marriage equality;anti-gay

Writing for the National Review, columnist George Weigel of the far-right Ethics and Public Policy Center lashes out at marriage equality supporters for comparing their struggle for equal rights to the civil rights movement. According to Weigel, legalizing marriage between same-sex couples is more like imposing racial segregation than ending it: “Legally enforced segregation involved the same kind of coercive state power that the proponents of gay marriage now wish to deploy on behalf of their cause.” He explains that LGBT rights require a “totalitarian impulse” to “remanufacture reality,” claiming that the gay rights movement “is the heir of Bull Connor,” referring to the Birmingham sheriff who violently crushed civil rights demonstrations. Weigel writes:

That usurpation is at the heart of the gay lobby’s emotional, cultural, and political success — the moral mantle of those Freedom Riders whose golden anniversary we mark this year has, so to speak, been successfully claimed by the Stonewall Democratic Club and its epigones. And because the classic civil-rights movement and its righteous demand for equality before the law remains one of the few agreed-upon moral touchstones in 21st-century American culture (another being the Holocaust as an icon of evil), to seize that mantle and wear it is to have won a large part of the battle — as one sees when trying to discuss these questions with otherwise sensible young people.

But the analogy simply doesn’t work. Legally enforced segregation involved the same kind of coercive state power that the proponents of gay marriage now wish to deploy on behalf of their cause. Something natural and obvious — “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” — was being denied by the state in its efforts to maintain segregated public facilities and to deny full citizenship rights to African Americans. Once the American people came to see that these arrangements, however hallowed by custom (and prejudice), were, in fact, unnatural and not obvious, the law was changed.

What the gay lobby proposes in the matter of marriage is precisely the opposite of this. Marriage, as both religious and secular thinkers have acknowledged for millennia, is a social institution that is older than the state and that precedes the state. The task of a just state is to recognize and support this older, prior social institution; it is not to attempt its redefinition. To do the latter involves indulging the totalitarian temptation that lurks within all modern states: the temptation to remanufacture reality. The American civil-rights movement was a call to recognize moral reality; the call for gay marriage is a call to reinvent reality to fit an agenda of personal willfulness. The gay-marriage movement is thus not the heir of the civil-rights movement; it is the heir of Bull Connor and others who tried to impose their false idea of moral reality on others by coercive state power.

Following a story on New York passing marriage equality, Pat Robertson on The 700 Club warned that God will destroy America just like God destroyed Sodom, saying that “there’s never been a civilization ever in history that has embraced homosexuality and turned away from traditional fidelity, traditional marriage, traditional child-rearing, and has survived.” Robertson previously feared that America was turning into Sodom, and today he claims that “we’re heading that way as a nation” because the marriage equality law in New York will further instigate God’s fatal judgment.

Watch:

I think we need to remember the term sodomy came from a town known as Sodom and Sodom was destroyed by God Almighty and the thing that they practiced was homosexual activity and even they tried to rape angels who came down there, so that’s the kind of people they were. But beyond that, Jesus when He spoke of Sodom He didn’t say anything about the homosexuality he talked about just the fact that business was as usual until God decided to destroy it. And He sent an angel down there and He said to Lot and his family, ‘get out now because I’m gonna destroy this whole area.’ That’s where sodomy came from, we use the term sodomy and it means Sodom. What’s it like? We’re heading that way as a nation. In history there’s never been a civilization ever in history that has embraced homosexuality and turned away from traditional fidelity, traditional marriage, traditional child-rearing, and has survived. There isn’t one single civilization that has survived that openly embraced homosexuality. So you say, “what’s going to happen to America?” Well if history is any guide, the same thing’s going to happen to us.

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It’s not a pretty world we live in right now, and we need all of God’s help we can get. And I don’t think we are not exactly setting ourselves up for His favor.

Lauding former New York Giant David Tyree’s strong criticism of a pending New York marriage equality bill, Janie Cheaney of the ultraconservative WORLD Magazine dubbed supporters of the legislation “forces of anarchy.” According to Cheaney, passing a bill allowing gay couples to marry will only help a “minuscule number of people” and will lead to the “undefining of the family.” Cheaney writes:

The minuscule number of people who stand to directly benefit from such legislation suggests further that it’s not about marriage at all—it’s about breaking down all barriers to consenting adults living exactly how they please, with dissenting voices confined to the margins.

Last week, former New York Giants wide receiver David Tyree stated his opposition to Cuomo’s bill in a video interview with the National Organization for Marriage. Tyree, best known for his legendary catch against the New England Patriots during Super Bowl XLII, is now catching heck. A Yahoo Sports headline read, “Super Bowl hero’s shocking same-sex marriage comments.” Shocking? Tyree said, “The moment we have [same sex marriage], if you trace back even to other cultures, other countries, that will be the moment where our society . . . loses its grip with what’s right. Marriage is one of those things that is the backbone of society.” He predicted anarchy otherwise, a fighting word if internet reaction to his interview is to be taken seriously.

And it should. We’re in a bare-knuckle fight with forces of anarchy, whether they know it or not. They think they’re about redefining the family, but it actually goes a step further: This is about undefining the family. The family becomes whatever they say it is, on any given day or legislative session. Kudos to the Republicans of the New York Senate (and one lone Democrat), and kudos to David Tyree for resisting the push.

Congresswoman Vicky Hartzler (R-MO) built her political career on opposing gay rights: she spearheaded the Missouri campaign to enshrine discrimination in the state constitution and since her election to Congress last November has fought to preserve the Defense of Marriage Act and block the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. Yesterday, Hartzler addressed Eagle Forum Collegians 2011 Summit in Washington on why young people should oppose marriage equality.

Joined by Eagle Forum head Phyllis Schlafly, Hartzler compared gay marriage to polygamy and incest, and later argued that we shouldn’t give equal marriage rights to gay couples just as “it’s not a right of a three-year old to drive a car.”

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Opposition to marriage equality was a major theme at the conference, due in part to fears that young people disproportionately favor legalizing gay marriage. Participants even received a pamphlet “77 Non-Religious Reasons to Support Man/Woman Marriage” from Jennifer Roback Morse of The Ruth Institute, a project of the National Organization for Marriage. The pamphlet harshly criticized gay families as “unjust and cruel to the child” and argues that “we will not be able to maintain a free society” if gay marriage is legalized.