Marriage & Family Headlines

CNN: "Years before the nation's capital legalized same-sex marriage in March, one church in Washington, D.C., opened its doors to gay couples as part of its mission to establish an 'inclusive body of Biblical believers.' ... Yvonne Moore not only left Covenant Baptist, where she had worshipped for nearly 40 years: she filed a lawsuit for her weekly tithes because, as she said, 'They didn't respect the members enough to listen to us.'"

Associated Press: "The city council is considering a request from Reggie Flimlin, an Asbury Park woman who owns a yoga studio, to allow women to decide for themselves whether they want to wear bikini tops on the beach. She says it's already happening on less populated beaches in the city's north end."

Orange County Register: "Local members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community are planning to protest religious activists' efforts to cure people from homosexuality this weekend. The demonstration will be held at the intersection of Ridgeline and University drives outside of Concordia University's campus where Exodus International is holding its annual conference."

Insurance News: "The study, released today in the online edition of the leading journal Health Affairs, found that partnered lesbians are only 28 percent as likely as married heterosexual couples to receive healthcare coverage for a partner through an employer. Gay men are 42 percent as likely. The study also found that these disparities are not remedied by other insurance options." | Lambda Legal Press Release | Full Study: The Effects Of Unequal Access to Health Insurance for Same-Sex Couples in California

ABC News: "A Massachusetts school district is going ahead with plans to give condoms to students even without their parents' consent, but because of an outcry from Gov. Deval Patrick and others the district will consider excluding students in grades one through four"

Matt Gurney writes at the National Post: "Jeff Dolan spent Father’s Day in jail, locked away for failure to pay child support. Deadbeat dads don’t garner a lot of sympathy. But you don’t need to study Jeff’s case for long before you realize that he’s anything but a deadbeat. Instead, he’s a man hopelessly ensnared in a crushing bureaucratic machine: He’s in jail because he couldn’t pay child support, but he couldn’t pay child support because he was unemployed … and he was unemployed because the court took his driver’s license for failure to pay child support … after he went bankrupt paying his court costs. ... Courts, in their earnest efforts to do right by families, are destroying them, instead." | Via Wintery Knight.

The Washington Post: "The marriage education movement has already spawned a cottage industry of trademarked seminars and self-help manuals. It has popped up, in varying forms, at community centers and churches across the nation. And it has successfully persuaded leaders of the federal government and the U.S. military to spend hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars a year attempting to disseminate its teachings to the masses. At its core, it's a movement that would ask of every divorcee: What if the truth was that you didn't marry the wrong person? What if you just didn't know how to be married?"

"Nearly one-in-five American women ends her childbearing years without having borne a child, compared with one-in-ten in the 1970s."

Ken Klukowski writing at Townhall: "[The] Supreme Court dealt a setback to supporters of traditional marriage. But it’s not the defeat that gay-rights supporters (and many of their fans on the media) are hailing it as, and leaves open the possibility that traditional-marriage supporters may be the ones celebrating at the end. ... The record of atrocious harassment in the wake of California’s Proposition 8 makes perfectly clear that these marriage supporters can make a strong case that they could be harassed. As such, by the standard the Court announced today, the marriage supporters should win."

Washington Times editorial: "Solicitor General Elena Kagan is too political, too leftist, too inexperienced and too disrespectful towards existing law to be confirmed for the U.S. Supreme Court. ... We know she is remarkably lacking in courtroom experience. ... We know she deliberately ignored the law while at Harvard, and unfairly besmirched our military in time of war. ... We know she cut corners in order to preserve partial-birth abortions. ... We know she is willing to undercut First Amendment free speech for political purposes. ... We know Ms. Kagan is hostile to gun rights. ... We know she believes foreign law is highly relevant to U.S. law. ... We know she believes judges should automatically favor certain classes of people and impose their own values to reach desired outcomes."

"Those who advocate changing it to recognize same-sex unions are not proposing a formal change in the law that will leave the institution unaltered even as it grants more people access to it. Rather, they seek a substantive change to the institution based on a new understanding of human sexuality."

WBZ: "Provincetown school officials are going to keep working on a new policy allowing local students -- even those in elementary school -- to receive free condoms without their parents' knowledge."

Minnesota Independent: "This weekend four of the five major party candidates for governor will be at Pride, and while one important Republican — Tom Emmer — will be missing, a fellow GOPer is taking the opportunity to show that not all Republicans share views with the religious right."

