Posted on 06/15/2012 3:04:16 PM PDT by neverdem
A notable feature of the legal debate over same-sex marriage in the United States in recent years has been the employment of social science research on the family as evidence. In courts of law across the country, advocates of same-sex marriage have advanced the “no differences†thesis—the view that having gay or lesbian parents makes “no difference†in the development of children into well-adjusted adults. For this proposition they have repeatedly relied on the claims of academic sociologists, psychologists, and other researchers. But as Ana Samuel explains in her recent Public Discourse essay, the findings of the New Family Structures Study led by Professor Mark Regnerus at the University of Texas (partly supported by a grant from the Witherspoon Institute, and published by Regnerus in the latest issue of Social Science Research), using data that for the first time meet the highest standards for research in social science, make it impossible to continue making such claims with any real credibility.
How much does this new study matter for the legal debate over same-sex marriage? A very great deal. Same-sex marriage advocates have argued in state and federal courts that traditional marriage laws have no “rational basis,†or that they fail some other more stringent form of “scrutiny†under constitutional provisions guaranteeing due process and the equal protection of the laws. Defenders of marriage have responded that one prominent basis for the conjugal definition of marriage is that the optimal form of family for raising children is the stable union of a married man...
(Excerpt) Read more at thepublicdiscourse.com ...
God defines marriage, not the State. Any “marriage” a State defines is just as much as legal fiction as when it tells us that a corporation is a “person” and then gives it a right of unrestricted speech.
Jesus tells us that from the beginning of humanity, it was God’s intent that marriage would only be one man and one woman. Scripture in many ways and places also tells us that God defines sexual morality and that people who refuse to practice that morality cannot qualify for the freely given gift of eternal life.
The State attempts to force us to recognize its power. One way is to presume the power to define who is married and who is not. We cede this power in part because we allow the State to tax incomes and estates, so to administer such taxing power, the State must define who it considers to be “married” and who is not. Just as when it defines a corporation to be a “person”, the State does not hesitate to define anyone it pleases as being “married, totally apart from how God would define it.
If you review the arguments advanced by supporters of same-sex marriage, you will find that a lot of them are related to taxation, inheritance and medical issues. But existing law addresses those and any defects in the law can be easily repaired apart from the issue of “marriage”.
I don’t want a government that can tell me what I may or may not do in the privacy of my own home or relationships. In a Constitutional Republic with a provision that prohibits Congress from making any law respecting religion, I have to allow others to have their own beliefs and morality. I can only be an advocate for the morality and beliefs that I think are true. I take my understanding of sexual morality from Scripture and that is where I learn that God considers sodomy to be an abomination.
If a State decides that two (or more) people can marry, if that is all that happened, I could live with that because I don’t have to approve, change my beliefs or what beliefs I pass on to my children.
However, once gays have sufficient influence with a State to redefine marriage, gays don’t stop there. They use the State to forbid me from acting on my morality and beliefs. In fact, the State in some cases forces me to accommodation in their practices.
If I have children in public school, the State will insist on teaching them that gay marriage is just as normal as godly marriage. You will be sanctioned as a parent if you attempt to remove your child from such indoctrination.
If you run a business that could provide services to gays, you will be sanctioned if you decline to treat them as any other customer. For example, if you run a wedding photography business, you will be sanctioned if you decline to photograph a gay wedding.
In short, gays will jam their lifestyle down our throats because when the State says they are equal it is forbidden for a private citizen to dissent from that status. In doing so, they seek to force me to give them approval for something that I will never approve of. It is that last point that galls gays the most.
Curiously, when liberal advocates of gay marriage are asked if their policy also would allow polygamy or polyandry, they recoil in horror and insist that it does not. However, logic demands that it does. I would ask how same-sex parents are going to react in the future when Utah public schools insist on indoctrinating the children that LDS-related polygamy is just as “normal” as same-sex “marriage”. The fact that this will be an issue will show yet again that gay “marriage” is not about marriage at all, it is about forcing the rest of us to approve of repugnant sexual immorality, something that LDS polygamists never demanded.
Wedding Photographer May Be Required (on Pain of Legal Liability) to Photograph Same-Sex Commitment Ceremonies
So the New Mexico Court of Appeals held last week in the long-pending Elane Photography v. Willock (N.M. Ct. App. May 31, 2012). The court began by holding that the state law that bans sexual orientation discrimination in places of public accommodation applies to professional wedding photographers’ decisions not to photograph same-sex commitment ceremonies: Such photography businesses are “places of public accommodation” under the language of the law, and the discrimination between legally recognized opposite-sex marriages (New Mexico only recognizes such marriages) and same-sex commitment ceremonies constitutes discrimination based on sexual orientation.
The court then rejected the argument of the photographer (Elane Huguenin, the co-owner and principal photographer for Elane Photography) that penalizing her for not photographing such same-sex ceremonies was an unconstitutional “speech compulsion.”...
To deny Natural Law Theory-—the teleological ends of human beings—is really removing the Designer-—God-— from Natural Law Theory-—the basis of our Jurisprudence.
Atheists want our God-Given Rights removed-—thus, God has got to go—and they want to artificially force little children to believe in perverse and evil use of the body (all biology, science-logic prove it is true) so they can eject Christian EThics out of their worldview-—to fundamentally transform this nation into a pagan/atheist hellhole. Throughout histroy, Atheist governments have destroyed freedom and killed millions of their own citizens.
Our judges better realize what this promotion of Evil (sodomy) means to our children and future. This promotion of evil violates the fundamental principle of Just Law—which is necessary for Rule of Law.
Just Law always promotes Virtue and can never promote by force of laws—Evil —such as sodomy. All Natural Rights in the US come from our Creator, not from arbitrary laws of Barney Frank. Sick perversion of Justice.
You might want to check THIS out:
Incredible ad by the Roman Catholic Church
>http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=D9vQt6IXXaM&hd<
It was only going to be a matter of time until the baloney got exposed, even empirically.
Epithelium rules.
If you use the wrong epithelium, you void the warranty. The poop chute is columnar epithelium and not designed for abrasion.
I agree, of course, but even the pagan world has always stood up for the specialness of the man-woman bond with the largest argument being about monogamy vs. polygamy, not about whether homo is ok (until very modern times that notion was not even entertained).
We don’t need sociology to tell us that marriage is focused on producing heirs and marriage laws aim to give women rights as the co-equal of a male. To give women status beyond that of a concubine and to make the male the guardian of the woman. Only in a socialist order does the woman not need the protection of a male. The idea of two men marrying is absurd. Of two women, less so. But ironically, female-female relations are even less stable than those of two males.
If where the state is now is the pillar, this would be the post. The state has gone and endorsed, not just winked and nodded at, abominations.
Heterosexual married couples offer the best family structure for children, according to a new, rigorously researched sociological study.
The Kids Aren’t All Right: New Family Structures and the “No Differences” Claim
How Badly Has Obama Alienated the Middle Class?
Some noteworthy articles about politics, foreign or military affairs, IMHO, FReepmail me if you want on or off my list.
Sociological studies are ordinarily quite rigorous, and the new one is in line with this. Most thers have been slap-dash and political in nature.
The state has a vested interest in marriage, considering that it involves both children and property rights. Gay marriage will create even more confusion than easy divorce.
Actually the Regnerus study has been composed of some very shoddy research resembling the faux research that composed the gun study about revolutionary war era.
Why Barry Goldwater voted against the public accomodations law. It was a draconian measure to break the segregation culture. Vindication of the old maxim that hard cases make bad law.
Where do you get this idea?
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