Marriage & Family Headlines

R.J. Snell writing at Public Discourse: "[T]he utilitarian education of the new university views the cosmos (and its citizens) as brute, factical, as merely given—what Charles Taylor calls the 'great disembedding.' The cosmos is mere stuff—indifferent and valueless until it is found useful and assigned a task. Lacking a sense of the gratuity of being, such education lacks also commitment to the worth of being; lacking a sense of the worth of being, such education lacks also commitment to acting only in conformity with the dignity of things; lacking a sense of the dignity of things, such education lacks also commitment to civility and the teaching thereof."

On Top Mag: "In filing its challenge to Wisconsin's domestic partnership law, a group opposed to gay rights claims it's too similar to marriage . . . WFA had also supported passage of the anti-gay marriage amendment as the Family Research Institute. It is being represented by the Christian-based Alliance Defense Fund (ADF). ADF lawyers are also defending California's gay marriage ban, Proposition 8, in federal court."

The New American: "With the timing of the ABA action thus closely coinciding with the action of Judge Walker, conservative attorneys, as well as other constitutionalists, are left with few alternatives but to continue the Proposition 8 fight all the way to the Supreme Court . . . 'The fact that ADF and other lawyers disagree with ABA on a number of controversial issues demonstrates the gross inaccuracy of ABA’s claim that it speaks for the U.S. legal profession,' remarked ADF Senior Legal Counsel [Doug Napier]."

Which Came First the Parent or the Child? Mary Patricia Byrn and Jenni Vainik Ives, 62 Rutgers L. Rev. 305 (2010) "From the moment a child is born, she is a juridical person endowed with constitutional rights. A child’s parents, however, do not become legal parents until a state statute grants them the fundamental right to raise one’s child. The state, therefore, exercises considerable power and discretion when it drafts the parentage statutes that determine who becomes a legal parent. This article asserts that the state, through its parens patriae power, has a duty to act as an agent for children when it drafts its parentage statutes. In particular, the state must adopt parentage statutes that satisfy children’s fundamental right to legal parents at birth. This right derives from the Substantive Due Process privacy right to form intimate, familial relationships, as well as the right to intimate association and ensures that a child may develop the parent-child relationships necessary to preserve her liberty, protect her rights, and define her identity."

The Sex Discount Kim Shayo Buchanan, 57 UCLA L. Rev. 1149 (2010) "This Article interrogates the sexual morality of Equal Protection. Gender equality jurisprudence reveals the unacknowledged influence of a traditional, heteronormative conception of sexual morality--the sexual double standard--that often sets the parameters of gender equality. When the U.S. Supreme Court frames a gendered law as limiting participation in education, the workplace, or civic life, it tends to apply a demanding form of heightened scrutiny that few gendered laws can survive. When, on the other hand, it frames a gendered law as governing the consequences of illicit sex, it tends to apply what I call the sex discount, replacing the rigorous scrutiny mandated by its public equality cases with an unacknowledged, much more deferential form of equal protection review. The Court invokes biological differences between men and women to justify this deference. But the sex discount does not genuinely accommodate gender differences regarding pregnancy, sexuality, or parenthood. Courts tend to reject reproductive justifications for inequality in public life; they tend to assume that biological differences are irrelevant when a heterosexual couple is married; they have applied the sex discount to gendered laws that serve no interest in protecting fetal life; and they apply a sex discount in cases of antigay discrimination that do not involve reproductive or sexual behavior. Rather, the sex discount authorizes governments to use gendered laws to enforce traditional gender norms about the morality of sex: to discourage abortion, to allow antigay discrimination, and to 'incentivize' heterosexual marriage."

HRC: Today President Obama appointed Richard Sorian as Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, Department of Health and Human Services. | White House press release

Morris News Service: "The State Board of Education upheld the denial of two online schools Tuesday, frustrating parents seeking options for their children. The board met to allow members to consider granting charters for Georgia Virtual Academy and Mercury Online Academy, which the Georgia Charter Schools Commission denied in June. The commission rejected the two applications largely because neither had a governing board that could act independently of the national companies contracted to operate the schools."

