By hook, crook, the DOJ, FBI, policies, Executive Orders, courts, and laws, leftist public “servants”—both elected and unelected—have long had conservatives in the sights of their weapons of war. And they’ve had powerful allies in this battle in the legacy news media, government schools, and, more recently, social media and corporate America, including virtually all of the entertainment and publishing industries. There’s no need for an exhaustive list of the ways leftists hunt conservatives. Every conservative with eyes and an amygdala perceives the threat.

The most recent of the daily—almost hourly—predations comes to us through Congress. First, the U.S. House of Representatives under the almighty rule of potentate Pelosi, passed the Dis-Respect for Marriage Act, which, if signed into law, would reverse the bipartisan Defense of Marriage Act signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1996.

The U.S. House version of the Dis-Respect for Marriage Act redefines marriage, eliminating both the criterion regarding sexual differentiation and the criterion regarding number of partners. The House version no longer defines marriage as the union of two people of opposite sexes or as the union of two people.

Worse yet, it doesn’t provide any legal protections for people of faith. Of course, given that the free exercise of religion is guaranteed by the First Amendment, laws shouldn’t need the redundancy of religious protection language, but we now know leftists disrespect the U.S. Constitution as well.

Further, the Dis-Respect for Marriage Act requires the federal government and states to recognize any and all marriages performed in other states.

Why are leftists pursuing this? The reason is that in the Roe reversal, Justice Clarence Thomas suggested Obergefell should also be revisited because it too shares in common with Roe a lack of constitutional grounding. Now leftists, accustomed to exploiting the Court for their pet moral projects, are quaking in their kinky boots, fearing that marriage—like abortion—will be returned to the people of each state.

Anticipating the day when, Lord willing, the U.S. Supreme Court Obergefell decision that unconstitutionally imposed same-sex pseudogamy on the entire nation is reversed, Leftists seek to preemptively rob citizens in every state of their right to define marriage.

So if, in a post-Obergefell America, the moral wastelands of Illinois or California were to recognize in law the unions of two women, or three men, or five people of assorted sexes as “marriages,” leftists want to force all states to recognize homoerotic and poly unions as marriages, including states that choose to define marriage as it has been defined until the latter half of the latter half of the 20^th Century as the union of two people of opposite sexes.

The Dis-Respect for Marriage Act was voted on and passed the U.S. House in July 2022 with the help of 47 treasonous Republicans one day after being introduced.

Then the bill moved to the U.S. Senate where “cloture” (i.e., ending debate) was invoked and passed with the help of a dirty dozen treasonous Republicans. Now moves to the Senate for a final vote, likely before the end of the year.

In the days following the cloture vote, opposition to the bill has intensified because of fears over the bill’s threats to religious liberty. U.S. Senators Tammy Baldwin (a lesbian) and Susan Collins (a RINO) added a feeble amendment in an attempt to silence objectors, but the Alliance Defending Freedom has warned of the weaknesses of their proposed changes:

[R]ather than adding any new concrete protections for religious individuals and organizations threatened by the Respect for Marriage Act, the new section simply states that those Americans whose beliefs are infringed can invoke already existing legal protections, like the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). As such, this new provision does not fix the bill’s negative impact on religious exercise and freedom of conscience. Those targeted under the bill will be forced to spend years in litigation and thousands of dollars in attorneys’ fees to protect their rights. …

[T]he bill can be used to punish social-service organizations like adoption or foster placement agencies that serve their communities in accordance with their religious belief that marriage is the union of one man and one woman. The proposed amendment does nothing to help such organizations. …

The amendment adds a new section that attempts to address concerns about the tax-exempt status of nonprofits that live out their beliefs about marriage.

Once again, the amendment fails to substantively remedy this problem. When the IRS determines whether an organization is “charitable” under the Internal Revenue Code, it asks whether the entity’s conduct is “contrary to public policy” or violates a “national policy.”

If the Respect for Marriage Act were enacted, the IRS could rely upon the bill to conclude that certain nonprofits are not “charitable.” The amendment’s new provision does nothing to prevent this.

U.S. Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) has proposed a beefier amendment, the Lee Amendment, and sent a letter signed by twenty other U.S. Senators to the dozen quislings asking them not to end debate on the bill unless and until the Lee Amendment is added. Lee et al. wrote,

As you are aware, we are one step closer to passing into law the Respect for Marriage Act. In the Obergefell oral arguments, there was a now infamous exchange between Justice Alito and then–Solicitor General Donald Verrilli. In response to Justice Alito asking whether, should states be required to recognize same-sex marriages, religious universities opposed to same-sex marriage would lose their tax-exempt status, General Verrilli replied, “. . . it’s certainly going to be an issue. I don’t deny that. I don’t deny that, Justice Alito, –it is going to be an issue.”

And it is an issue. Obergefell did not make a private right of action for aggrieved individuals to sue those who oppose same-sex marriage. It did not create a mandate for the Department of Justice to sue where it perceived an institution opposed same-sex marriage, but the Respect for Marriage Act will. What we can expect should this bill become law is more litigation against those institutions and individuals trying to live according to their sincerely held religious beliefs and moral convictions.

Should Congress decide to codify Obergefell and protect same-sex marriages, we must do so in a way that also resolves the question posed by Justice Alito. Instead of subjecting churches, religious non-profits, and persons of conscience to undue scrutiny or punishment by the federal government because of their views on marriage, we should make explicitly clear that this legislation does not constitute a national policy endorsing a particular view of marriage that threatens the tax-exempt status of faith-based non-profits. As we move forward, let us be sure to keep churches, religious charities, and religious universities out of litigation in the first instance. No American should face legal harassment or retaliation from the federal government for holding sincerely held religious beliefs or moral convictions.

My amendment would ensure that federal bureaucrats do not take discriminatory actions against individuals, organizations, nonprofits, and other entities based on their sincerely held religious beliefs or moral convictions about marriage by prohibiting the denial or revocation of tax-exempt status, licenses, contracts, benefits, etc. It would affirm that individuals still have the right to act according to their faith and deepest convictions even outside of their church or home. The undersigned ask that you oppose cloture on the Respect for Marriage Act unless the Lee amendment is added to the bill. The free exercise of religion is absolutely essential to the health of our Republic. We must have the courage to protect it.

Conservative Americans should thank Lee and the twenty U.S. Senators who signed the letter. Not so much, the dirty dozen who helped sic the hellhounds on conservatives.

Next week, the U.S. Senate will resume consideration of H.R. 8404 and vote on amendments as well as one final cloture vote, which will need 10 Republicans to pass, to end debate. Votes could occur Monday, Nov. 28.

Take ACTION: Please take a moment to urge U.S. Senators Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth not to end debate on the H.R. 8404 unless and until the Lee Amendment is added. Without the Lee Amendment, the Dis-Respect for Marriage Act will encourage both government and individual lawsuits against people of faith. Even if we win protracted litigation, the process is the punishment.

U.S. Senator Dick Durbin
https://www.durbin.senate.gov/contact/email
Phone: (202) 224-2152

U.S. Senator Tammy Duckworth
https://www.duckworth.senate.gov/connect/email-tammy
Phone: (202) 224-2854

Please send a message and then follow up with a phone call early next week.

