Ruth Institute Blog

from WinnipegFreePress.com:
The last time Canadians had a debate about the definition of marriage, it was over whether gays and lesbians had a constitutional right to marry.

In the end, the courts decided they did.

Now, as a British Columbia judge weighs whether polygamy should be decriminalized, advocates on both sides of the debate are pointing to the legalization of same-sex marriage to bolster their claims.

Keep reading…

LGBTweekly.com:
The Irish edition of tabloid news magazine The Sun recently covered the story of Penny Lawrence, a 28-year-old woman suffering from Genetic Sexual Attraction (GSA) who is now pregnant with her father’s child.

If you seriously don’t think there are folks waiting in the wings for same-sex ‘marriage’ to set the legal precedent they need to make what is described above legal – along with absolutely anything else you could imagine – then check out a website called Full Marriage Equality. (They refer to this father and daughter’s relationship as “consanguinarmory”.)

By Maggie Gallagher

Last month, facing the problem of Muslim assimilation, British Prime Minister David Cameron denounced multiculturalism and called for a new “muscular liberalism” as the basis for a shared national identity.

Applauding conservatives, beware. Read more…

by John McCormack

The Democratic leadership in Maryland’s House of Delegates announced Friday night that it didn’t have the votes to pass a gay marriage bill. The Associated Press reports:

The speaker of Maryland’s House vowed that Democrats would try again next year to pass legislation legalizing gay marriage, but the intense lobbying by faith groups against the measure in recent weeks shows that it won’t be easy, even in a state known for its liberal politics. Read more…

From the FRC article:

As the president of the Family Research Council (FRC), an organization that has filed amicus briefs defending both Proposition 8 and DoMA, I am troubled by the lightning-fast integration of concepts and actual language from the Attorney General Letter into the Motion to Vacate Stay. Let me repeat: the Motion was filed within two-and-one-half hours of Attorney General’s press conference. Consequently, I am deeply concerned that officials at the Department of Justice were collaborating with the litigants in the Proposition 8 case. Even the appearance of collusion between the Department of Justice and litigants is highly damaging to the rule of law in America.

How often have we all heard pro same-sex so-called ‘marriage’ folks vehemently insist that Christians will not have to be politically or socially marginalized for them to get their way.

And yet this is happening in Great Britain where, if I’m not mistaken, same-sex ‘marriage’ isn’t even recognized yet – just civil unions.

On another site, this story was aptely titled Christianity isn’t dying, it’s being eradicated.

Philosopher Francis Beckwith has posted a short, but incisive, comment on patheos.com concerning the legal implications of the ‘reasoning’ undergirding the Obama administration’s refusal to continue to defend DOMA.

This is the core of his argument: Read more…

WASHINGTON—The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued the following from its Office of General Counsel:

“Marriage has been understood for millennia and across cultures as the union of one man and one woman. Today, the President has instructed the Department of Justice to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act, a federal law reiterating that definition of marriage, passed by a Republican Congress and signed by a Democratic President just fifteen years ago. The principal basis for today’s decision is that the President considers the law a form of impermissible sexual orientation discrimination. Read more…

This article is aptly titled. Obama never intended to defend marriage and has done nothing but undermine DOMA in court. That was his only objective all along. All of his prior professions that he valued the institution of marriage were nothing more than deliberate acts of deceit devised to win elections.

As another article (Obama is out of the closet about gay marriage) noted: Read more…

So now you can’t even support a candidate for elected office if he’s not pro same-sex ‘marriage’:

Target attracted the ire of many LGBT rights supporters — some of whom pledged to boycott the company — after it was revealed last year that the retail chain donated $150,000 to MN Forward. The group ran ads backing Minnesota Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer, who opposes same-sex marriage.

Well how dare they!

But if they thought they could allay the hatred of the lavender thought-gestapo, the first comment on the article would indicate that they were probably wrong: Read more…

Do the words “official duty” mean anything to guys like Barack Obama or Jerry Brown? How about “oath of office”?

