FIC Blog

One year ago yesterday the same-sex civil union law went into effect. The occasion was marked by a flurry of stories similar to what was published when the law hit the six month mark. From the Bristol Press:

Brian S. Brown is the executive director of the Family Institute of Connecticut, whose mission is “to encourage and strengthen the family as the foundation of society,” according to its Web site. The Institute opposes civil unions and same-sex marriage.
“Everyone knows the same-sex civil union bill is meant to be a stepping-stone for marriage,” Brown said.
He’s right. Most couples in civil unions hope to marry someday, and a group called Love Makes A Family openly declares that its goal is “equal marriage rights for same-sex couples in Connecticut.” The group’s name states its position: love, not gender, should be the basis of marriage.
“That argument makes no sense,” Brown said. “The subjective feeling of love does not define marriage. If I love four people, I can’t marry them.”
Anne Stanback, president of Love Makes A Family, calls this “a red herring. People made the same arguments when they changed the laws to grant women rights within marriage, or allow interracial marriage … ‘if you allow interracial marriage, what’s to stop polygamy?'”

If Brian’s point is just “a red herring” how does Ms. Stanback explain last summer’s “Beyond Same-Sex Marriage” statement, which explicitly endorsed “committed loving households in which there is more than one conjugal partner“[emphasis added]. The statement was signed not by fringe figures but by such prominent left-wing personalities as feminist icon Gloria Steinem and Princeton’s Cornell West. The signers also included a Rev. Cecil Charles Prescod of Love Makes a Family, Inc., who—unlike Ms. Stanback—publicly embraces the logic of the group’s name.

More from the Bristol Press:

Brown admits that no Connecticut marriage is likely to fail as a direct result of civil unions, but he fears the indirect results.
“Same-sex marriage won’t affect my marriage or yours, but it will change our [overall] culture, and changing the culture will change marriage.”
Brown said that in Norway, marriage rates have gone down since same-sex marriage has been allowed, and he fears this might happen in America…

Said Brown: “Marriage is based on a distinction between men and women. Only they can come together to make a child. The connection to child-rearing is the basis of marriage … obviously, not all married couples have children. But they could. … Ultimately, we need a free and fair vote on an amendment to the state Constitution to make marriage between a man and a woman.”

The Stamford Advocate also ran a “one year later” story:

If gay marriage does come up in the next session, the conservative Family Institute of Connecticut is ready to rally against it.
The institute is lobbying for a constitutional convention in November to add an amendment to the state constitution defining marriage as a union between one man and one woman.
Peter Wolfgang, the institute’s director of public policy, said same-sex marriage threatens religion.
Wolfgang said same-sex marriage is already wreaking havoc in Boston, where Catholic Charities stopped handling adoptions so it would not have to place children in homes with same-sex couples.
Connecticut is starting to tread on religious institutions’ rights with civil unions, Wolfgang said, citing a case in Waterbury where a doctor at St. Mary’s Hospital accused the Catholic hospital of discrimination because it refused to provide his civil-union partner with health insurance.
“We’re very concerned about the effect on religious freedom and we’ve already seen that in Connecticut,” Wolfgang said.
The Family Institute is getting involved in this year’s state elections to elect legislators who back their agenda. It has a scorecard on its Web site rating incumbents on their “pro-family” votes, including those on same-sex unions and stem cell research.
“The battle regarding same-sex marriage in 2007 will be largely won or lost on Nov. 7, 2006, with who’s elected and who loses on Election Day,” Wolfgang said.

It’s FIC’s political action committee that’s “getting involved in this year’s state elections”—as I told the Advocate’s reporter—and we’re not lobbying for a constitutional convention for this November.

But the Advocate did the state a service by reporting what is at stake in this year’s state elections—something that has been virtually ignored in most of Connecticut’s media. If anti-family candidates for our legislature do better than pro-family candidates, we will see attacks on faith and family in our state next year that will make the dark days of the 2005 session look like a picnic.

You can help us turn the state from its present anti-family course by clicking here to support pro-family candidates. You can also view the pro-family scorecards mentioned in the Advocate piece here.