Watertown Daily Times: "The Justice Department has filed motion in U.S. District Court to participate in the case as an 'amicus curiae,' or friend of the court, essentially volunteering to help the court decide whether federal discrimination claims by former student Charles P. Pratt should be upheld. Mr. Pratt, who filed suit in April 2009, alleged he was harassed, called names, physically assaulted and threatened . . . Mr. Pratt claims that district officials were aware of the problems but deliberately refused to help him. He also said any attempts by him to form a Gay-Straight Alliance at the high school were shot down by administrators."

San Diego Gay and Lesbian News: "An amended judgment was entered on Aug. 18 in Gill v. Office of Personnel Management, the challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act filed by Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD). Simultaneously, a stay was issued pending any appeal by the government to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. It supersedes a judgment entered by the federal district court on Aug. 12, 2010."

Associated Press: "MSNBC rejected a TV ad calling for a boycott of Target Corp. after the retail giant made a political donation in Minnesota, continuing the controversy over corporate involvement in elections."

"San Diego sheriff’s deputies cuffed and removed several protesters at the County Clerk’s Office on the day that same-sex marriages were supposed to resume . . . Three people sat in front of one door and blocked several heterosexual couples from entering."

Ross Douthat writing at his New York Times blog: "Basically, [conservatives] should have pushed (in, let's say, the early 1980s) for what Ryan Anderson and Sherif Girgis have urged as a contemporary compromise: A domestic partnership law designed to accommodate gay couples without being sexuality-specific. (In other words, it would be available to any couple who couldn’t legally marry each other: A pair of cohabitating siblings or cousins could enter into it as well, for instance.) . . . "

"Walker simply rules out the notion that there may have been reasons for turning away from the homosexual life. Homosexuals were simply 'disliked,' an aversion without reason. 'Moral judgments' come down in the end to irrational beliefs; and they could supply then no justification for the law. In this way, the wave of relativism inverts language and dissolves any moral ground for the law."

Maggie Gallagher writing at Real Clear Politics: "[T]he devastating brief that attorney Charles Cooper filed asking the 9th Circuit to overrule Walker . . . is a total smack-down of Walker's decision to ignore the immense amount of evidence brought to him -- not to dispute it, but to simply ignore it. Walker tried to pretend, in essence, that the only form of evidence a trial judge may consider is expert witness testimony in court. He even ignored expert witness testimony when it clashed with his own views. Harvard professor Nancy Cott, a historian of marriage, favors gay marriage, but even she freely admitted in trial that gay marriage represented a momentous change in the public meaning of marriage, and that the effects of this change would be impossible to determine in advance."

Law.com: "The appeal of Chief Judge Vaughn Walker's Aug. 4 ruling hasn't yet been assigned to a merits panel, said Circuit Executive Cathy Catterson. The court typically assigns cases about three months before argument, Catterson said. It won't be publicly revealed which 9th Circuit judges will hear the case until a week before oral argument, set for the week of Dec. 6 . . ."

ADF attorney Austin R. Nimocks appeared on Point of View Radio to answer the question. | MP3 18:34 mins| Austin R. Nimocks' article at Human Events: Federal Court Declares Most Americans A Bunch of Bigots.

ADF attorney Daniel Blomberg appeared on the Janet Mefferd Show to discuss the status of the Cal. marriage litigation. | MP3 17:42 mins

Philadelphia Gay News: "The suit was filed against the state of California, but the governor and attorney general refused to defend Prop. 8 in court. A coalition of religious groups, led by Christian legal agency Alliance Defense Fund, took over the case and must now prove to the appeals court that they would be directly harmed if marriage equality was legal in California."

San Francisco Bay Times: 'It made no sense to impose a radical change in marriage on the people of California before all appeals on their behalf are heard, so the 9th Circuit’s decision is clearly the right call,' stated pro-Prop 8 conservative Alliance Defense Fund Litigation Staff Counsel [Jim Campbell]. 'Refusing to stay the decision would only have created more legal confusion surrounding any same-sex unions entered while the appeal is pending. This case has just begun.'"

SonoranNews.com: "Representing the proponents of Prop. 8, Attorney [Brian Raum] of the Alliance Defense Fund issued a statement afterward calling the court’s ruling 'disappointing' and said, 'Its impact could be devastating to marriage and the democratic process.' He said the majority of voters 'simply wished to preserve the historic definition of marriage . . . imagine what would happen if every state constitutional amendment could be eliminated by small groups of wealthy activists who malign the intent of the people. It would no longer be America, but a tyranny of elitists.'"