But at least we can be certain they know about “collusive litigation”?:

…the Obama Justice Department’s defense of DOMA maintains a pattern that a distinguished scholar has termed “almost like collusive litigation”—that is, where presumed adversaries are actually seeking the same result. The Obama Administration is indeed all but abandoning DOMA—but not in the forthright manner that would result in a real battle in the courts where both sides of the controversy are represented. Read more…

by Sheila Liaugminas

Apparently the one thing both sides of this debate agree on is that the effort to change laws probably won’t stop with civil unions legislation, because such laws may stop short of full marriage rights. And gay activists are, indeed, after that goal.

Slippery slope? It sure is, says just about everyone involved.

That’s an argument gay-rights advocates are happy to concede. Read more…

The ground shifts beneath the Catholic left.

By George Neumayr | December 2010

The phrase “social justice,” when invoked by members of the Catholic left, is a euphemism for the agenda of the Democratic Party. “Social justice” refers not to objective principles of justice but to specific policies of Democrats on health care, labor, welfare, and other matters. Read more…

In our battle to prevent marriage abolition via redefinition, we have an adversary.  Just who is this adversary?  One commenter on our site said that we were trying to defend marriage against gay people.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  We are doing no such thing.  We are trying to defend marriage from Leftists. Read more…

Here’s a great article from Mother Jones.  (Gosh, that’s a sentence I rarely have a chance to write).  It is not directly related to marriage abolition via redefinition, but it does have this to say about those brilliant social engineers who promised us that they were going to eliminate poverty and turn all of our children into geniuses with their education proposals.  You know, those prodigies whose designs have had about the same effect on our society as a large meteor strike on one of our medium-sized cities. Read more…

Some of our commenters make a big deal that the AMA and other organizations support their position on various issues.

Seeing as how these commenters are Leftists and their positions are standard leftist fare, this is completely not surprising.  In fact, it is predicted by O’Sullivan’s First Law:

All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing. I cite as supporting evidence the ACLU, the Ford Foundation, and the Episcopal Church. The reason is, of course, that people who staff such bodies tend to be the sort who don’t like private profit, business, making money, the current organization of society, and, by extension, the Western world. Read more…

An interesting thought from Robin Hanson over at Overcoming Bias:

A key pillar of modern morality is the sanctity of romantic love.  We reel in horror at the thought of “backward” societies, including our ancestors’, who arrange marriages without intense emotional romantic love.  While they think it nice if arranged partners have such romantic feelings, if that does not happen such partners are not to look for love elsewhere. They think a life without romantic love can be a fine life. Read more…

From the Blog Villainous Company:

From the author of a longitudinal study of the long term effects of early child care:

“In America today, it is normative for children to start childcare at some point in the first year of life and stay there until they start school. This is the case for over 50% of children,” he says. He continues: “Let’s imagine these are small effects. But let’s imagine a reception class of 30 children in which two-thirds of them have small effects that make them a little bit more aggressive and disobedient … versus another class of 30 in which only 10% of them do. Are those teachers going to be doing more time managing and less time teaching? Are those playgrounds going to be less friendly? Are those neighbourhoods going to be affected? Read more…

(July 14, 2010) Massachusetts judge Joseph Tauro has ruled that the federal Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional.  In this installment of her weekly interview on Issues, Etc., Dr J and Todd Wilken discuss the ramifications of this decision.  She also brings us up to speed on NOM’s Summer of Marriage Tour (Dr J is participating in the New England leg of it this year).

Defense of Marriage Act

Might as well post this as well.

by Sheila Liaugminas

Sometimes, the Proposition 8 battle seems surreal. But then, so do other serious, emotional and intense conflicts playing out in the nation’s courts and city halls and classrooms and media, over what we knew not long ago as core Judeo-Christian traditional values. Read more…