Free Republic

From the December 15, 2003 issue: Federalism is a poor excuse for abandoning a core social institution. IS MARRIAGE WORTH a constitutional amendment? A fair number of conservatives think not. "Leave it up to the states!" urges John McLaughlin. George Will, with customary eloquence, calls "constitutionalizing social policy" both a "misuse of fundamental law" and "imprudent . . . at a moment when we require evidence of the sort that can be generated by allowing the states to be laboratories of social policy." William Safire sees civil union as one of the "basic rights" that should be recognized in...

For Dick Gephardt and the other Democratic presidential candidates, the good news is the bad news: "When you measure progress on the threats that could inflict the greatest number of casualties, it's clear this president is gambling with our safety," Gephardt charged in Iowa this week. Eighty-one U.S. soldiers were killed in Iraq last month, the bloodiest month of the war. According to Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, this is because of a new, more aggressive effort to root out Fedayeen still loyal to Saddam Hussein. When you go after the enemy, he said, "you will lose American soldiers, you...

LAST WEEK, the long-awaited Massachusetts Goodridge gay-marriage decision came down--hard. In a 4-3 ruling, the Massachusetts high court held that the millennia-old, cross-cultural definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman is utterly irrational. Using the lowest level of scrutiny (the "rational basis" test, which almost always results in deference to the legislature), four well-educated judges could not think up any reason other than "animus" why the people of Massachusetts and their elected representatives might not want same-sex marriage. Only a fool or a madman (or a bigot), they implied, could possibly disagree. The judges gave...

So at last it has happened: Four judges in Massachusetts, ruling in a same-sex marriage case, have decided that children don't need mothers and fathers, that marriage has nothing to do with getting children what they need. Marriage is a passing plaything of the latest fashionable ideology, a toy for adults with graduate degrees to tinker with, at their pleasure. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court judges, in Hillary Goodridge and others vs. Department of Public Health and another, displayed their own massive ignorance about marriage, its history and its public purposes. Four people claim that "the government creates marriage."...

Can we get honest about sex? I know it seems all we do is talk openly and honestly about sex. But while we blather on about it on "Oprah," there is one set of sexual truths we have all rather studiously repressed: gender. For 30 years, elite women have insisted we all talk and act as if we believed in androgyny (or the idea that there are no natural differences between men and women). Which, mind you, is a very different matter than equality (which is the idea that social institutions should do justice to both men and women). Until...

Forty years ago, a study called the Hammond Report analyzed the smoking habits of half a million people. Its conclusion: Smoking is dangerous to one's health. It was a warning that ended up on every pack of cigarettes sold. Ten years later, a researcher took another look at the Hammond Report and found something that had been overlooked -- something just as hazardous as a pack-a-day cigarette habit -- that is, divorce. As Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher write in their book, THE CASE FOR MARRIAGE, an enterprising Surgeon General might wish to slap a warning label on divorce decrees,...

"Losing [the debate about marriage] means losing marriage as a social institution, a shared public norm," writes columnist Maggie Gallagher. "The question is not whether this is a battle we can win, but whether it is a battle we can afford to lose." Gallagher is right. As we fight this battle to keep the definition of marriage as a union between a man and a woman, we have to be careful to articulate the value of marriage in ways that make sense to the general public. That's why this week has been designated "Marriage Protection Week," and it's why BreakPoint...

What are we, the adult society, telling boys and girls about what it means to be a man or a woman? Consider three vignettes, pulled almost at random: one a big news story, one a small local bit of news, the third a scholar's anecdote. Story one: Madonna (news - web sites), at a press conference for her new children's book, wearing a green and pink floral "English lady" dress, preaching the gospel of good motherhood. Superimpose that image against the portrait of Madonna, scarcely more than a week ago, in dominatrix wear, initiating two teen idols into a sloppy...