Since the unconstitutional Roe v. Wade was overturned in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, leftists have been roiling in rage at the thought that states are now free to enact the will of their voters with regard to killing humans in the womb. In his concurrence, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas argued that three other Supreme Court cases should be revisited in that they too lacked constitutional grounding—an argument made also by the esteemed Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork.

One of the decisions Thomas believes should be revisited is the Obergefell decision that imposed same-sex “marriage” on the entire country, robbing states—that is, the people—of their right to decide if intrinsically non-marital relationships should be legally recognized as marriages.

And so, leftists, livid at the prospect of states one day being free to enact marriage laws in accordance with the will of their voters, are trying to take that right away preemptively through federal legislation.

On July 19, 2022 the U.S. House of Representatives passed the absurdly named “Respect for Marriage Act” (H.R. 8404)—a bill that doesn’t merely disrespect marriage; it is hostile to marriage. The bill, which would overturn the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), next goes to the U.S. Senate.

On September 15, seven weeks before the mid-term elections, the Senate announced plans to delay a vote on the controversial bill until after the elections. According to CBS news, “GOP negotiators” who are “involved in the talks over a bipartisan plan” believe this will help increase Republican support.

Who are these GOP Senators? They are RINO Susan Collins, Rob Portman who began supporting all things homosexual after his son announced his sexual attraction to men, and Thom Tillis, who the day after the House passed H.R. 8404 announced he would “probably” support it when it comes to the Senate for a vote. I think this “bipartisan collaboration” is bipartisan in name only.

DOMA, which was passed and signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996, explicitly defines marriage:

In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, or of any
ruling, regulation, or interpretation of the various administrative
bureaus and agencies of the United States, the word ‘marriage’ means
only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife,
and the word ‘spouse’ refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is
a husband or a wife. (emphasis added) 

Forty-seven Republicans voted for the dis-Respect for Marriage Act, including Adam Kinzinger, Rodney Davis, Liz Cheney, Tom Emmer (chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee), Darrell Issa, Elise Stefanik (U.S. House Republican Conference chair), Lee Zeldin (who was recently defeated in the New York race for U.S. Senate), and Florida Representatives Michael Waltz and Brian Mast.

Any Republican who doesn’t understand the essential role of the nuclear family—that is, mother, father, and children—to the health and future of any society doesn’t deserve to serve in government. The same applies to any Republican who votes for a bill that robs states of the right to pass laws regulating marriage.

DOMA, which all U.S. House Democrats and 47 “Republicans” oppose, defines marriage in federal law “as between a man and a woman and spouse as a person of the opposite sex.” In contrast, the dis-Respect for Marriage Act recognizes in federal law “any marriage that is valid under state law.”

Again, while DOMA has a provision requiring states to recognize marriages from other states, that provision specifically limits the type of marriages that must be recognized to those composed of two people. No such limit is placed on the federal government in the dis-Respect for Marriage Act.

This means that once Utah, California, Massachusetts, Illinois, or any other nutty state recognizes plural/poly unions as marriages, the federal government will be forced to recognize plural/poly unions as marriages. And once the federal government recognizes plural/poly unions as legal marriages, all states will be forced to recognize those marriages as well.

While some naïve or gullible voters view the absence of language defining marriage as the union of two people in the dis-Respect for Marriage Act as an oversight, others see it correctly as intentional—an interim step to the compulsory legal recognition of plural/poly unions from sea to darkening sea.

Take ACTION: H.R. 8404 may be taken up in the U.S. Senate soon. Please take a moment to urge our two U.S. Senators to vote to protect the Defense of Marriage Act by voting NO to H.R. 8404. Remind them, “The government has no interest in inherently non-reproductive types of relationships. The government has no more vested interest in recognizing and regulating inherently non-reproductive erotic relationships than it does in platonic friendships.”

U.S. Senator Dick Durbin
https://www.durbin.senate.gov/contact/email
Phone: (202) 224-2152

U.S. Senator Tammy Duckworth
https://www.duckworth.senate.gov/connect/email-tammy
Phone: (202) 224-2854

Please send a message and then follow up with a phone call this week.

Recently, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, University of Virginia Children’s Hospital, Boston Children’s Hospital, Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Transgender Health Clinic, and Akron Children’s Hospital have been under fire for engaging in experimental cross-sex hormone-doping on gender-confused teens—some effects of which are risky and irreversible—and for performing mutilating surgeries on the healthy sexual anatomy of minors. These Mengelesque procedures are beginning to pierce the consciences of Americans. While the growing outrage over what scores of hospitals and gender clinics are doing is a very good thing, it’s troubling that it’s taken this long.

Seven years ago, I wrote about Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago performing a double mastectomy on a 17-year-old girl from Grayslake, Illinois, whose birth name is Emily Paschal. How many more healthy breasts of minors have surgeons at Lurie lopped off since 2015?

The doctor who began Emily—now “Emmett”—on a path to affirming her metaphysical confusion via drugs was the infamous and ubiquitous homosexual, Dr. Robert Garofalo, who was profiled in a 2015 article titled “The Change Agent” published in Chicago Magazine. The profile reveals that Lurie’s lurid clinic was the brainchild of activist Garofalo:

Garofalo’s clinic, one of only 25 of its kind in the nation and the first to open in the Midwest, is pushing the boundaries of treatments for the growing population of transgender kids. In the past, patients this young were often redirected through “corrective” therapy to more gender-typical behaviors; Garofalo and his 25-person team take a much different approach: They aid these patients in transitioning.

Garofalo believes he’s “helping” confused children, who often suffer from co-morbidities like autism spectrum disorder, anxiety, and depression, “become their authentic selves.” By “authentic selves,” Garofalo is referring to what adolescents’ confused, troubled minds desire years before their brains are fully developed.

Chicago Magazine writes about one patient of Garofalo, a boy (i.e., an actual boy) who was named David at birth, then became “Jae” in 2013, then became “Diana” in 2015 when Garofalo recommended he start doping estrogen:

It wasn’t until she [sic] was 12 and saw an episode of Oprah about transgender women that she [sic] realized her [sic] situation was more complicated. She [sic] asked her [sic] mom to make an appointment with Garofalo. The doctor immediately put her [sic] on Lupron, a treatment for prostate cancer and fibroid tumors that also happens to suppress puberty.

As with so many adolescents today, David diagnosed himself.

Prior to starting David/Jae/Diana on the estrogen-doping regimen, Garofalo gave him and his mother Lisa Salas the requisite consent form:

“There are a lot of wishy-washy statements here,” Garofalo continues as he hands them the form. “That’s because there haven’t been many studies on the long-term effects of estrogen on young people.” He pauses to look at Diana’s mother. “I wish I could tell you everything that’s going to happen, but I can’t. There’s just so much that we don’t know yet.”

And with that, the diabolical Garofalo proceeded.

Lurie was initially leery of Garofalo’s proposed gender clinic, but J.B. Pritzker’s deep-pocketed, burly, cross-dressing cousin James/ “Jennifer” Pritzker ensured it come to fruition:

Leading the way through this uncharted water is Garofalo, a 49-year-old HIV-positive cancer survivor who readily admits he doesn’t have all the answers. Since he opened the clinic—thanks to a significant grant, matched by Lurie, from a foundation run by Jennifer Pritzker, the billionaire investor and philanthropist who came out as transgender in 2013—Garofalo has emerged as a leader in the adolescent transgender field. He travels the world to speak on the topic, is regularly brought in by medical schools and hospitals to train young pediatricians, and serves as a primary investigator on a National Institutes of Health research grant focusing on transgender people.

