and she will be ordered to complete training. If she fails to comply she will be struck off the register."
In his newspaper article, Mr. Strudwick said: "I am an out, happily gay man. I was undercover, investigating therapists who practise this so-called conversion therapy (also known as reparative therapy)—who try to 'pray away the gay'.'I asked her to make me straight. Her attempts to do so flout the advice of every major mental-health body in Britain.'"
Folks like Mr. Strudwick are loud and proud and utterly convinced that "live and let live" is a one-way street that ends with his power to punish and hurt those with whom he disagrees. And in Great Britain he can!
Here in the States, for the first time in recent memory a major newspaper has begun to cover the kind of open, ugly hatred that is directed against anyone who dares to stand for marriage as the union of husband and wife.
[Sen. Diaz's effort to protect marriage] has also drawn the Pentecostal minister into venomous, online clashes and spawned death threats called into his office. Now a Brooklyn gay bar will host a "F--- Ruben Diaz Festival."
"I have never preached hate," Diaz told the Daily News. "They're showing that they're the ones that are doing the hateful things."
Diaz said he and his family have received death threats due to his vocal stance on keeping gay marriage unlawful in New York State. They were reported to the FBI and Albany police, he said.
"We are in America; we are supposed to agree to disagree and respect each other's positions," the senator said.
On May 10, tweets by opponents of Diaz's May 15 rally included one in which the sender expressed the desire to sexually assault Diaz's daughter.
(Yes, that's me there standing proudly by Sen. Rev. Díaz's side at his rally in May.)
"Be not afraid," I tell you, as the Lord told us. In every crisis there is opportunity, and out of this civilizational crisis, if we come together and stand with courage and love, will come something great.
Let me close by pointing you to a column Maggie published in Patheos, in response to a young Catholic writer who said our fight for marriage is doomed.
Maggie called it "Why Life is Winning," and she pointed out, "Some say that no one will oppose gay marriage a few decades from now. They used to say the same about abortion":
When I was, well, a few years younger than Tim Muldoon is today, the message of despair now directed at marriage was directed at the pro-life movement. All the powerful elites favored abortion. Media coverage of anyone who was pro-life was dreadful. All the wives of Republican power-brokers favored abortion rights. If you said you opposed abortion, people would shout, "You are calling my sister a murderer!" They informed me that by the time I turned 50, the pro-life movement would be dead because young people were so pro-choice.
I'm 50 now, and yet the pro-life sentiment is surging as today's young people are more pro-life than their elders.
How did that happen?
There are many ways to answer that question, and what I offer here is more of a missing piece—the role of politics in cultural change—than a comprehensive theory. ...
By the 1990s, both sides agreed (at least publicly) that pro-life values should be respected, even if they continued to disagree on the specific legislative strategies for reducing abortion.
That political accommodation created a new cultural space for pro-lifers. The pro-life position became "respected" by both sides in the public square, rather than relentlessly de-legitimized by elite organs of culture.
Politics and culture are not separate activities. Sometimes culture determines politics. But sometimes politics, by raising the costs of demonizing pro-life positions, and raising the profile of the issue in the public square, serves cultural change as well.
Speaking of politics changing culture, we just helped form a new ballot initiative committee, Minnesotans for Marriage.
In 2012, we hope, pray and expect that the people of Minnesota, after a dignified and civil debate, will join 31 other states in voting to protect marriage as the union of one man and one woman.
They will give a visible rebuke to those who claim that the majority of Americans support gay marriage, and rebuking the voices of despair who claim that the fight for marriage cannot be won.
Thank you for all you make possible. At NOM we want no less than to be your voice for your values—and for the truth about the human person: We are born male and female, called to come together in love so that the future can happen.
God bless you; and please pray for Sen. Rev. Díaz, and for everyone on the front lines of this great battle for God's truth about marriage.
Brian S. Brown
President
National Organization for Marriage
P.S. For the sake of the next generation, marriage must be defended and the truth about marriage must be proclaimed in the public square. But for us to get that message out, we need your help. Please consider what you can give, whether it's $15 or $150. We will do everything in our power to make your voice heard, to win more victories for marriage.
Following months of resistance, Chilean president Sebastian Piñera capitulated last Friday to the demands of [pro-SSM] organizations and agreed to introduce legislation to create “civil unions” between people of the same sex.
Until recently, the otherwise conservative Piñera was receiving the praise of pro-family organizations for his strong stance in favor of marriage, as well as the right to life. Although he had formerly promised to offer a civil unions bill, he had resisted demands by homosexual organizations to do so as a debate raged within his own party over the matter. Moreover, Piñera had strongly upheld marriage as a union between a man and a woman, and defined families in a way that excluded homosexual couples. --LifeSiteNews
New York University Law School Professor Stephen Gillers said that as long as Walker did not wish to marry his partner in California, there was no reason to disqualify him from the case. But Gillers said Walker should have disclosed his situation prior to trial.
