FIC Blog

NE, the Courant’s Sunday magazine, has run solid cover stories on FIC, Fr. McGivney’s cause for canonization, philanthropist John Hunt’s work with inner city youth and other worthy topics. So why do long-time Courant readers write NE off as shallow fluff?

“Zingers” may provide part of the answer. Like similar features in other papers “Zingers” appears to be modeled after the Jim Mullen “Hot Sheet” feature that used to run in Entertainment Weekly: brief, humorous items on events of the previous week. But while Mullen was consistently talented and funny, “Zingers” is…well, judge for yourself. This week’s lead “Zinger” is about FIC:

Now that the U.S. Senate has rejected the notion of a Constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, the Family Institute of Connecticut is pushing for a state constitutional convention with the same purpose.
As the institute’s brain trust would tell you, a state constitutional amendment would help protect us from “activist” judges and their “radical” and “anti-democratic” rulings in favor of same-sex marriage. (Those pesky judges – always using the court to protect the rights of the individual, no matter what everyone else thinks. And isn’t that whole “equal protection” idea over-rated? )

No doubt activist judges and their radical supporters do think they are “always” on the side of individual rights and “equal protection.” But the forty million-plus children who have been legally aborted since the Supreme Court’s notorious 1973 Roe v. Wade decision suggests otherwise.

Besides stopping gay people from hitching up and sharing their lives together to the detriment of others, the amendment could not be “judicially reviewed or overruled,” the institute has said. (An interesting interpretation of the law, the U.S. Supreme Court might say.)

Does “Zingers” really think that constitutional amendments can be overruled by the courts? Granted, that does fit with the Left’s desire to make the courts the final arbiter of every contested political issue. But Bush v. Gore should have taught them to be careful what they wish for.

A state constitutional amendment would blunt what the institute calls the “all-out assault” in the courts to “redefine” marriage. (Would the “love, cherish, death-do-us-part” thing be out, too?) That assault, if successful, “will force same-sex marriage on the entire country without a single citizen getting the right to vote,” the institute observes. (Sounds like what happened with desegregation, doesn’t it?)

Actually, “what happened with desegregation” was that the Court in 1954 overturned its own 1896 decision declaring segregation constitutional, that earlier decision being part of a pattern stretching back to the Court’s pro-slavery Dred Scott decision. Does the Left really want to argue that having the courts impose solutions to contentious social issues “on the entire country without a single citizen getting the right to vote” is a good thing?

“Zingers,” which appears every week in NE, is written from a liberal, pro same-sex “marriage” perspective. There is nothing comparable to it anywhere in the Courant from a conservative perspective.