For those who don’t know, the Pritzkers are essential members of the cabal to socially construct their deviant beliefs about “transgenderism”–or what investigative journalist Jennifer Bilek more accurately calls “synthetic sex identities,” (SSI)–in every corner of American life.

Chicago Magazine gets nervily close to indicting Garofalo’s disturbing vision for gender-confused youth but ultimately bails by using the passive voice to avoid saying who questions Garofalo’s actions:

Garofalo’s treatments have to be seen as a radical form of medical improvisation, and that scares some folks.

Garofalo has historically been an outlier in the unholy quest to harm children:

Both the Endocrine Society and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health recommend waiting until patients are 16 to begin them on cross-sex hormone treatment. But Garofalo and other doctors at the clinic … will start patients as young as 14 on hormones. … Garofalo has had patients as young as 15 undergo top surgery.

Remember, this was written over seven years ago.

Matt Walsh recently exposed a Vanderbilt University Medical School doctor admitting that disfiguring minors makes big bucks for hospitals, not to mention for counselors, endocrinologists, pediatricians, surgeons, and the maker of Lupron.

Garofalo and his minions at Lurid make sure they squeeze money out of everyone they can to fund their dirty work:

Transgender treatments aren’t cheap—Lupron, for example, costs $8,500 to $18,000 a year—but Garofalo works with his patients, including those on Medicaid, to help get insurance companies to cover the medications. “Nearly every patient who comes through the door gets a denial initially from their insurance,” says Ginny Scheffler, the clinic’s nurse, who spends a good bit of her time writing appeals on behalf of patients. But even those without coverage can get treatment at Lurie thanks to private donations, including one from the Chicago transgender filmmaker Lana Wachowski of The Matrix fame.

Because of the profitability of creating synthetic sex identities for minors, because of the social contagion nature of “trans” identification, because of the terror instilled in parents by profiteers and ideologues, and because of the collaborationist silence of those who know the movement is evil, a low estimate of the number of children ages 6-17 who were diagnosed with gender dysphoria in 2021 is over 42,000. That is 42,000+ children who are being exploited and harmed for profit and for the social and political goals of adults who want to normalize their perverse desires.

And now we have public elementary schools reading picture books to little ones that affirm leftist beliefs about cross-sex impersonation. We have public libraries dragging in drag queens to read stories to toddlers. We have policies that enable teachers to keep secrets from parents about their children’s cross-sex impersonation at school. We have an organization committed to finding “trans”-complicit adults to appropriate wayward confused children from their parents. And perhaps the most alarming recent development is a bill sponsored by deviant California State Senator Scott Wiener and signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom that empowers “California courts to strip parents [from other states] of custody if a [non-parent] person takes the parents’ child to California and arranges for the child to receive gender transition procedures.”

“Trans”-cultism did not emerge on the cultural scene suddenly in the last two years. It didn’t emerge suddenly in 2015 after the disastrous Obergefell U.S. Supreme Court decision. “Trans”-cultism has been metastasizing for decades, destroying the hearts, minds, and bodies of children and teens; corrupting schools; shattering families; undermining First Amendment rights; and sexually integrating private spaces and sports.

Illinois Family Institute (IFI) has been warning about it for almost fifteen years, and so we have been watching with mixed feelings the long-anticipated, desired, and prayed-for anti-“trans”-cult movement grow.

We are thankful that at last parents and others on both sides of the political aisle are speaking out against the evil of “trans”-cultism. We are also sad and frustrated that it has taken so long for Americans in large numbers to speak out against this evil, resulting in untold numbers of children being grievously and irreparably harmed.

One of my first articles after being hired by IFI in the fall of 2008 was about lesbian Laurel Dykstra who had written a how-to article on ideologically grooming preschoolers into the “trans” cult. Her article, titled “Trans-Friendly Preschool,” was published in 2005.

My article, titled “Soulless Teaching,” summarizes Dykstra’s suggestions for indoctrinating preschoolers. Here are some of the claims and recommendations Dykstra, now a pastor, made 17 years ago. See if anything sounds familiar:

• She said that the “gender binary system…. is harmful to everyone.”

• She moralized that “It is not enough for classrooms, teachers, and schools to be ‘open’ or ‘non-judgmental’; they need to be actively trans-positive.”

• Dykstra recommended that when talking to preschoolers, teachers should say things like “‘Well, most men have penises, but some don’t,’” and “‘Some girls grow up to be men.’”

• She urged teachers to “Encourage kids to question their assumptions. ‘How do you know that that person is a woman? Could a man wear a dress?’”

• She instructed teachers to “Call children by the name and the pronouns they choose.”

• She recommended accessorizing classrooms with a “Tranny Teddy. Have a non-gendered toy/doll/puppet…. Do not use pronouns and give this creature a variety of gendered clothing, such as a skirt and tie. If asked, say ‘Oh, Binker isn’t a boy or a girl.’”

• She suggested having a “Butch/Femme Day. Why not teach kids language like butch/femme, as an alternative to boy/girl or male/female? You could have dress-up days to play deliberately with gender, like ‘Fabulous and Fearless Day’ or ‘Capable and Campy.’”

• She encouraged teachers to “Invite a drag performer or transsexual person who would be willing to share their story and a photo album.”

• When reading picture books to preschoolers, Dykstra recommended “switching pronouns, avoiding them altogether, or using alternative pronouns.”

• Dykstra rationalized using deceit in the face of parental opposition: “For ‘stealth practitioners’ (i.e., teachers in a transphobic setting), these classroom suggestions can be implemented without fanfare to create a more just and welcoming classroom.”

I reiterated her recommendations again in a 2018 article titled “Queering Government Schools: Just Say No.”

In 2017, when leftists everywhere were promoting the specious claim that the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) supports the social, chemical, and surgical “transitioning” of minor children and teens, I wrote an article exposing the disturbing way the AAP developed its position on the treatment of gender-dysphoric children. That article, titled “Do 66,000 Pediatricians Really Support the AAP’s Trans-Affirmative Policy,” outlines the secret process by which the AAP ensured its policy would reflect only leftist views.

The following year, 2018, I wrote an article titled “55 Members of the American Academy of Pediatrics Devise Destructive ‘Trans’ Policy,” exposing in greater detail the position of the AAP select-committee on harming children through profitable-but-medically-unsubstantiated protocols.

By the way, Lurid’s creepy Dr. Robert Garofalo has been instrumental in the social construction and imposition of the AAP’s non-science-based “trans” affirming policy.

In 2017, I wrote an article titled, “Things You Don’t Hear About Gender Dysphoria,” which lists 13 bulleted facts about gender dysphoria in minors and the health risks and grotesque nature of the “treatments” from which hospitals are profiting handsomely.

And still the medical cultists march on, surgical weapons unsheathed.

There are steps churches, parents, and other concerned citizens can take to begin to undo the damage done by synthetic sex identitarians and their apostles. In addition to removing your children from schools that affirm synthetic sex identities, watch and discuss these three documentaries with your children and in church youth groups:

Dysconnected: The Real Story Behind the Transgender Explosion 

Whose Children Are They? 

What is a Woman?

