Free Republic

How the Founding Fathers would have handled gay marriage.Last November the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled that excluding gay couples from civil marriage violated the state constitution. The court gave the legislature six months—until May—to do something about it. Some legislators mounted efforts to amend the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage, but as of this writing they have failed (and even if passed, a ban would not take effect until at least 2006). With unexpected urgency the country faces the possibility that marriage licenses might soon be issued to homosexual couples. To hear the opposing sides talk, a...

Few issues have produced as much confused thinking as the "gay marriage" issue. There is, for example, the argument that the government has no business getting involved with marriage in the first place. That is a personal relation, the argument goes. Love affairs are personal relations. Marriage is a legal relation. To say that government should not get involved in legal relations is to say that government has no business governing. Homosexuals were on their strongest ground when they said that what happens between "consenting adults" in private is none of the government's business. But now gay activists are taking...

In taking up the cause of "the family" in the debate over homosexual marriage, conservative commentators appear to be making the same rhetorical mistake they made in 1992 when Dan Quayle touched off a firestorm of controversy with his famous "Murphy Brown" speech. Conservatives then spoke about the widespread problem of illegitimacy as an issue of "family values." Nothing much was ever decided in that debate and nothing, including public opinion, really changed. The problem now, as it was then, is not that anything these commentators are saying is wrong. As far as they go, their arguments are correct. The...

<p>TOLEDO, Ohio -- Presidential candidate John F. Kerry said yesterday that he supports amending the Massachusetts Constitution to ban gay marriage and provide for civil unions for gay couples.</p> <p>In his most explicit remarks on the subject yet, Kerry told the Globe that he would support a proposed amendment to the state Constitution that would prohibit gay marrriage so long as, while outlawing gay marriage, it also ensured that same-sex couples have access to all legal rights that married couples receive.</p>

Lawsuit threatened after gay couple denied marriage license in Broward By Paula McMahon Staff Writer Posted February 24 2004 Gay activists and attorneys in Florida were quietly and carefully monitoring how the legal campaign for same-sex marriage was going in liberal states like Massachusetts and California. Some said they were waiting to see how the laws would be interpreted. Others said they wanted a legal dream team to find the most sympathetic examples of same-sex partners who wanted to marry and were willing to fight the battle.

One of the conditions of living in the People’s Republic of San Francisco is a constant feeling of isolation from the rest of the state and country. Indeed, San Franciscans often joke about seceding from the union, when for all intents and purposes, they already have. For years, the city’s government has refused to comply with a variety of federal and state laws, including immigration, national security, and drug enforcement. So when San Francisco’s new mayor Gavin Newsom decreed this past week that gay marriage would now be legal, it shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise. Newsom’s announcement...