Adam Liptak quoted me more or less accurately, but his emotional evaluation of our cell phone call is way off mark--as readers might have seen if he had also quoted my litany of the victories for marriage won over this year, and over the past few years.
Not bitter, and not besieged (as we keep celebrating victories!) but I am very concerned for my country that our worst fears about what the gay marriage movement intends to do if it wins--marginalize, repress, and stigmatize traditional views of marriage--appear to be spot on.
The Minnesota House Civil Law Committee has approved the marriage amendment bill on a party-line 10-7 vote, as local MN press reports.
The bill will next travel to the Ways and Means committee of the Minnesota House, where it scheduled to be debated at 6pm tomorrow.
Stay tuned for more from us!
Now is the time!
The Minnesota Marriage Amendment has passed out of committee and is headed to a floor vote in both the House and the Senate, with a vote expected within the next two weeks!
Thanks to all of you who have helped bring us to this point. But we can't let up now! In less than two weeks, the Minnesota Marriage Amendment could finally be headed to the November 2012 ballot—but our opponents are pulling out all the stops to block the measures from ever going to the voters.
We need your help today! Please send an email to your state senator and state representative, urging them to vote yes on the Minnesota Marriage Amendment.
Here's what you can do:
Victory is in sight . . . Help push across the finish line with your phone call or email today!
Great news from late last week - the Minnesota Senate Judiciary Committee approved the marriage amendment bill 8-4 on a party line vote.
Glen Stubbe with the Star Tribune snapped a photo of Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse testifying in favor of the amendment before it passed (with one of the bill's sponsors, Senator Warren Limmer beside her):
Thank you to our friends and supports who showed up for the meeting after seeing our action alert! Please stay tuned for more updates!
The Catholic Church in Minnesota gets behind the new Marriage Amendment:
"Minnesotans Should Decide the Future of Marriage in their State"
Marriage between one man and one woman sustains our civil society and promotes the common good.
That is the view of Minnesota’s Roman Catholic bishops, who were encouraged today by the introduction of legislation in the Minnesota Senate that, if passed by both houses, would place a constitutional amendment on the ballot in November 2012. If approved by the people, the Minnesota Constitution would declare that only the union of one man and one woman shall be considered "marriage" in Minnesota.
According to Jason Adkins, executive director of the Minnesota Catholic Conference-the Church’s public policy voice-the purpose of marriage is to ensure the well-being of children and, as a result, properly nurture the next generation of society. "Reason, science, and experience all show that children need a mother and a father," he said.
... "The people of Minnesota should have the opportunity to preserve an institution that pre-dates government and has been the bedrock of society for thousands of years."
"Let the people vote."
Deacon Keith Fournier writes at Catholic Online:
The effort to force Paul Clement to withdraw from legal representation in defense of Marriage is one more manifestation of the growth of bullying in our culture. Only this variety does not receive much attention in the main stream media. It is the bullying of the Homosexual Equivalency Activists.
Thomas Sowell, a black, Harlem-raised conservative scholar and pundit, is one of America's finest commentators today. Here are passages from some of his writings on the subject of gay marriage:
From "The Notion of 'Gay Marriage' Is a Product of Sloppy Thinking," March 24, 2000:
- Why is marriage a government concern in the first place?... First of all, a marriage between a man and a woman has the potential to produce additional people... The well-being of those children is important both for their sake and for the sake of society as a whole... Second, men and women are inherently in very different positions within a marriage. The inescapable fact that only women become pregnant means that male and female situations are never going to be the same... Third... [s]ince [after a few decades] a woman has often invested years of her life in creating a home and family, the marriage contract is one way of trying to assure her [of some security against being cast off in favor of a younger woman].
From "Gay Marriage 'Rights' Are Nonsensical," January 3, 2005:
- The issue [for supporters of "gay equality"] is not individual rights. What activists are seeking is official social approval of their lifestyle. But this is the antithesis of equal rights. If you have a right to someone else's approval, then they do not have a right to their own opinions and values.
From "Gay 'Marriage,'" August 16, 2006:
- Analogies [of bans on gay marriage to bans on] interracial marriage are bogus. Race is not part of the definition of marriage. A ban on interracial marriage is a ban on the same actions otherwise permitted, because of the race of the particular people involved. It is a discrimination against people, not actions. There is no reason why all those [marriage] laws should be transferred willy-nilly to a different union, one with no inherent tendency to produce children nor the inherent asymmetries of relationships between people of different sexes.
April 30, 2011 at 9:00 am
Russell Nieli, who has a PhD in politics from Princeton, writes in the Public Discourse about "learning from a religious skeptic's rejection of polygamy and easy divorce":
While often hostile to the Calvinist Christianity in which he was reared, David Hume’s essay “Of Polygamy and Divorces” offers a vigorous and well-argued defense of marriage arrangements as they existed in England and many other parts of Europe from the early Middle Ages through most of the 18th century. His arguments have great relevance for us today as we struggle to cope with unprecedented rates of divorce and unprecedented ease of both entering into and exiting marriages and other intimate procreative relationships. His arguments against polygamy are also important as that practice seems to be undergoing something of a resurgence in parts of the southwest, with renewed interest in the popular culture.
Maggie Gallagher comments on David Hume's claim that both polygamy and liberal divorce laws make marriages less happy over at NRO's The Corner:
Interesting stuff, but I became somewhat more transfixed by the argument for polygamy to which Hume is in part responding:
Having multiple wives, says the polygamy defender, is “the only effectual remedy for the disorder of love and the only expedient for freeing men from that slavery to the females which the natural violence of our passion has imposed upon us.” It is by multiple partners alone — partners who can be used at will and played off one against the other — that “[we men] regain our right of sovereignty, and sating our appetite, reestablish the authority of reason in our minds, and, of consequence, our own authority in our families.”