Since the unconstitutional Roe was overturned, leftists have been roiling in rage at the thought that states are now free to enact the will of the people with regard to killing humans in the womb. In his concurrence, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas argued that three other Supreme Court cases should be revisited in that they too lacked constitutional grounding—an argument made also by the esteemed Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork.

One of the decisions Thomas believes should be revisited is the Obergefell decision that imposed same-sex “marriage” on the entire country, robbing states—that is, the people—of their right to decide if intrinsically non-marital relationships should be legally recognized as marriages. And so, leftists livid at the prospect of diverse states one day being free to enact marriage laws in accordance with the will of the people, are trying to take that right away preemptively through federal legislation.

This week the U.S. House of Representatives passed the laughably named “Respect for Marriage Act” (H.R. 8404)—a bill that doesn’t merely disrespect marriage; it is hostile to marriage. The bill, which would overturn the Defense of Marriage Act, now goes to the U.S. Senate.

Forty-seven Republicans voted for it, including Adam Kinzinger, Liz Cheney, Rodney Davis, Tom Emmer (chair of National Republican Congressional Committee), Darrell Issa, Elise Stefanik (U.S. House Republican Conference chair), and Lee Zeldin. Any Republican who doesn’t understand the essential role of the nuclear family—that is, mother, father, and children—to the health and future of any society doesn’t deserve to serve in government.

The Defense of Marriage Act—which all U.S. House Democrats and 47 “Republicans” detest—defines marriage in federal law “as between a man and a woman and spouse as a person of the opposite sex.” In contrast, the Disrespect for Marriage Act recognizes in federal law “any marriage that is valid under state law.”

Note that this means that once Utah, California, Massachusetts, Illinois, or any other nutty state recognizes plural unions as marriages, the federal government will be forced to recognize plural unions as marriages.

While there is a provision requiring states to recognize marriages from other states, that provision specifically limits the type of marriages that must be recognized to those composed of two people. No such limit is placed on the federal government in the Disrespect for Marriage Act.

While some naïfs among us may view this as an oversight, others see it as intentional—an interim step to the legal recognition of plural unions from sea to darkening sea.

Marriage is something. It has a nature. And words have meanings.

As I wrote four years ago, let’s try a little thought experiment. Let’s imagine that now, after legally recognizing intrinsically non-marital same-sex unions as “marriages,” society notices that there remains a unique type of relationship that is identified by the following features: it is composed of two people of major age who are not closely related by blood, are of opposite sexes, and engage in the only kind of sexual act that is naturally procreative. We decide that as language-users there must be a term to identify this particular, commonplace, and cross-cultural type of relationship. Let’s call it “huwelijk.”

In this thought experiment in which the term “marriage” would denote the union of two people of the same sex and “huwelijk” would denote the union of two people of opposite sexes—both of which provide the same legal protections, benefits, and obligations—does anyone believe that homosexuals would accept such a distinction?

Homosexuals would not accept such a linguistic distinction. They would not accept it even if they enjoyed all the practical benefits society historically accorded to sexually complementary couples and even if their unions were legally recognized as marriages.

Homosexuals would not tolerate such a legal distinction because their tyrannical quest for universal approval of homoerotic relationships cannot be achieved unless they obliterate all distinctions—including linguistic distinctions—between homosexual unions and heterosexual unions. Homosexuals—whose unions are naturally sterile—would not tolerate any term that signifies the naturally procreative union between one man and one woman.

Severing marriage from both biological sex and reproductive potential renders marriage irrelevant as a public institution. The most salient aspects of marriage as an institution sanctioned by the government are not subjective feelings of affection and sexual attraction. The government has no vested interest in the private subjective feelings of marriage partners.

The government has a vested interest in the public good. What serves the public good is the welfare of future generations. And what best serves future generations is providing for the needs and protecting the rights of children, which includes their right to be raised by a mother and father, preferably their own biological parents.

If marriage were solely a private institution concerned only with emotional attachments and sexual desire, as homosexuals claim it is, then there would be no reason for the government to be involved. There would be no more justification for government regulation of marriage than there is for government regulation of platonic friendships. And there would be no legitimate reason to prohibit plural marriages.

If the claim of homosexuals that marriage has no intrinsic, necessary, and rational connection to the biological sex of partners or to reproductive potential are true, then there remains no rational basis for the belief that marriage has anything to do with romantic or erotic feelings.

Why is marriage any longer conceived of as a romantic and erotic union? If marriage is severed from biological sex and from reproductive potential and if love is love, then why can’t a loving platonic relationship between three BFF’s be recognized as a marriage? Why can’t the platonic relationship between a 40-year-old soccer coach and his 13-year-old soccer star be deemed a marriage? If “progressives” can jettison the single most enduring and cross-cultural feature of marriage—sexual differentiation—then on what basis can they conceptually retain any other feature, including the notion that marriage is a romantic/erotic union? While eroticism may be important to intimate partners, of what relevance is naturally sterile erotic activity to the government’s interest in marriage as now construed?

When Leftists assert that “love is love,” they really mean that the moral status of erotic activity between two men or two women is no different from the moral status of sexual activity between a man and a woman. If the claim that “love is love,” is true, then there is no rational basis for thinking that there exist types of relationships in which eroticism has no legitimate place. If that’s the case, then why isn’t it morally permissible for all types of relationships to include erotic activity? If all loving relationships are identical (i.e., “love is love”), then why can’t all loving relationships include erotic activity? And if love is love, and marriage has no intrinsic nature, then it’s anything. And if it’s anything, it’s nothing.

If, however, there are different forms of love, some of which ought not include erotic activity, how do leftists determine when love ought not be eroticized?

Marriage is in tatters, but leftists want those tatters torched. Next up from “progressive” pyros: “eliminating the binary”—of marriage. Polyamorists are on the move. “Progressives” just love the smell of napalm all day long.

Take ACTION: H.R. 8404 may be taken up in the U.S. Senate soon**. Please take a moment to speak out to our two U.S. Senators to ask them to vote to protect the Defense of Marriage Act and vote NO to H.R. 8404. Remind them, “The government has no interest in inherently non-reproductive types of relationships. The government has no more interest in inherently non-reproductive erotic relationships than it does in platonic friendships.”

U.S. Senator Dick Durbin
https://www.durbin.senate.gov/contact/email
Phone: (202) 224-2152

U.S. Senator Tammy Duckworth
https://www.duckworth.senate.gov/connect/email-tammy
Phone: (202) 224-2854

Please send a message and then follow up with a phone call early next week.

**UPDATE: According to various news sources, the U.S. Senate vote on H.R. 8404 has been pushed back to September.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Unprincipled-Republicans-Vote-for-the-Disrespect-for-Marriage-Act.mp3

Written by Dr. Paul G. Kengor

“In 1949, some friends and I came upon a noteworthy news item in Nature, a magazine of the Academy of Sciences.” So opens Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s majestic The Gulag Archipelago, a seemingly odd start for a classic on the Soviet gulag, the nation’s forced labor camps. Readers initially wonder where the author is headed with a sort of ho-hum report from not a political journal but a science journal. He continues:

“It reported in tiny type that in the course of excavations on the Kolyma River a subterranean ice lens had been discovered which was actually a frozen stream — and in it were found frozen specimens of prehistoric fauna some tens of thousands of years old. Whether fish or salamander, these were preserved in so fresh a state, the scientific correspondent reported, that those present immediately broke open the ice encasing the specimens and devoured them with relish on the spot.”