OneNewsNow: "A college student in New York is once again getting the run-around from school officials for trying to express his religious views on campus. ... Hayon, president of the student Republican Club, wanted to hold an on-campus forum entitled 'The Economic, Political, Social, and Legal Outcome on Same-Gender Marriage' to defend the definition of marriage as one man and one woman. ... [ADF Attorney Travis Barham said] '[t]here's a rule at Kingsborough that says the student group has to have a faculty advisor present at every event. The faculty advisor took advantage of that rule to insist that students give him a speaking role and give him the authority to shut down the event at anytime.'"

ADF Attorney Daniel Blomberg writing at Speak Up Movement / Church: "So what if Congress forces the military makes homosexual behavior normal? Isn’t that just a military issue? Why should average Americans care at all? Because this change will change America. Why is that? For at least two reasons. First, the military is a repository of American culture—it reflects, in a single institution, many of the highest values our society respects. ... [T]he second point: perhaps the only institution more deeply respected and widely recognized as the training ground for inculcating societal values than the military is marriage. And normalizing homosexual conduct in the military will not only—as an ACLU attorney recently stated—be a cultural precursor to normalizing homosexual 'marriage,' it will actually create the perfect storm for destroying the primary federal law protecting marriage—the Defense of Marriage Act ('DOMA')."

New York Law School Professor Arthur S. Leonard analyzes Doe v. Reed, No. 09-559 (U.S. June 24, 2010) at LeonardLink: "My quick summary - Concur by Sotomayor with Ginsburg and Stevens - it should be difficult for plaintiffs to keep the names confidential; Concur by Alito - it should be easy for the plaintiffs to keep the names confidential; Concur by Stevens and Breyer - it should be difficult for plaintiffs to keep the names confidential; Concur by Scalia - originalist view of the First Amendment and characterization of petition signers as actually being involved in 'legislating' means there is only a weak First Amendment interest, if any, in keeping these names confidential. So Scalia is sees no problem with the statute, as such, and is very unfavorably disposed to the second claim. Dissent by Thomas - Strong First Amendment protection for privacy of petition signers, so statute violates the First Amendment. Interesting to see Thomas and Scalia sharply split.

ChristianNewsWire: "While any number of our co-religionists would represent the undeniable, historic Torah values shared by Orthodox and traditional Jews, we are devastated and broken-hearted by the choice of Elena Kagan. According to the Torah perspective adhered to by our 850-plus member Rabbis, as well as hundreds of thousands of Orthodox and traditional Jews, MS. KAGAN IS NON-KOSHER - NOT FIT TO SERVE - ON THE SUPREME COURT, OR ANY OTHER COURT."

Metropolitan News-Enterprise: "'The marriage relation is the foundation of all society, and is not to be severed on slight ground or for trivial causes. The policy of the law, therefore, is against granting divorces.' That pronouncement came in a 1902 California Supreme Court opinion. ... Nowadays, by contrast, a marriage is thought of by many as a transitory state in one’s life journey, with marital vows being but a tentative statement of present intent. The posture of the law with respect to divorce has been since the advent of a 'no-fault' system in 1970: 'You want it, you got it.'"

"True, 49 other states have adopted no-fault divorce. But New York would be unwise to discard a law has produced almost the lowest divorce rate in America."

Rose McDermott, Nicholas A. Christakis, and James H. Fowler, Breaking Up is Hard to Do, Unless Everyone Else is Doing it Too: Social Network Effects on Divorce in a Longitudinal Sample Followed for 32 Years (October 18, 2009). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1490708 "Divorce is the dissolution of a social tie, but it is also possible that attitudes about divorce flow across social ties. To explore how social networks influence divorce and vice versa, we utilize a longitudinal data set from the long-running Framingham Heart Study. We find that divorce can spread between friends, siblings, and coworkers, and there are clusters of divorcees that extend two degrees of separation in the network. We also find that popular people are less likely to get divorced, divorcees have denser social networks, and they are much more likely to remarry other divorcees. Interestingly, we do not find that the presence of children influences the likelihood of divorce, but we do find that each child reduces the susceptibility to being influenced by peers who get divorced. Overall, the results suggest that attending to the health of one’s friends’ marriages serves to support and enhance the durability of one’s own relationship, and that, from a policy perspective, divorce should be understood as a collective phenomenon that extends far beyond those directly affected." Via Ross Douthat.