From Chief Justice Roberts concerning the overturn of DOMA:
“The Court does not have before it, and the logic of its opinion does not decide, the distinct question whether the States . . . may continue to utilize the traditional definition of marriage.”
Better words could not describe it.
UPDATE: Proposition 8 is overturned based on standing. So here is the legal picture:
Josh Weed is a clinic therapist, happily married to Lolly (his lovely wife) with whom he has three adorable daughters, and they are active members of the Latter-Day Saints church.
Josh is also gay, and now he’s out to the world.
WTF? I hear you say. (I heard myself say it.)
Josh and Lolly write at length about their marriage, their feelings, and how they make their situation work.
And the post brought to tears to my eyes.
The family and I had a discussion about Josh and his marriage yesterday, and I tried to get through to the Horsemen (or three of them, anyway) that as long as a couple love each other, and can make a healthy and safe home-life for themselves and their children, Josh’s homosexuality doesn’t matter a damn.
While the rest of Josh’s blog consists of funny stories about his family and life, this latest post is as serious as a heart attack and as thought provoking as anything I’ve read lately.
Read the Weeds’ post — it’s well worth your time.
(Thanks, yet again, to The Spouse for this tip.)
Focus on the Family, it would seem, has an “institute of higher learning”, called the Focus Leadership Institute. The FLI’s mission statement?
Focus Leadership Institute™, commissioned by Focus on the Family®, exists to provide a unique Christian educational community that sharpens passionate and persuasive leaders who are committed to Jesus Christ, equipping them to promote healthy families, vibrant churches and a civil society.
You must be 26 or younger, and you must be single (not sure why).
Part of the application is a core statement for FLI; you must agree and sign this statement in order to apply. Part of this core statement is a section on divorce and remarriage. Here are the FLI’s “acceptable” reasons for divorce:
It would appear that you can’t get a divorce if your spouse puts you into the hospital with a broken jaw or fractured skull. Nor does it count if the couple cannot stand each other, or if one provides no emotional or financial support for the marriage.
However, if neither of you were “saved” prior to divorce, that’s cool. And if your spouse isn’t “saved” and takes off, that’s okey-dokey as well.
There are also scripture-based rants about homosexuality and how it will cause the End Times. Or raise the Beast. Or something like that.
Like these (click to enbiggen):
There has been a fair amount of loose talk lately about “traditional marriage”.
I’m curious as to which “tradition” we’re talking about:
These are in addition to even earlier periods of history, where
(Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror has quite a bit of interesting material on the subject.)
For those of you unaware of it, the direct cause for the enactment of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was the case of Baehr v. Miike. The Hawaii Supreme Court ruled that refusal to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples violated the discrimination clauses of the Hawaii state constitution. In an effort to stop this supposed violation of “traditional” marriage, the Clinton administration promoted and signed DOMA.
That got me to thinking about “traditional” states’ rights. The Tea Party and other assorted wackaloons make a lot of noise about how the federal government is getting into the personal business of citizens; they also make a lot of noise about preserving DOMA (even though section 3 of DOMA has been found unconstitutional).
So I’m confused. How can you claim that
(Thanks, Jocelyn, for the pic.)
Yep, it’s obviously Ms. Shriver’s fault:
What a crappy thing to even think, and how typical of Fox News–blame the woman for “erasing her wedding vows”, when it was the man who erased them first.
I hope Shriver cleans that man’s financial clock.
Thanks so much to The Spouse®, David Badash, and the New York Times (sorry, paywall=no link) for this eye-opening graphic:
There are 25 states that will allow first cousins to marry (along with the consequent genetic and social risks), but won’t allow same-sex couples to marry.
And before the right-wing yanknuts out there start bleeting about how gays are “redefining marriage”, this country has done that so that blacks could marry non-blacks, and blacks could marry blacks. As Keith Olbermann so beautifully expressed:
It seems that you can’t get married at all in Israel unless you toe the line on the rules set by the state Rabbinate:
So not only can a gay couple not get married, you can’t even get a secular marriage.
This is one of my favorite movie scenes of all time, and it has so much relevance today. Substitute “orientation” for “pigmentation”, and you can see how anti-gay-marriage arguments look hopelessly flawed and hateful.
“I think now, no matter what kind of case some bastard could make against your getting married, there would be only one thing worse. And that would be if, knowing what you two are, and knowing what you two have, and knowing what you two feel, you didn’t get married.”
And for those who know film history, you realize that Katherine Hepburn’s tears are quite real. Tracy died 17 days after his scenes were filmed, and his mentioning how much his character Matt loved Hepburn’s Christina was a hard pull on the heartstrings for those who knew of their history.