At this point, readers might still be confused. Isn’t this a book on the Soviet gulag? Why are we reading about prehistoric fauna?

Actually, they’re learning about the gulag — its escapees, its survivors. Solzhenitsyn next explains what those present did with those ancient creatures. They didn’t rush them off to a museum; no, they devoured them. They were not doing a scientific excavation — they were escaping a communist prison camp, where millions starved and died.

“Flouting the higher claims of ichthyology,” narrated Solzhenitsyn, and “elbowing each other to be first,” they chipped away the ice, hurried the fish to a fire, cooked it and bolted it down. No doubt, said Solzhenitsyn, Nature impressed its readers with this account of how 10,000-year-old fish could be kept fresh over such a long period. But only a narrower group of readers could decipher the true meaning of this “incautious” report. That smaller club was his fellow gulag survivors — the “pitiable zeks,” as Solzhenitsyn called them. When your goal is survival, you survive, even if it means hurriedly devouring something that in a normal world would be carefully rushed to a museum.

What started as a seemingly odd opening about prehistoric fish was actually a poignant anecdote about the human horrors of Soviet communism. It was not about fish at all. It was about human beings who had been trapped in their state-constructed frozen ice lens — the frozen camps of Siberia.

I mention this now because it was 50 years ago, shortly before the publication of The Gulag Archipelago, that Alexander Solzhenitsyn received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Few recipients have so earned it.

To here summarize Solzhenitsyn’s life or book would be impossible. There was so much of note. Many might point to his Harvard commencement address in June 1978, or perhaps his less-known-but-equally-inspiring Templeton Prize speech (“Men Have Forgotten God”) in May 1983, or his reporting on the daily travails of another sufferer in his classic A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. For me, however, what endures most are his reports of religious persecution under communism.

In The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn reported on the Moscow “church trials” of the 1920s — classic communist show trials, aimed particularly at the Russian Orthodox Church. Solzhenitsyn provided a narrative account of this surreal, painful miscarriage of justice. The presiding judge was Comrade Bek, with the prosecutors Comrade Lunin and Comrade Longinov. Solzhenitsyn didn’t bother to share the first names of this dubious troika of comrades. It didn’t matter. Their names and faces and roles and duties were interchangeable in the Soviet system.

On trial were 17 defendants from the Russian Orthodox Church, including the patriarch, archpriests and laymen, accused of disseminating “propaganda” and of “hoarding” Church valuables (including everything from liturgical items to relics to icons) that the Soviet state demanded. Lenin and his Bolsheviks salivated over these “fabulous treasures” of the Church. Leon Trotsky rubbed his covetous hands together: “The booty is enormous!” he thrilled.

And thus the Church was told that it must give up everything to the state — then and there, without hesitation. That would ultimately include churches themselves, not to mention the loyalty of priests. The Soviet state was to be the new arbiter of truth.

And so, on May 5, shortly after May Day 1922, the holy day of international communism, Patriarch Tikhon was one among 17 Church officials dragged into a Moscow “courtroom” to testify for having “acted incorrectly” in disobeying the state.

Solzhenitsyn’s narrative strikes me especially today because the words echo in the United States today. In fact, what Tikhon told the judge is eerily similar to what Kim Davis, the Kentucky law clerk, told a judge post-Obergefell when she refused to issue in her name same-sex marriage licenses because doing so would violate the teachings of her faith. Many Christians will face similar interrogations for not doing what the state orders in defiance of the teachings of their faith. Here’s Solzhenitsyn’s narration:

Comrade Bek to Patriarch Tikhon: “Do you consider the state’s laws obligatory or not?”

Patriarch Tikhon: “Yes, I recognize them, to the extent that they do not contradict the rules of piety.”

Judge Bek: “Which in the last analysis is more important to you, the laws of the Church or the point of view of the Soviet government? Are we, the representatives of the Soviet government, thieves of holy things? [Do you] call the representatives of the Soviet government, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, thieves?!”

Tikhon: “I am citing only Church law.”

The Soviet atheist judge then lectured the head of the Russian Orthodox Church on a correct understanding of “blasphemy.” He told the shaken patriarch that he was a liar.

The verdict, incidentally, was already predetermined. Nonetheless, the “jury” proceeded forward with the farce, ordering criminal charges against the patriarch. He was arrested and removed from office, and he eventually died of a heart attack while under house arrest. At least he wasn’t executed on the spot — 11 of his 17 co-defendants were shot.

In my view, accounts like this are among the most memorable moral lessons in Solzhenitsyn’s great work. He documents vile examples of Soviet sacrilege and persecution of religious believers. In The Gulag Archipelago, he recorded how nuns and prostitutes were housed together in special sections of the gulag, both deemed whores by the atheistic state.

Solzhenitsyn understood that the battle against communism was not simply a political one. The roots of communism’s rage were unmistakable: “Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin … hatred of God is the principal driving force.” As Solzhenitsyn knew, Soviet communism was not merely a political and ideological threat but a spiritual threat. And few did better work exposing that dark world than he did.

It was 50 years ago that the world recognized Solzhenitsyn “for the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature”—a literary achievement that went well beyond the realm of literature. Like the best of literary works, what he told us had profound moral-spiritual lessons that endure through the ages. He would not want us to forget. And we shouldn’t forget.

Dr. Paul Kengor is professor of political science and chief academic fellow of the Institute for Faith and Freedom at Grove City College. His latest book (April 2017) is A Pope and a President: John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and the Extraordinary Untold Story of the 20th Century. He is also the author of 11 Principles of a Reagan Conservative. His other books include The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis, The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor and Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century.

This article was originally published at The Institute for Faith & Freedom.

With the kids home for Thanksgiving we were watching a movie and during one of the commercial breaks, a cosmetic company promoted its products with a slick, high-gloss advertisement. Inserted with the burst of dramatic head shots showing beautiful young women wearing lipstick, rouge and eyeliner was a quick shot of a man doing the same.

Because it passed so quickly, it took a second to register and I asked, “Was that a guy?” My daughter responded with, “Yeah. I don’t know why you have to make such a big deal about it.”

That moment was instructive for a couple of reasons. First, when I asked my daughter if she was okay with a man wearing make-up, she said that that’s just the way the world is, and wonders why I’m surprised.

She has a point. We’ve been force-fed the LGBTQ+ agenda for years, and it’s seeped into every conceivable corner of life. The rapid collapse of historical sexual norms since Obergefell has felt like a dam giving way under the weight of the floodwaters behind it, unleashing a swollen cascade that submerges everything in its path.

Transsexuals now grace the covers of lifestyle magazines that cater to women. They displace women and girls in competitive sports. Drag queens read to children at libraries across the country. Starting in kindergarten, the next generations of children are being taught that what was once considered perverted and shameful is to be affirmed and celebrated.

Businesses adopt policies and practices that provide benefits to same-sex couples. They aspire to achieve a “100” rating from the Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality Index, billed as “the national benchmarking tool on corporate policies and practices pertinent to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer employees.”

Why should I be surprised that this is the world we live in now?

But I am surprised and that leads me to the second reason it was an instructive moment. The fact that my daughter didn’t react with aversion tells me that men wearing make-up has become normalized at a much faster rate than I expected.

