Free Republic

A state commission recommended Monday that Marion County Circuit Judge Vance Day be ousted from his job for his refusal to marry same-sex couples and other ethical violations. The Oregon Commission on Judicial Fitness and Disability made its rare recommendation to the Oregon Supreme Court in a 48-page report. The high court ultimately will decide whether to remove Day from the bench.

(CNSNews.com) – Former Solicitor General Ted Olson told “Fox News Sunday” that it is “not illegal” for a bakery for instance to refuse to participate in a gay wedding under last week’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide. “It's not illegal under this ruling,” Olson said in response to Fox News host Chris Wallace’s question about how the ruling will affect religious freedom. “There's the question – and it became hot this spring – of religious freedom. Can the proverbial baker or photographer who is selling his services openly, can he refuse to participate in a same-sex marriage...

Australia’s political opposition hopes to harness momentum from the Irish gay marriage referendum after it proposed a law Monday that would recognize same-sex marriages, something the country’s conservative prime minister is against. Center-left Labor Party leader Bill Shorten became the first leader of a major Australian political party to back a bill to overturn a national ban on gay marriage. Gay rights advocates fear that government lawmakers will be reluctant to support the bill as such a law would be seen as a political victory for Shorten over Prime Minister Tony Abbott, a former Roman Catholic seminarian and a staunch...

Indiana voters ousted two Republican legislators who helped keep a gay marriage ban off the November ballot, but most other incumbents prevailed Tuesday in a primary election lacking a galvanizing issue or marquee statewide race. Social conservatives in northeast Indiana helped tea party candidates defeat Reps. Rebecca Kubacki of Syracuse and Kathy Heuer of Columbia City. Both women voted in favor of a measure that delayed, at least until 2016, an effort to let voters consider whether to amend the Indiana Constitution to solidify the state's gay marriage ban.

The rumble in Round Lake is over. As its first order of business, a newly appointed seven-member Board of Trustees held an emergency meeting Wednesday night and unanimously voted to reinstate longtime librarian Theresa Marchione to her job with back pay. "Come on back, Theresa," said Bill Ryan as sustained applause from the audience filled Village Hall. Marchione, a familiar face at the Wesley Avenue facility for decades, had been terminated for shutting down the library 40 minutes early on May 29 because of a tornado warning. A powerful twister touched down later in nearby Vischer Ferry. Since Marchione's dismissal,...

“Glee” star Jane Lynch is divorcing her wife of three years. Lynch married Dr. Lara Embry in 2010 in Massachusetts. She told People magazine in a statement Monday that splitting up was “a difficult decision for us as we care very deeply about one another.” …

LAPD Police Chief William J. Bratton has come out -- in favor of gay marriage. As a wedding gift to friend and celebrity publicist Howard Bragman and his longtime partner, Chuck O'Donnell, Bratton made it official: He and his wife, former Court TV diva Rikki Kleiman, strongly believe that gays have a right to marry. And in honor of Bragman and O'Donnell, who wed this past week in Norwalk, the chief and Kleiman have made a donation to Equality California, a group seeking to stop a state ballot measure this November that would ban same-sex marriages. "The Constitution guarantees life,...

ANNAPOLIS — Gov. Martin O"Malley has struggled to find a consistent position on homosexual "marriage" in the weeks since Maryland"s highest court upheld a ban on the unions and left further action on the issue to the General Assembly. Mr. O"Malley, a Democrat, seemed to support civil unions last week, although his stance has shifted depending on who he is talking to. "I believe civil unions is an idea around which we can forge a consensus," Mr. O"Malley said during a Thursday appearance on the "Kojo Nnamdi Show" on WAMU-FM (88.5 FM). Mr. O"Malley went on to acknowledge that some...