The movie Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner will be on at 21:00 EST on 13 December on Turner Classic Movies. (I’m not a TCM employee–just a highly satisfied customer.) (Per the Spouse®, it’s also available in streaming mode on Netflix, and no, no one here is a Netflix employee.) It’s a wonderful film–#99 on AFI’s top 100 of all time– and Tracy’s work in it is superb.
From an interesting piece by Jeff Goode about marriage:
[W]hich traditional definition of marriage do we want our Constitution to protect?
- The one from Book of Genesis when family values meant multiple wives and concubines?
- Or the marriages of the Middle Ages when women were traded like cattle and weddings were too bawdy for church?
- Since this is America, should we preserve marriage as it existed in 1776 when arranged marriages were still commonplace?
- Or the traditions of 1850 when California became a state and marriage was customarily between one man and one woman-or-girl of age 11 and up?
- Or are we really seeking to protect a more modern vision of traditional marriage, say from the 1950s when it was illegal for whites to wed blacks or hispanics?
- Or the traditional marriage of the late 1960s when couples were routinely excommunicated for marrying outside their faith?
No, the truth of the matter is, that we’re trying to preserve traditional marriage the way it “was and always has been” during a very narrow period in the late 70s / early 80s.
I can remember when blacks and white couldn’t marry each other. I remember when Catholics got excommunicated for marrying outside their own faith. I barely don’t remember when female divorcees rarely got married again because no one wanted them. (Widows were different for some reason.)
What the real problem with gay marriage is that people fear change–any change–that might challenge what they hold as truths.
The cure for that? Education.
Unfortunately, our judicial branch has been placed in the position of having to force that education on those who don’t want it. It was exactly the same thing when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down existing miscegenation laws when the Loving v. Virginia decision was handed down in 1967.
As of tomorrow, The Fiancé© will no longer be.
She will morph into The Spouse®.
Yes, we are getting married tomorrow in a civil ceremony. No clergy, no “god” stuff, no religious trappings or adornments. The judge will have us sign the marriage license, allow the witnesses to witness and sign, and we will find a courtroom somewhere in the building to do the ceremony.
We will have a number of close friends with us, including Realty Lady (who is going to sing for us), Chocolate Lady (one of our favorite folk for obvious reasons!), some family from Detroit, and of course the Four Horsemen as well.
Why get married? Legal reasons, of course, but we do love each other so much, and we want to spend the rest of our lives together, and I want to be able to easily provide for her and the Horsemen in the unlikely event that space aliens from Megaraxosus choose the Twin Cities as their prelude to the annihilation of the human race.
(Seriously, we both feel a little guilty that we (a heterosexual couple) can marry when so many of our gay friends cannot. The state of Minnesota does not allow same-sex couples to marry, and that sucks granite boulders through glass pippettes.) However, The Spouse® and I both work toward allowing all consenting adults to get married.)
We will have a blow-out reception later this summer when we can get a few hundred of our best friends together more easily.
One of the commentariat in Professor Myers’s blog Pharyngula mentioned a website called Wallbuilders. Woe be onto that person, for they have drawn that pile of drivel to my attention–and now of course I can’t leave it alone.
From the site:
“Presenting America’s forgotten history and heroes with an emphasis on our moral, religious, and constitutional heritage”
Every time I see the terms “moral” and “religious” in juxtaposition, I break out in hives.
One story on the site is entitled “Understanding Illegitimacy”, which is of couse is a misnomer. Bastardy is an antiquated concept that was fostered by the religious powers-that-be to try to keep the faithful (married) “legitimate” and the unfaithful (unmarried) not.
The link takes you to a National Review article by Robert Rector (a golden boy of the Heritage Foundation) that goes on at some length about how marriage and education are the dividing lines delineating a “two-caste system in America”. Among other oddities is
“The disappearance of marriage in low-income communities is the predominant cause of child poverty in the U.S. today. If poor single mothers were married to the fathers of their children, two-thirds of them would not be poor.”
Now if that statement was meant to be an Aristotelian syllogism, it’s fallacious.
One poor human + one poor human + one or more poor children != a not-poor family
Not even in New Math.
Also from Rector:
Most liberal academics regard marriage as an outdated, socially backward institution; they have shed no tears over its demise.
All very interesting, but the attitudes of liberal academics have little or no bearing on what goes on in culture. People aren’t getting married because the people involved choose not to (for better or worse).
Marriage will be around as long as humans are social, but what most conservatives ignore is the fact that “marriage” and “religion” in western culture became synonymous only with the advent of Christianity. Christianity loves the “we’re saved and you’re damned” game, and marriage is just one more of them.
Toward a Moral Life 