Do we really need to be reminded that biological males cannot be female? Men in make-up are play-acting—they’re pretending to be women (and mostly ugly women, at that).

No matter how much lipstick, rouge, or eyeliner they wear; no matter how much they mutilate their bodies or how much estrogen they consume; no matter how much they sashay, flounce or pose in satin dresses—they remain biologically male.

It’s the science, stupid. Transsexuals either know they’re lying about their biology, in which case they need to be called out for the frauds they are; or they don’t know they’re lying about their biology, in which case they have a serious mental condition and need to be institutionalized. But in either case, why should the larger society accommodate them, much less on their terms?

I won’t. I won’t, first and foremost, because it denies God’s created order. He “created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” (Gen. 1:27) I realize that most, perhaps even all, transsexuals don’t believe that. But I do and so does God and I won’t compromise my convictions.

I also won’t do it because it is irrational and I won’t betray logic or common sense to accommodate their absurdities. It makes me an accessory to their delusions and makes them codependents in a dysfunctional relationship. I’m not playing that game.

And I won’t do it because I was born at the end of the baby boom after World War II. I am part of a passing generation that held to traditional cultural norms, rational beliefs and American patriotism. It may be that my generation is one of the last to escape the full indoctrination of the decades-long “march through the institutions” of Western—specifically, American—civilization developed by Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci more than 80 years ago. I won’t be party to the overthrow of that civilization.

Unfortunately the church has not escaped the boots of cultural Marxism marching through its sanctuaries, either. As Jude told his original readers, “certain individuals whose condemnation was written about long ago have secretly slipped in among you. They are ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into a license for immorality and deny Jesus Christ our only Sovereign and Lord.” (verse 4)

Instead of holding firm to scriptural teaching, some church leaders have sought to accommodate the alphabet mob in the cause of “winning the lost.” Just love everyone always, they say. They’ve lost their nerve to stand against the popular demands of the world and have compromised their faith. In their compassion they have forgotten that even Jesus declared that he did not come to bring peace on earth, but division. (Luke 12:51)

The church needs to regain its courage, stand for righteousness, and let God sort out the winners and losers. Parents need to take charge of their children and pull them out of public schools. Business owners need to take hits to their bottom line. Employees need to risk getting fired for refusing to toe the line on the Human Rights Campaign’s index.

When a man shows up in a cosmetics commercial peddling the latest beauty products, I express surprise, yes, but also revulsion and dismay over what our society has become. It’s getting late and we are likely past the point of no return. But we don’t need to succumb without resistance to the end.

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Probate Judge Don Davis asked to be relieved of the order because it would cause him to violate a federal court order that struck down the marriage law. On March 10, 2015, the Alabama Supreme Court issued a second order refusing to relieve him of the order and directing that he immediately cease issuing same-sex marriage licenses.

On March 12, 2015, the Alabama Supreme Court issued a third order directing that “all probate judges” in the state are subject to the March 3, 2015, order and that they must immediately cease issuing same-sex marriage licenses.

On June 26, 2015, the 5-4 opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court in the Obergefell marriage case was released. The ACLU then asked the Alabama Supreme Court to reverse its prior orders in light of the U.S. Supreme Court opinion. Liberty Counsel argued that the prior Alabama Supreme Court orders remain valid.

Last Friday the Alabama Supreme Court made permanent the Petition for Mandamus, which upheld the marriage laws and ordered the probate judges to comply with those laws. The Alabama Supreme Court then dismissed the ACLU’s motion to clarify and reverse this prior order. The Judgment reads as follows:

CERTIFICATE OF JUDGMENT

WHEREAS, the ruling on the application for rehearing filed in this cause and indicated below was entered in this cause on March 20, 2015:

Application Overruled. No Opinion. PER CURIAM – Stuart, Bolin, Parker, Murdock, Main, Wise, and Bryan, JJ., concur. [This refers to the ACLU motion.]

WHEREAS, the above referenced cause has been duly submitted and considered by the Supreme Court of Alabama and the orders indicated below were entered in this cause:

Petition Granted. Writ Issued. March 3, 2015. PER CURIAM – Stuart, Bolin, Parker, Murdock, Wise, and Bryan, JJ., concur. Main, J., concurs in part and concurs in the result. Shaw, J., dissents. [This refers to Liberty Counsel’s Petition for Mandamus.]

Writ Issued as to Judge Don Davis. March 11, 2015. PER CURIAM – Stuart, Parker, Murdock, Main, Wise, and Bryan, JJ., concur. Shaw, J., dissents. [Same as above]

Writ Issued as to additional respondents. March 12, 2015. PER CURIAM – Stuart, Bolin, Parker, Murdock, Main, Wise, and Bryan, JJ., concur. Shaw, J., dissents. [Same as above]

NOW, THEREFORE, pursuant to Rule 41, Ala. R. App. P., IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that this Court’s judgment in this cause is certified on this date. IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that, unless otherwise ordered by this Court or agreed upon by the parties, the costs of this cause are hereby taxed as provided by Rule 35, Ala. R. App. P.

Along with the Judgment, the Alabama Supreme Court released the separate opinions of the Justices. In his 105-page opinion, in which he concurred in the Judgment, Chief Justice Roy Moore wrote the following:

Today this Court by order dismisses all pending motions and petitions and issues the certificate of judgment in this case. That action does not disturb the existing March orders in this case or the Court’s holding therein that the Sanctity of Marriage Amendment, art. I, § 36.03, Ala. Const. 1901, and the Alabama Marriage Protection Act, § 30-1-9, Ala. Code 1975, are constitutional. Therefore, and for the reasons stated below, I concur with the order.

Later in a public statement after the Judgment was issued, Chief Justice Roy Moore made the following statement:

The Court dismissed in its order “pending motions and petitions” in the API case today but did not dismiss “lawsuits” or dismiss the case. In fact, the Court also issued the certificate of judgment (COJ) which explicitly recognized the 3 orders issued in this case last year. As I stated in my written concurrence, the Court did not disturb the existing orders in this case or the holding in API that Alabama’s Sanctity of Marriage Amendment and the Alabama Marriage Protection Act were constitutional.

“Some media reported the opposite of what the Alabama Supreme Court did. When the Alabama Supreme Court entered the Judgment on its March 2015 order and dismissed the ALCU’s motion to reverse that order, the result was a clear victory for our case,” said Mat Staver, Founder and Chairman of Liberty Counsel. “The Alabama Supreme Court order upholding the marriage laws and ordering the probate judges to comply with those laws still remains in effect. The ACLU’s request to reverse that order was dismissed. The Alabama Supreme Court rejected the 5-4 marriage opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court. While some of the Alabama Supreme Court Justices wrote separate opinions ripping apart the U.S. Supreme Court, it is clear a majority of the Court issued a Judgment affirming that their prior orders upholding the marriage laws remain valid in Alabama,” said Staver.

Liberty Counsel is an international nonprofit, litigation, education, and policy organization dedicated to advancing religious freedom, the sanctity of life, and the family since 1989, by providing pro bono assistance and representation on these and related topics.

From First Liberty

Last week, First Liberty Institute attorneys announced their legal representation of Aaron and Melissa Klein—owners of Sweet Cakes by Melissa who were forced to pay a $135,000 penalty to the Oregon government for declining to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding.

In addition to widespread media attention from news outlets across the country, Aaron and Melissa shared their story with America last Friday night on FOX’s The Kelly File.