For marriage nuts, the big question lately has been: Are things getting a little bit better, or are they still getting worse and worse? For years, family diversity advocates preached the gospel of despair: In a nation dedicated to the progressive drama -- each generation better off than the last -- elite voices counseled, for reasons of their own, that this one problem was intractable, stubborn, impossible to reverse. Best (they urged us) just to ignore the fact that half or more of our children grow up in fatherless homes, and get on with the business of making the world...

So the U.S. Anglicans have decided to consecrate a bishop who believes gay sex can be sacramental and practices what he preaches. Traditional Anglicans are calling for a second Anglican province in America, begging to be allowed to place themselves under the leadership and authority of African archbishops. The archbishop of Canterbury has called an emergency meeting to prevent schism in the American church, which amounts to about 2.2. million people (or just 1 percent of American adults, and less than 3 percent of the 79 million Anglicans worldwide). One percent can be a very powerful number. The enormous press...

So the U.S. Anglicans have decided to consecrate a bishop who believes gay sex can be sacramental and practices what he preaches. Traditional Anglicans are calling for a second Anglican province in America, begging to be allowed to place themselves under the leadership and authority of African archbishops. The archbishop of Canterbury has called an emergency meeting to prevent schism in the American church, which amounts to about 2.2. million people (or just 1 percent of American adults, and less than 3 percent of the 79 million Anglicans worldwide). One percent can be a very powerful number. The enormous press...

Andrew Sullivan has a new idea. If gay-marriage opponents really cared about marriage, we would propose a constitutional amendment to ban divorce. Logically, of course, this is a complete non sequitur: Don't do what is possible to protect marriage, try to do what is impossible. Gee, that is a real recipe for progress. But I have found this argument has a weird appeal for many conservatives, especially those who are unaware of serious ongoing cross-ideological efforts to revive marriage as the normal, usual, and generally reliable way of raising children. (See for example, The Marriage Movement: A Statement of Principles)...

Contrary to the World-Herald’s assertion in its August 3, 2003 op-ed (“Much Ado about Little”), there is a need for a federal constitutional amendment limiting marriage to one man and one woman. A constitutional amendment, and not just a statute, is necessary as a pre-emptive defense of a fundamental societal value because of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Lawrence v. Texas. As a first principle the purpose of marriage must be ascertained. Maggie Gallagher, editor of MarriageDebate.com, has written that, “Marriage is the fundamental, cross-cultural institution for bridging the male-female divide so that children have loving, committed mothers and...

For those who adhere to traditional Christian (or Jewish) sexual teachings, the future may look bleak. America is disfigured by high rates of sexual disorders, including unnecessary divorce, unmarried childbearing, sexually transmitted diseases, a pornographic culture, and the progressive normalization of alternative sexual lifestyles, along with the sudden real threat that courts will impose gay marriage. A Vatican statement simply repeating a 2,000-year-old ethical tradition about marriage and sex has prompted a flurry of threats, overt and implicit, around what we used to call the Free World. Hate-speech codes intended to prevent violence and harassment are being directed at Catholics...

GAY MARRIAGE is no longer a theoretical issue. Canada has it. Massachusetts is expected to get it any day. The Goodridge decision there could set off a legal, political, and cultural battle in the courts of 50 states and in the U.S. Congress. Every politician, every judge, every citizen has to decide: Does same-sex marriage matter? If so, how and why? The timing could not be worse. Marriage is in crisis, as everyone knows: High rates of divorce and illegitimacy have eroded marriage norms and created millions of fatherless children, whole neighborhoods where lifelong marriage is no longer customary, driving...

BLACK BUTTE, Ore. -- It was a typical American picnic table conversation, only with a better view: Behind us the snow-clad peaks of the Sisters mountain range framed towering Ponderosa pines. Before us, though, the question of war created another sort of cleavage. "There were no weapons of mass destruction!" "Stable democracy in the Mideast? Forget about it." "But what happens if terrorists get nuclear weapons?" My close family members now span both coasts and two oceans, stretching from India to New York through Oregon and Washington and on to Japan. So the conversation was lively and the viewpoints diverse....