FIC Blog

Leave aside the Courant’s disingenuousness in “challenging” pro-family activists yesterday to explain how same-sex “marriage” hurts real marriage. Today’s Courant answers the paper’s own challenge:

Valerie and others among the estimated 40,000 men, women and children in polygamous communities are part of a new movement to decriminalize bigamy. Consciously taking tactics from the gay-rights movement, polygamists have reframed their struggle, choosing in interviews to de-emphasize their religious beliefs and focus on their desire to live “in freedom,” according to Anne Wilde, director of community relations for Principle Voices, a pro-polygamy group based in Salt Lake City.
In recent months, polygamy activists have held rallies, appeared on nationally televised news shows and lobbied legislators. Before the Nov. 7 elections, one pro-polygamy group issued a six-page analysis of all of Utah’s state and local candidates and their views on polygamy. “We can make a difference,” the group told supporters…

In their quest to decriminalize bigamy, practitioners have had help from unlikely quarters. HBO’s series “Big Love,” about a Viagra-popping man with three wives, three sets of bills, three sets of chores and three sets of kids, marked a watershed because of its sympathetic portrayal of polygamists. The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2003 decision in Lawrence vs. Texas, which voided laws criminalizing sodomy, also aided polygamy’s cause because it implied that the court disapproved of laws that reach into the bedroom.
Since then, liberal legal scholars, generally no friend of the polygamists’ conservative-leaning politics, have championed decriminalization. One of them is Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University who has written two op-ed pieces for USA Today calling for the legalization of bigamy – and same-sex marriage. [emphases added]

It was disingenuous of the Courant to pretend that our argument boiled down to nothing more than that same-sex “marriage” would “diminish the legal bond between heterosexual couples” and then challenging us to prove it a mere two years after its imposition on Massachusetts. As we said all along it took thirty years before social science could show what a disaster no-fault divorce has been for our nation’s children and the same thing will likely prove true for same-sex “marriage.” At that point it will be too late, so why embark on yet another ill-conceived reform of our most important-but-fragile social institution? We warned that the redefinition of marriage could lead to attacks on religious liberty, changes in school curriculum, polyamory (if “love” alone “makes a family”, why stop at 2 people?) and a culture that, by not honoring traditional marriage, causes fewer of its young citizens to enter into it, thus giving children less of a chance to grow up in the environment where they will do best: a home with their married mother and father. But as the dire predictions FIC has been making for years in our battle against same-sex “marriage” start to come true the MSM’s response is to stick their heads in the sand and pretend it isn’t happening.

The weakening of marriage has already gotten us to the point where 40% of U.S. births in 2005 were illegitimate. And our warning to state legislators that the passage of civil unions could strengthen the hand of plaintiffs seeking to impose same-sex “marriage” on Connecticut by judicial fiat may also be coming true:

Lawyers for eight same-sex couples seeking the right to marry will file their brief in the state Supreme Court today, setting the stage for an epochal legal battle on whether Connecticut permits gay marriage.
Since the couples launched their lawsuit in August 2004, the state has passed a law permitting same-sex couples to form civil unions, which bestow virtually the same legal rights that come with marriage.

The couples not only say civil unions are not enough, but also use the General Assembly’s adoption of civil unions as fodder in their constitutional challenge.

The excerpt above is from a front page story in today’s Courant—the same edition that carries the polygamy story on the next page. Courant reporter Lynn Tuohy reveals her pro same-sex “marriage” bias in this part of what is supposed to be an objective news story:

In 2005, the legislature’s judiciary committee replaced an act that would have guaranteed marriage equality with one permitting civil unions instead.
The same-sex couples contend that the legislature “blinked” when it approved civil unions instead of marriage equality. [emphases added]

Whether same-sex “marriage” is “marriage equality” or a radical redefinition which attacks marriage’s place in our society is precisely the question upon which activists on both sides of the issue disagree. By using pro same-sex “marriage” activists’ favorite buzz phrase, Tuohy—and the editors who let it slip through—have tipped their hand. It’s one of the things they should consider the next time they wonder why the newspaper industry is experiencing difficulties.

Christian blogger Mark Shea has often written that it’s a short trip from “What could it hurt?” to “How could we have known?” For readers of today’s Courant, that trip is as short as the distance between page A1 and page A2.