“[I]t’s not something I ever thought I’d have to fight with the government over,” Aaron said of his faith-based stance on the issue of marriage. “This was something I believed should never be happening in this country.”

But it is happening—and not only in Oregon to Aaron and Melissa Klein.

A TEXAS COUPLE UNDER ATTACK FOR THEIR FAITH

In mid-February, a family-owned bakery in Longview, Texas declined to make a same-sex wedding cake—and they are now reaping the same hate-filled repercussions as the Kleins did in 2013 (and still feel today).

David and Edie Delorme own Kern’s Bake Shop, which has been in business in Longview, Texas since 1918. As devout Christians, David and Edie are committed to operating their bakery in a manner that honors God. In the past they have consistently refused to bake alcohol, tobacco, gambling, or risqué-themed cakes.

When two men requested a cake for their same-sex wedding, Edie politely informed them that Kern’s Bake Shop did not make same-sex wedding cakes, and offered to provide a list of other bakeries in Longview that could fulfill the couple’s request.

Nevertheless, the incident soon appeared in a local newspaper, igniting a firestorm of hostility and even death threats toward the Delormes, their family, and their business from places as far away as New York and California.

“Americans value and protect our freedoms – especially freedom of expression and religious liberty,” said Mike Berry, Senior Counsel for First Liberty Institute. “In order for America to remain free and prosperous, we must secure the rights of small business owners to operate their businesses according to their beliefs.”

Though no lawsuits have been filed against Kern’s Bake Shop yet, David and Edie heard about First Liberty’s defense of Aaron and Melissa Klein, and preemptively retained First Liberty Institute as legal counsel.

HOPE—FOR THE KLEINS, THE DELORMES, AND ALL AMERICANS

Attacks are spreading against Americans who embrace religious tenets teaching that marriage is a sacred union between one man and one woman, as evidenced by the Delormes’ experience just a few weeks ago.

But there is hope for religious freedom, even surrounding this hotly contested issue. For example:

• The same majority opinion that legalized same-sex marriage in Obergefell last June reaffirmed religious liberty for those who maintain that marriage is between one man and one woman. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote,

The First Amendment ensures that religious organizations and persons are given proper protection as they seek to teach the principles that are so fulfilling and so central to their lives and faiths, and to their own deep aspirations to continue the family structure they have long revered. The same is true of those who oppose same-sex marriage for other reasons…In turn, those who believe allowing same-sex marriage is proper or indeed essential, whether as a matter of religious conviction or secular belief, may engage those who disagree with their view in an open and searching debate.

• First Liberty’s social media pages prove that the “open and searching” debate Justice Kennedy talked about is increasing, while hate speech and threats are decreasing. The response on social media to First Liberty’s announced representation of the Kleins last week was overwhelmingly positive and consisted of constructive debate—a stark contrast to the barrage of hostile, lewd, or extreme comments that often flood social media in response to controversial issues. According to First Liberty’s social media team, the response was more positive than anticipated—and could mark a change of heart regarding the religious liberty rights of Americans who simply want to run their business according to their faith.

• The best constitutional lawyers in the country are working with First Liberty to win these cases. First Liberty’s unique volunteer attorney model harnesses the legal firepower of constitutional attorneys from many of the nation’s top law firms. Passionate about defending religious freedom, these lawyers give their time to First Liberty Clients pro bono.

Working on the Aaron and Melissa Klein’s case is The Honorable Boyden Gray, former White House Counsel for President George H. W. Bush, former Ambassador to the European Union, and founding partner of Boyden Gray and Associates.

“America is a great nation because we celebrate diversity of thought,” stated Ambassador Gray. He emphasized:

“Our rights to free expression and religious liberty are some of our most cherished American freedoms. We must safeguard these rights for every American – including Aaron and Melissa Klein.”

Thanks to God’s grace and volunteer attorneys like Ambassador Gray, First Liberty wins over 90 percent of its cases.

IN THE BALANCE—PROTECTIONS FOR PEOPLE OF FAITH

But while the hope is undeniable, so is the threat. And despite progress in the conversation surrounding religious freedom and marriage, threats and hate-filled messages continue to bombard the Kleins and the Delormes personally.

“If these small business owners can come under attack for their faith, what does that say about our perspective on liberty?” asks Berry. “We need to respect the rights of all Americans to live together peaceably, even if they have a difference of opinion. That’s what freedom means.”

First Liberty’s attorneys are committed to ensuring Americans like Aaron and Melissa Klein and David and Edie Delorme are free to live out their faith, and are preparing for the Kleins’ case to possibly go before the United States Supreme Court.

If the case does go to the U.S. Supreme Court, it will be one of the first cases to answer two new questions America is now facing, said Ken Klukowski, First Liberty Senior Counsel and Director of Strategic Affairs on The Kelly File last Friday:

[I[f someone has sincerely held religious beliefs that are mainstream beliefs on an issue like marriage, can the government punish them for speaking those beliefs, and can the government order them, as [the Kleins have] been ordered to, that they can’t discuss aspects of their beliefs?”

Click here to receive updates from First Liberty Institute as these cases progress

Click here to read more information about Aaron and Melissa Klein’s case

News and Commentary is brought to you by First Liberty’s team of writers and legal experts.

I’ve been saying that 2015 is the year of pushback, and this might be the most significant act of pushing back so far: A group of legal scholars, most of them university professors, have declared that the U.S. Supreme Court’s redefinition of marriage this past June 26^th is not “the law of the land,” and they are calling on all office holders, together with all presidential candidates, to join them in rejecting the Court’s decision.

Make no mistake about it: This is really big news.

These scholars, who teach at schools like Princeton and Oxford and Notre Dame and Boston and Boston College and Michigan State and Kansas State and Vanderbilt and Hillsdale and the University of Toronto and the University of Nebraska, state that the Court’s decision “has no more claim” to being the law of the land “than Dred Scott v. Sandford had when President Abraham Lincoln condemned that pro-slavery decision as an offense against the very Constitution that the Supreme Court justices responsible for that atrocious ruling purported to be upholding.”

They note that “Lincoln warned that for the people and their elected leaders to treat unconstitutional decisions of the Supreme Court as creating a binding rule on anyone other than the parties to the particular case would be for ‘the people [to] have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.'”

They also cite James Madison, who in 1788 had this to say about the balance of powers: “The several departments being perfectly co-ordinate by the terms of their common commission, neither of them, it is evident, can pretend to an exclusive or superior right of settling the boundaries between their respective powers.”

But these professors and lawyers are not simply making a philosophical statement about the Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges ruling.

They have issued a call for action, reminding “all officeholders in the United States that they are pledged to uphold the Constitution of the United States, not the will of five members of the Supreme Court.” They also call on “all federal and state officeholders” to “refuse to accept Obergefell as binding precedent for all but the specific plaintiffs in that case.”

They urge these officeholders to recognize the right of each state to define marriage, to “pledge full and mutual legal and political assistance to anyone who refuses to follow Obergefell for constitutionally protected reasons,” and to “open forthwith a broad and honest conversation on the means by which Americans may constitutionally resist and overturn the judicial usurpations evident in Obergefell.”

To repeat: This is big, and it gives further legal, moral, and Constitutional teeth to the first and fourth principles laid out in Outlasting the Gay Revolution: Never Compromise Your Convictions and Refuse to Redefine Marriage.

