MARRIAGE PROTECTION AMENDMENT VOTE NEXT WEEK
June 2nd, 2006 by Peter
The U.S. Senate is set to vote on the Marriage Protection Amendment (MPA) June 7th and it is not a moment too soon. FIC’s motion in the Kerrigan case has still not been ruled on and several similar suits seeking the judicial imposition of same-sex “marriage” are pending around the nation, including New York:
ALBANY, May 31 — As the issue of gay marriage finally reached New York State’s highest court on Wednesday, the six judges who heard the passionate arguments from both sides put forth a fundamental question: Has marriage been defined by history, culture and tradition since the dawn of Western civilization, or is it an evolving social institution that should change with the times?
If two-thirds of both Houses of Congress pass the MPA, it must then be approved by the legislatures of three-fourths of our fifty states to become law. This is the only way for the future of marriage to be decided by the people instead of radical anti-democratic judges. You can encourage Senators Dodd and Lieberman to vote for the MPA by clicking here.
As pro-family activists work to persuade our fellow citizens to support the MPA, we should keep in mind several important articles on same-sex “marriage” that have recently appeared. Maggie Gallagher’s piece, written in the wake of Boston Catholic Charities’ decision to cease its adoption services rather than be forced to place children with same-sex couples, is especially important. Maggie interviews several key players on both sides of the same-sex “marriage” issue about the coming conflict between religious liberty and the gay rights agenda—”everyone thinks it is the battle of our times” one scholar tells her—and draws some ominous conclusions. Should our opponents win, traditional religious institutions in general will be treated as the legal equivalent of racists and, like Bob Jones University, risk losing their tax exempt status:
Religious bodies may be as simple as the small, independent congregations that exist all over America, but often they are large and complex institutions with extensive property and multiple missions, notably saving souls. Even a slight risk of anything so damaging as the loss of tax-exempt status will persuade many such groups to at least mute their marriage theology in the interest of preserving the rest of their activities. Such a self-imposed muting on the part of faith communities would change our culture of marriage, and our understanding of the free exercise of religion, without necessarily creating visible martyrs.
Stanley Kurtz has written several key essays lately, including Polygamy vs. Democracy: You Can’t Have Both:
The solution is to treat marriage as a social institution whose fundamental purpose is to encourage mothers and fathers to build stable families for the children they create. Same-sex marriage breaks this understanding, thus encouraging the sort of unstable parental cohabitation we see in Europe, where cohabiting parents break up at two to three times the rate of married parents. And polygamy undercuts companionate monogamy, the only form of marriage that can function in a modern liberal society. What’s needed, then, is the revitalization of a richer understanding of marriage as a culturally specific social form.
Giddens, Beck, Beck-Gernsheim, Moxnes and their exuberant torch-bearing kill-the-zombie followers among European intellectuals (along with those happy-go-lucky Night-of-the-Living-Dead American radical sociologists) are simply better company than America’s deny-it-all gay marriage defenders. They cheerfully admit they want to burn down traditional marriage and they look forward to basking in the glow of the conflagration. B & B offer a brilliant duet on the virtues of divorce and family fragmentation as a way to harden up the children born into the brave new post-family paradise.
The numbers for 2005 are in, and the Dutch out-of-wedlock birthrate has done it again, shooting up a striking 2.5 percentage points. That makes nine consecutive years of average two-percentage-point increases in the Dutch out-of-wedlock birthrate, a rise unmatched by any country in Western Europe during the same period. Ever since the Dutch passed registered partnerships in 1997, followed by formal same-sex marriage in 2000, their out-of-wedlock birthrate has been moving up at a striking clip. That fact has created a serious problem for advocates of same-sex marriage…
At a bare minimum, the rapid and ongoing deterioration of Dutch marriage shows that the “conservative case” for same-sex marriage has been proven wrong in the Netherlands. Convince the public that marriage is not about parenthood, and increasingly parents simply stop getting married.