BAN SAME SEX MARRAIGE RESULTS: ARKANSAS YES 75% GEORGIA YES 77% KENTUCKY YES 75% MICHIGAN YES 59% MISSISSIPPI YES 86% MONTANA YES 66% NORTH DAKOTA YES 73% OHIO YES 62% OKLAHOMA YES 76% OREGON YES 57% UTAH YES 66% Full results at CNN

Lessons of the same-sex marriage debate in the Netherlands.   ONLY A FEW YEARS AGO, two prominent demographers hailed the Dutch family as a model for Europe. Somehow the Dutch had managed to combine liberal family law and a robust welfare state with a surprisingly traditional attitude toward marriage. Even as a new pattern of highly unstable parental cohabitation was sweeping out of Scandinavia and across northern Europe, the Dutch were unswayed. To be sure, premarital cohabitation was widespread, but when Dutch couples decided to have children, they got married. At least they used to. Today, marriage is in...

<p>In the debate over traditional marriage, the cultural dominoes are falling in the wrong direction. Activist judges, who specialize in taking issues away from the people and deciding those issues instead, intend to make traditional marriage a thing of the past. Their decisions, like the one that will allow Massachusetts clerks to begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples this week, and the aggressive political and legal strategy driving them, make clear that protecting traditional marriage will require amending the Constitution.</p>

LONGWOOD, Fla. — The map that hangs above Liberty Counsel's weekly planning meeting measures the small firm's national reach, with color-coded tabs marking the status of 33 active cases in 13 states. Their agenda: stop same-sex marriage by using the courts. From an unmarked beige tin warehouse near a railway line at an address they insist on keeping secret, Liberty Counsel has employed a range of legal tactics to fight same-sex marriage across the country. "This is the central command center for the defense of traditional marriage against the same-sex marriage movement," said Mathew D. Staver, president, general counsel and...

Bill O’Reilly, host of the O’Reilly Factor show on Fox Network, describes his show as the “no spin zone.” Guests on the show don’t get much slack to slant their cause or issue in the most favorable light. Most of the time, Mr. O’Reilly confronts them in mid sentence. However, way back in February, Mr. O’Reilly had Kevin Jennings of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Educators Network (GLSEN) on his show. Mr. Jennings was touting his organization’s high school curriculum on gay marriage. Not only did Mr. Jennings engage in spin, he did so under the watching eyes of the...

Q: So if a state were voting on gay marriage, you would suggest to that state not to approve it? A: The state can do what they want to do. Don't try to trap me in this state's [rights] issue like you're trying to get me into. … In my state of Texas, if we tried to have gay marriage, I would campaign against it. —Candidate George W. Bush, in a presidential debate moderated by Larry King in Columbia, S.C., Feb. 15, 2000 Peter Singer cites this exchange in his new book, The President of Good and Evil: The Ethics...

The Power of Marriage Anybody who has several sexual partners in a year is committing spiritual suicide. He or she is ripping the veil from all that is private and delicate in oneself, and pulverizing it in an assembly line of selfish sensations. But marriage is the opposite. Marriage joins two people in a sacred bond. It demands that they make an exclusive commitment to each other and thereby takes two discrete individuals and turns them into kin. Few of us work as hard at the vocation of marriage as we should. But marriage makes us better than we deserve...

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Probable vanity here. What are the chances of this amendment Sen. Frist is talking about banning gay marraige really taking off and taken seriously? How do we get started?

CNSNews.com) - The Catholic Action League of Massachusetts is seeking state and federal hate crimes charges against homosexual protestors who "disturbed" Sunday's Mass at Boston's Cathedral of the Holy Cross. "This was a bigoted expression of contempt for Catholics," C.J. Doyle, executive director of the league, told CNSNews.com. Doyle referred to the protest as "a premeditated assault on the First Amendment religious freedom rights of Catholics" and "a very crude intimidation tactic intended to silence Catholic opposition to same-sex marriage. "But it was also a crime," Doyle said. The protest, staged by 11 members of QueerToday.com - a self-described Boston-based...