Constitutional Amendment

North Carolina state Sen. James Forrester appeared on Concerned Women for America radio Tuesday, along with his wife -- who just happens to be the Associate State Director of CWA’s North Carolina chapter -- to discuss the proposed state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. Republicans in the state legislature succeeded in getting a referendum on the marriage amendment on the ballot for May of next year.

Earlier this month, Forrester memorably told a town hall meeting that gays “are going to die at least 20 years earlier” than straight people. While proponents of the discriminatory marriage amendment claim that they are only focused on the issue of marriage, Forrester made it clear that there was a much larger goal behind the amendment: to “make it more difficult for the homosexual group to get their agenda recognized as being normal and getting it into schools and things like that.”

Listen:

Forrester: In some states even though the states have ratified having marriage between one man and one woman in the constitution, activist judges have overruled that, overruled the will of the people, that bothers me too, but if we don’t have it in the constitution there’s a whole lot better chance for them succeeding in what they’re trying to do. So I’m very encouraged that we’re gonna have the opportunity to vote on it, hopefully put it in our constitution, and make it more difficult for the homosexual group to get their agenda recognized as being normal and getting it into schools and things like that. So I’m very, very happy this morning.

The Family Research Council has released a series of radio ads in North Carolina, calling for the state legislature to place a constitutional amendment banning marriage equality for gays and lesbians on the ballot this November. North Carolina already prohibits same-sex marriage by statute, but the FRC says it’s not enough, warning, “Our laws defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman could be overturned.”

Organizers of the marriage amendment have called marriage equality an evil plot concocted by Satan and said an amendment is needed to “put a big letter of shame on the behavior.” According to findings from Public Policy Polling published today, while 61% of state voters oppose legalizing same-sex marriage, just 30% support the constitutional amendment.

Listen:

Marriage is at risk in our state. Our laws defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman could be overturned. Marriage between one man and one woman benefits families in society so we must preserve the marriage laws in our state Constitution.

On September 12, the North Carolina legislature will vote on putting a marriage amendment to a vote of the people. Powerful voices in our state capitol are threatening your right to vote on marriage. Take a stand for marriage. Call Rep. Chuck McGrady and ask him to vote yes to the marriage amendment. It's not about party, it's about marriage.

And on September 12, join us for a rally supporting marriage at 11 a.m. in front of the legislative building in Raleigh. Bring a sign and take a stand for marriage.

Casual viewers of “The Response,” including some political reporters who don’t pay a lot of attention to the Religious Right, may have watched Texas Governor Rick Perry’s prayer rally on Saturday and wondered what all the fuss was about.  Most of the time was taken up with prayer and praise music.  Few of the speakers seemed overtly political.  Nobody used the occasion to endorse Perry’s pending presidential bid.

But context is everything, and the context for this event was remarkable: a governor launching a presidential bid by teaming up with some of the nation’s most divisive extremists to hold a Christians-only prayer rally that suggested Americans are helpless to solve the country’s problems without divine intervention. Some media coverage is missing the boat: the issue wasn’t whether it was ok for a politician to pray, or the size of the audience, but the purposes of the event’s planners and their disturbing vision for America.

Organizers argued (unconvincingly) that “The Response” was about prayer, not politics. But groups like the American Family Association (AFA), which paid for the rally and its webcast, and organizations like the Family Research Council, whose president was among the speakers, are not designed to win souls but to change American law and culture through grassroots organizing and political power-building.  They have a corrosive effect on our political culture by promoting religious bigotry and anti-gay extremism, by claiming that the United States was meant to be a Christian nation, and by fostering resentment among conservative evangelicals with repeated false assertions that liberal elites are out to destroy religious liberty and silence conservative religious voices.

By calling for this rally, and partnering with the far right of the evangelical world, Perry aligned himself with all these troubling strategies.  When he drew criticism for the event and the extremism of its sponsors, Perry suggested his critics were intolerant of Christians.  Speakers returned to the theme, with one of them declaring that “there is an attack on the name of Jesus.” Such claims of anti-Christian persecution are a tried-and-true strategy of the Religious Right for rousing conservative Christians to political activism.  And for those who actually believe that Christianity is on the verge of being criminalized in America, Perry’s event defined him as a defiant and courageous defender of the faith. 

Earlier this summer presidential candidate Michele Bachmann raised eyebrows with her incoherent argument that she supports the Federal Marriage Amendment, which would ban same-sex marriage nationwide, while agreeing that states have a right to have their own laws on marriage under the 10th Amendment. Now, Texas governor and potential presidential candidate Rick Perry appears to be taking a similarly confusing and contradictory view on states’ rights.

When asked about New York’s new marriage equality law, Perry said it was “fine” with him because of the 10th Amendment’s protections for different state marriage laws. He was quickly praised by the gay conservative group GOProud but faced immediate criticism from social conservative activists and presidential candidate Rick Santorum.

