FIC Blog

What We’re Up Against

The Connecticut Post is running a fawning, puff-piece series on Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy’s first year in office. The series inadvertently reveals what we are up against–and why Family Institute of Connecticut is so crucial to faith and family in our state.

There is, for instance, this in the first installment:

[Dannel Malloy] remembers his mother sitting there with him. She was devout in the standard way — obedient to the Church teachings she agreed with, stubbornly resistant to the rules that were obviously wrong.

Only in the mind of a liberal newspaper reporter would pick-and-choose cafeteria Catholicism be considered “devout in the standard way.” (You can read one response to the Post’s anti-Catholic bias here.)

Values?

More to the point, Malloy’s misunderstanding of his faith has had serious anti-family consequences for our whole state. From the second installment of the Post puff piece:

[Andrew] McDonald is also part of the reason they jokingly refer to themselves as “the gayest administration ever.” It is a reflection of Malloy’s profound progressiveness on social and gender matters, even for a Democrat, that they so readily joke about it. It is also a reflection of the personal pride the governor takes in the politics of inclusion. It is no mistake that Malloy lobbies hard in the final hours before a vote on new anti-discrimination protections for transgendered people. His friend Rachel, a former colleague in Stamford, has been through transition. Malloy’s personal loyalties coincide with the assumption that they all share about the inevitability of equality. They’re getting on the right side of history. That’s one thing Malloy’s friends love about him. After the bill passes, McDonald tells the governor, brightly: “All the trannies love you!” He smiles and laughs.

This is what we are up against. FIC was the only group to lead the fight against the Bathroom Bill, which allows “transgender” men to teach small children and to enter women’s bathrooms. When others shrunk back, we took up the fight. Without FIC, there would have been no organized resistance to the Bathroom Bill at all.

Virtually alone against the self-described “gayest administration ever,” we lost the Bathroom Bill fight by only three votes. But the details of that loss showed the sign of our growing strength.

In 2005, legislators in both parties abandoned us on gay civil unions and the bill was signed into law by a Republican governor. But this year, 2011, we persuaded the entire GOP–and several Democrats–to stand with us against the Bathroom Bill, something we have never accomplished before. The strength of the pro-family vote was so surprising to Connecticut’s power establishment that it led to a Courant article exploring the shift at the Capitol.

This is the value of FIC. We can build on this success, this near-miss in defeating the Bathroom Bill, in ways that we could not when we lost the 2005 civil union bill. Even against the “gayest administration ever”–especially against an administration that would describe itself in that manner–FIC is more crucial to the fight for faith and family in Connecticut than we have ever been before.

But we need your help to keep our momentum going. Please go to our homepage, please donate and please also sign up for our email alerts. Watch your in-boxes for information on what you can do to defend faith and family in our state–even under the shadow of the self-described “gayest administration ever.”