Essentially, The tyranny of lust disorders men’s reason and gives women too much power over men: that’s polygamy as misogyny.
But who today seeks to limit the power of lust to disorder reason? That 3,000-year-old tradition of thought — from the Roman stoics to the Christian fathers to the polygamy defenders in Hume’s day — appears to have been replaced by a desire to experience the sweet disorder of lust as often as possible. Strange.
April 30, 2011 at 8:00 am
From Glen Stanton at Focus on the Family:
Since 1991, there have a been a number of good, population-based studies exploring the connection between premarital sexual activity and later elevated risk of divorce.
Just recently, another good study was published on the topic, prompting me to do a little research round-up/summary of the nice handful of studies addressing this question.
It is important that adolescents and young adults have access to this information indicating how sexual choices made today can have real, significant negative consequences upon their most important relationships - and therefore their lives and general well-being - years down the road.
Here is the concise two-page summary of this body of research.
April 29, 2011 at 4:00 pm
The Washington Examiner got the scoop:
Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has terminated his office's relationship with King & Spalding, the Atlanta law firm that abrubtly dropped the U.S. House of Representatives as a client for purposes of defending the Defense of Marriage Act.
"King & Spalding's willingness to drop a client, the U.S. House of Representatives, in connection with the lawsuit challenging the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was such an obsequious act of weakness that I feel compelled to end your legal association with Virginia so that there is no chance that one of my legal clients will be put in the embarrassing and difficult situation like the client you walked away from, the House of Representatives," Cuccinelli said in a letter to Joseph Lynch in the firm's Washington, D.C. office.
... The firm had been retained by the Virginia AG's office Sept. 15, 2009. Cuccinelli said the firm was being terminated "effective immediately."
Cuccinelli said he acted because "Virginia does not shy away from hiring outside counsel because they may have ongoing professional relationships with people or entities, or on behalf of causes that I, or my office, or Virginia as a whole may not support. But it is crucial for us to be able to trust and rely on the fact that our outside counsel will not desert Virginia due to pressure by an outside group or groups."
Updates:
April 29, 2011 at 4:00 pm
It doesn't appear to offer legislators much of a compromise at this point:
"Catholic Diocese Asks Assembly to Kill Civil Unions" (ProJo)
"Meri States Strong Opposition to Civil Unions" (MERI press release)
April 29, 2011 at 3:51 pm
This in the New York Times:
Two dozen high-profile New York business leaders plan to release an open letter on Friday urging state lawmakers to legalize same-sex marriage, arguing that the measure would help companies attract and retain employees.
We've already responded to this meme when it popped up in Rhode Island, Indiana, and --most recently-- Minnesota.
No matter which state the argument is floated in: the evidence simply does not show that redefining marriage helps state economies. In fact, the most prospering states have one-man, one-woman marriage amendments, and none have gay marriage, as Maggie points out in this column on the subject back in March.
April 29, 2011 at 1:40 pm
Ruth Marcus, who opposes DOMA, writes in the Washington Post that she opposes HRC's intimidation tactics more:
It’s easy to beat up on a big corporate law firm for acting cravenly in its financial self-interest. In the case of King & Spalding, the Atlanta firm that abruptly reneged on its commitment to defend the Defense of Marriage Act, the pummeling is entirely deserved. But the bigger culprit is the Human Rights Campaign, the gay rights group that orchestrated the ugly pressure tactics against King & Spalding.
... strong-arming the lawyer to drop or avoid the unpopular client is not an acceptable tactic. This is not, or shouldn’t be, a left-right debate. It is true whether the lawyer is defending murderers on death row, Guantanamo detainees or a federal law — a law, it must be pointed out, that was passed by overwhelming congressional majorities and signed by a Democratic president.
April 29, 2011 at 1:36 pm
The Albany Times Union raises the question.
SSM advocates say yes, for sure.
But then again, they said that about the Rhode Island House ... and the Maryland House, too.
And there are new factors to consider this year:
"There's a sense that because it's passed three times, it's a given it'll pass again," said Dennis Poust, a spokesman for the Catholic group [the New York State Catholic Conference]. "But they're not taking into account the fact that the speaker lost 10 seats in the election."
The organization also is taking into account the departures of Democrats Nettie Mayersohn and Darryl Towns, and the pending departures of Audrey Pheffer and RoAnn Destito, all of whom voted for the bill in 2009.
April 29, 2011 at 1:34 pm
House Majority Leader Nicholas Mattiello echoes Speaker Gordon Fox and says no the votes for gay marriage weren't there, even in the house, but several in leadership disagree, as ProJo reports:
House Majority Leader Nicholas Mattiello, D-Cranston, echoing Fox, said it was questionable whether the votes were there in the House for a gay-marriage bill. “There are political realities,” he said Wednesday. “We have representatives from different constituencies and some of those constituencies indicated they were not ready for this.”
Mattiello declined to say on the record how close he thought the vote would be for gay marriage.
But at least three members of Fox’s leadership team who have been consistent supporters of gay-marriage legislation felt otherwise.
Rep. Jon Brien says the reason he backed down, is that Fox was afraid a SSM bill could be amended to refer the question to the people---and that is apparently still unacceptable to gay marriage supporters, even though they claim majority support in Rhode Island.