Now, it appears that Perry is taking the Bachmann position by supporting both the sweeping and discriminatory Federal Marriage Amendment and states’ rights to have different marriage laws under the 10th Amendment. The Austin American Statesmen reports that Perry’s spokesman is now “confirming Perry's support of a federal constitutional amendment defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman”:

Kelly Shackelford, president and CEO of the conservative Liberty Institute, said he heard from concerned conservatives around the country who wanted to know what to make of Perry's remark.

"He probably could have used a much better term," Shackelford said. Shackelford, whose Plano-based group pushes for limited government and promotes Judeo-Christian values, said he has been telling callers that Perry has long favored an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would define marriage as being only between a man and a woman.

…

Mark Miner, a spokesman for Perry, said the governor's social conservatism remains steadfast.

Miner said people who know Perry understand that two things he feels strongly about are states' rights and the institution of traditional marriage.

"Nothing has changed with the governor's philosophy here," he said. Besides confirming Perry's support of a federal constitutional amendment defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman, Miner pointed to the governor's state record. Perry supported the Texas Defense of Marriage Act and a state constitutional amendment defining traditional marriage, Miner noted.

After we attended and posted video of a speech by Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-MO) to a group of young conservatives, in which she compared marriage equality to pedophilia, incest, and allowing three year old children drive cars, Hartzler faced criticism and tried to explain that her comments were “misconstrued.” Then, on Wednesday, a young Missouri activist confronted Hartzler at a public forum, asking her about her anti-gay comments and leadership role in the campaign to pass a state constitutional amendment banning marriage equality. Hartzler repeated her line that her Eagle Forum Collegians speech was misconstrued and said that the activist, who is openly gay, “shouldn’t feel bad” about the constitutional amendment because gays were already banned from marrying by statute. Now, the discriminatory ban is just enshrined in the Missouri Constitution.

Watch Hartzler’s original comments:

H/T Danny Ferguson, Liberaland

The American Family Association is taking to defend the prayer rally, The Response, that they are hosting with Texas Governor Rick Perry. The AFA’s OneNewsNow today interviewed Tom Schlueter of the Texas Apostolic Prayer Network to defend the rally, whose spokesman said is meant to bring people of different faiths “to seek out the living Christ” and worship Jesus.

The Texas Apostolic Prayer Network is just one of many ‘New Apostolic’ organizations to work with Gov. Perry and the AFA on The Response, and the group calls on people to file “a decree of divorce from Baal,” renounce Free Masonry, and pray for the conversion of Muslims who are “rooted Deeply into Satan’s schemes.” And the group’s advisers include leading ‘prophets’ in the New Apostolic movement like Cindy Jacobs and Doug Stringer, who are endorsers of The Response, and Chuck Pierce.

Schlueter tells the AFA’s OneNewsNow:

Dr. Tom Schlueter of the Texas Apostolic Prayer Network says many citizens have been praying for a political leader to be bold enough to call the nation to its knees.

According to Schlueter, the event is decidedly apolitical…but Perry is also the answer of prayers that God will raise up a leader to bring the country to prayer:

"One of the things that we have been asking the Lord for many, many years has been a time when one of our political leaders will rise up and make this kind of a call to the state or to the nation," he shares.

As Rachel Tabachnick of Talk2Action notes, Schlueter once tied Hurricane Rita to the campaign to pass a constitutional amendment in Texas banning gay and lesbian couples from marrying:

Two weeks before Hurricane Rita hit Texas, the USSPN began a God-ordained national effort to bring the governmental rule of the King of Glory to our nation along the I-35 corridor. This effort began in the largest inland port in our nation, Laredo, Texas. Through Apostles Jay Swallow and Doug Stringer and Prophet Chuck Pierce, God positioned the Church of the region (Laredo, Texas, and Nuevo Laredo, Mexico) in unity and governmentally set the Church in order, commissioning the Church to develop and move with Kingdom authority. The United States of America will either be held together or divided by what occurs during the next three years along the I-35 corridor. What began with the Church of Laredo-Nuevo Laredo must continue all the way to the Canadian border. The Lord Jesus Christ wants the Church along the I-35 corridor to move in obedience to Him with unity, order, and authority.

That you are praying for Texas the week before the citizens of our state vote for or against God's definition of marriage is NO coincidence. The people of Texas and especially the Church of Texas have been summoned to decide between two "opinions". Will the Church "hesitate" between these two or will the Church follow God? The opposition is gathering their forces, meeting regularly, and planning strategically. We need the Lord to bring down fire from heaven to consume the plans of the enemy and to bring a downpour of rain to bless the efforts of those who are obediently and diligently trying to inspire and inform the Church of Texas about the upcoming vote concerning the marriage amendment.