"A judge should always disclose facts that are not publicly available, as in public financial disclosure filings, to give the parties a chance to seek recusal," Gillers said.
He cited an American Bar Assn. model of conduct that says a judge should disclose information that the litigants or their lawyers "might consider relevant to a possible motion of disqualification, even if the judge believes there is no basis for disqualification."
Monica Hesse, in the Washington Post, nails a fundamental sexual truth vis-a-vis "Weinergate":
"A general note for men:
Over the weekend, it was revealed that Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), or someone pretending to be Weiner, allegedly sent a photo of his bulging briefs to one of his Twitter followers.
Putting aside the issues of inappropriateness (the recipient was a college student) and accuracy (Weiner has maintained that his Twitter account was hacked in a prank), this fact remains:
Weiner, or someone pretending to be Weiner, apparently assumed that women would enjoy seeing photos of bulging briefs via Twitter.
We polled some women. Really, they would like to see . . .
“I would like a photo of a made bed,” says Kathryn Roberts, who works at a law firm in Washington. “I would take rose petals, but I want them on top of a made bed.” And not that fake kind of made, either, where the comforter is smooth but the sheets are a jumbled mess.
“Or laundry,” adds her friend Andrea Neurohr.
“Folded laundry,” elaborates Roberts. “Maybe in a wicker basket.” . . .
... Not all women like this, of course. This is the part where we call up an expert, who affirms that there is a great diversity in what women find arousing.
“There is a great diversity in what women find arousing,” says Marta Meana, a renowned psychologist who studies women’s sexual function at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. She would never want to make blanket statements about what does or does not put wind in one’s sails.
But.
“But,” she says, if you look at the empirical literature, it does indicate that the majority of women are not as aroused by pictures of” naked man-parts."
A new poll in Iowa following the departures of Mike Huckabee and Donald Trump as potential Republican presidential candidates shows former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney leading in Iowa among Republican voters.
The Public Policy Polling institute survey has businessman Herman Cain and former governor Sarah Palin tied for second at 15 percent, with Romney leading the race at 21 percent when Republican and independents who lean Republican are measured.
Newt Gingrich is 4th with 12%, Michele Bachmann 5th with 11%, Tim Pawlenty 6th with 10%, and Ron Paul 7th with 8%. All other candidates were shown at 0 or 1%.
Sen. Jim DeMint, a pro-life Republican from South Carolina, says he is possibly reconsidering his decision not to seek the Republican nomination for president. DeMint had previously indicated multiple times he would not run for the GOP nod.
In this Fox News exchange between Brad Dacus (Pacific Justice Institute), and Shannon Price Minter (Legal Director for the Center for Lesbian Rights), Minter is uncompromisingly in favor of teaching kids this program over their parents objections because, he says "It's not okay to teach children to hate."
No, it's not. And it's not okay to propagandize other people's children for your extremely innovative views on gender either.
[Correction: The Oakland class in multiple genders was addressed to fourth-graders, not kindergarteners, and this post has been update to correct the error.]
Carson Holloway writes at Public Discourse that "Public recognition of unions contrary to human flourishing will hurt, not help, the happiness of those who participate in them":
It is not clear [...] that the quest for same-sex marriage offers any substantive good to those on whose behalf it is so insistently demanded. Put another way, it is hard to see why such an absolute equality of public recognition should be essential to the happiness of homosexuals.
... There is, moreover, a further emptiness in this quest for equal recognition. The progress of same-sex marriage in American politics has been almost entirely the result not of legislation but of litigation. The final, national victory of same-sex marriage, if it comes, will come as the result of a ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States issued not only without the consent of a majority of Americans, but even against the legally expressed will of majorities in a majority of states. Public recognition of same-sex marriage is demanded as a sign of equal public acceptance, but the mode in which it is being sought ensures that the acceptance will be fraudulent. It will be in fact not a public acceptance but the acceptance of a legal and political elite that is able to force its will on the public.
Do you think same-sex marriage should be legal or illegal?
Legal............................................................... 46%
Illegal .............................................................. 45%
Not sure .......................................................... 9%
Should the Minnesota Constitution be amended to provide that only a union of one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in Minnesota?
Yes.................................................................. 46%
No ................................................................... 47%
Not sure .......................................................... 7%
The most recent SurveyUSA poll showed Minnesotans supporting the marriage amendment 51-40%, so there is obviously some give in these findings.