Pamela Geller’s rabid anti-Muslim activism helped her win friends in the conservative movement and the Republican Party, and she even had her own panel at CPAC earlier this year. But Geller has now been focusing her efforts on a different issue: Birtherism. Geller accused President Obama of doctoring his birth certificate and took to the Birther website WorldNetDaily to claim that Obama is ineligible to be president because his parents had a sham marriage. Virginia School of Law professor G. Edward White plainly points out that the term “natural born citizen” is “understood to mean a person born in the United States or born abroad to parents who are both American citizen” (emphasis mine) and had nothing to do with the children of purported “sham marriages.” But for Geller, who now professes to be an expert on Obama’s parents’ romantic life, even if Obama was born in the United States he can’t be considered a “natural born citizen” because the Founders wouldn’t have wanted “an illegitimate child of a foreign bigamist” to be President:

The release of Barack Hussein Obama I's immigration file is stunning in what it reveals and the questions it poses. BHO I's visa expired Aug. 8, 1961 (Barack Junior was born Aug. 4, 1961) – is that why he married Obama's mother? Stanley Ann Dunham was a white girl in a family way with a mixed-race child, desperate for legitimacy in a culture that condemned such behavior as abject immorality, and Barack Obama Sr. was a con man from Kenya desperate to stay in the USA. Was the marriage merely a business arrangement (she was 17 when she got pregnant)? Is that why it was so important to place the ads in the Hawaiian papers announcing the birth of the future president – because his father was about to be deported?

Stanley Ann Dunham could not have been so savvy as to know that BHO I was a Muslim polygamist. Yet clearly, Barack Hussein Obama Sr., was never divorced from his first wife in Kenya. The Immigration and Naturalization Service suspected that the elder Obama's marriage to Dunham was a sham, arranged strictly to secure immigration status for him. Despite the fact that BHO I had married Dunham, the government wasn't buying it: An INS official wrote in 1961 that the agency should "make sure an investigation is conducted as to the bona-fide of the marriage."

…

It is interesting to note that BHO I claims in the documents to have divorced first wife, Kezia, "verbally." According to the Shariah, a man can divorce his wife by repeating it three times. Further, when BHO I returned to Kenya, he apparently lived with his first Kenyan wife and his American third wife, suggesting that the "divorce" he ostensibly secured to marry Dunham was a transitory ruse.

That would make the president illegitimate. In 1787, illegitimate children had different rights. There is no way the founders of this great nation intended for an illegitimate child of a foreign bigamist to attain the highest, most powerful position in the new land.

Similarly, WND editor Joseph Farah maintains that if Obama is eligible to serve as president, then so are “anchor babies,” or the US-born children of illegal immigrants. Unfortunately for Farah, so-called “anchor babies” are in fact American citizens:

We have a pretender to the throne sitting in the highest office of the land – the most powerful elected position in the world.

America has, without a vote, without a constitutional amendment, without even a court decision, dumbed down the eligibility requirement for the presidency. And that is unacceptable. …

Americans do not want illegal aliens to serve as presidents. That's not what the founders envisioned at all. But conceding to Obama's eligibility will open the door to American presidents who were "anchor babies" – children born of illegal aliens born on U.S. soil.

That's not what the Constitution means. That's not what the founders intended. And it's not what Americans want today.

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• Igor Volsky @ Wonk Room: Bachmann: God Told Me To Introduce Constitutional Amendment Prohibiting Same-Sex Marriage In MN.
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Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-MO) began her career as an anti-gay firebrand and spokesperson for the successful campaign to pass a constitutional amendment banning marriage equality in Missouri. After she was elected to the House in 2010, she became a favorite of conservative groups for her virulent attacks on the Obama Administration over its stance on the Defense of Marriage Act. Now, Hartzler told constituents that she supports the reinstatement of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, but if the policy’s repeal is successfully implemented, the military should house openly gay soldiers in separate barracks just as quarters are divided for men and women. The Daily Star-Journal reports:

At the ABC Building on Wednesday, Hartzler met with active, reserve and retired military members and spouses. A military retiree, Tom Fitzpatrick, Warrensburg, asked Hartzler about the new military policy on gays.

"Is there a growing sentiment to reinstate don't ask, don't tell?" Fitzpatrick asked.

After a 10-month Pentagon study found more than two-thirds of service members do not object to serving alongside openly gay soldiers, President Obama signed a defense bill that included ending the practice of expelling gay service members.

Hartzler - whose 4th Congressional District includes Whiteman Air Force Base and the Army's Fort Leonard Wood - told Fitzpatrick she and other Republicans oppose the change.

"I can tell you people on the committee, who are my side of the aisle, think it's very ill-advised and do not support that," Hartzler said, and are "pushing back."

Hartzler said that during a hearing with military brass she asked why, because separate housing exists for male and female troops, gays are not housed separately, too. She said a general, she did not know which, responded first with a gurgling-type noise before answering, ""We're recruiting professionals."'

Hartzler's description led some in the crowd to laugh.

"So we have some work to do there," she said. "We're going to keep advancing the cause."