These scholars have also issued a fourfold call to all presidential candidates, urging them to:

1. treat Obergefell, not as “the law of the land,” but rather (to once again quote Justice Alito) as “an abuse of judicial power”
2. refuse to recognize Obergefell as creating a binding rule controlling other cases or their own conduct as President
3. appoint judges and justices who respect the constitutional limits of their power, and
4. support the First Amendment Defense Act to protect the conscience and free speech rights of those who hold fast to the conjugal understanding of marriage as the union of husband and wife.

To help send this critically important message to all the presidential candidates, join me in signing this statement here, and let’s pray for a continued spirit of revival in the Church and awakening in the society.

Preserving the meaning of marriage and restoring the sacredness of marriage must be among our top priorities if we want to see America become healthy, and as disciples of Jesus, we can do nothing less.

This landmark action by these scholars could be another spark that will help fan the flames of a gospel-based moral and cultural revolution.

On with it!

This article was originally posted at the ChristianPost.com

Written by John C. Eastman

Until her release [last week], Kim Davis, the clerk of rural Rowan County, Kentucky, was confined to a jail cell because she refused to issue marriage licenses over her name to same-sex couples. She has been pilloried in the media for “lawlessness” and compared not to Martin Luther King Jr. for her civil disobedience but to Governor George Wallace of Alabama. Michael Keegen of the grossly misnamed People for the American Way called her actions an “abuse of power” and proposed instead that she should “find another line of work” — that is, resign her elected office — if she “can’t in good conscience fulfill [her] duties.”

The double standard on display is palpable. I don’t recall Keegen or any of the other self-righteous, newfound devotees of the rule of law calling for the resignation of Kentucky’s attorney general when he refused to defend his state’s marriage law — or any of the other state attorneys general who did the same, from California’s Jerry Brown to Pennsylvania’s Kathleen Kane, and several others, including perhaps most notoriously Oregon’s Ellen Rosenblum, who was caught actively colluding with plaintiffs to ensure judicial invalidation of the Oregon marriage law she disliked.

“But Davis was refusing to comply with a decision of the Supreme Court,” it will be argued. So, too, did all those illustrious attorneys general. All of them refused to do their duty and defend their state’s man-woman marriage laws, even though the binding precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court at that time, a 1972 case called Baker v. Nelson, was that such laws were constitutionally valid.

Ms. Davis’s position has also been mischaracterized as asserting that because the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision is contrary to God’s authority, she cannot be compelled to comply with it and therefore can prevent same-sex couples from getting married in her county. Her position — so described — has been belittled by simpletons across the political spectrum as nothing more than the misguided stance of a crazy evangelical clinging to her Bible. But that is not her legal argument at all (however much merit it might have as a reaction to an illegitimate decision by the U.S. Supreme Court). Her actual argument is much more restrained.

Kentucky has a Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which expressly prevents the government from imposing a substantial burden on someone’s religious beliefs unless the government’s mandate is narrowly tailored to further a compelling governmental interest. Because this lawsuit is pending in federal court, the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which contains the same protection, is also applicable. Ms. Davis’s lawyers have simply argued that these federal and state laws require that her religious objection to issuing same-sex “marriage” licenses over her own name be accommodated.

There is no compelling interest here. Even assuming the validity of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision holding that right to same-sex “marriage” is a fundamental right, no one is being denied the right to marry. As a matter of Kentucky law, the couples seeking to compel Ms. Davis herself to issue them a marriage license can obtain a marriage license from any other county in Kentucky. They can also get one from the county executive of Rowan County. And if the governor would simply call the legislature into special session to deal with the problem that has arisen since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in June, it would likely even be possible for other clerks in Ms. Davis’s office to issue a marriage license without its being issued on Ms. Davis’s authority (the legislature could simply remove the problematic “under [her] authority” language from the statewide uniform form), or for marriage licenses to be obtained via a statewide online system.

But none of those options would accomplish what the same-sex couple and its chorus of advocates are really after, which is not the “marriage” but forcing Ms. Davis and everyone like her to bow to the new, unholy orthodoxy. In other words, this controversy has all the hallmarks of the one that engulfed Thomas More, who silently acquiesced in but would not condone King Henry VIII’s illicit marriage.

The Religious Freedom Restoration Acts, both the federal law and Kentucky’s version of it, required that Ms. Davis’s religious objection be accommodated as a matter of law. The federal court’s refusal to respect those laws is where the real lawlessness lies in this case. And of course, that lawlessness is quite apart from the not insignificant question of whether the U.S. Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision is itself lawless. Such claims did not originate with Ms. Davis, but with the four U.S. Supreme Court Justices who stridently dissented from Justice Kennedy’s diktat, calling it “illegitima[te],” “indefensible,” “dangerous for the rule of law,” “demeaning to the democratic process,” “a naked judicial claim to legislative — indeed, super-legislative — power,” “pretentious,” “egotistic,” a “judicial Putsch,” “deeply misguided,” a “usurp[ation of] the constitutional right of the people,” a “perhaps irremediable corruption of our legal culture’s conception of constitutional interpretation,” and an “extravagant conception of judicial supremacy.”

That latter point is important to put to rest the other charge that has been leveled against Ms. Davis, namely, that she is violating her oath of office by not upholding the law she swore to uphold. The Constitution requires that all officials, both federal and state, take an oath to “support this Constitution,” and the Constitution itself provides that “this Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof . . . shall be the supreme Law of the Land.” Neither the oath clause nor the supremacy clause requires fealty to an erroneous decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that is contrary to the Constitution itself. That is not constitutionalism, or the rule of law, but the rule of judges; a claim that although the Constitution is the supreme law of the land, the Constitution is whatever the judges say it is, even if what they say is a patently erroneous interpretation of the Constitution.

Reacting to a similar piece of judicial tyranny in the Dred Scott case, Abraham Lincoln famously said, in his first inaugural address, that although judicial decisions are binding on the specific parties to a case, “the candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions, the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.”

In short, Ms. Davis was much more faithful to her oath of office, and to the Constitution she vowed to support, than the federal judge who jailed her for contempt, the attorney general of the state who refused to defend Kentucky’s laws, and Justice Anthony Kennedy, who usurped the authority of the states and the more than 50 million voters who had recently reaffirmed the natural definition of marriage, in order to impose his own more “enlightened” views on the nation. One can only hope that Ms. Davis’s simple but determined act of civil disobedience will yet ignite the kind of reaction in the American people that is necessary to oppose such lawlessness, or at the very least bring forth a national leader who will take up the argument against judicial supremacy in truly Lincolnian fashion.

This article was originally posted at the National Review Online.

— John C. Eastman is the Henry Salvatori Professor of Law and Community Service, and former dean, at Chapman University’s Dale E. Fowler School of Law. He is also the founding director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence and chairman of the board of the National Organization for Marriage.

If I had a nickel for every time a liberal said it’s a slippery slope fallacy to claim that the legalization of homoerotic marriage would necessarily result in the legal recognition of plural unions, I would be a very rich woman.

The juxtaposition of two recent Chicago Tribune editorials provides an almost-comical illustration of both “progressive” deceit and ignorance about marriage.

Eric Zorn inveighed against conservative claims about the inevitability of legalized polygamy, describing such claims as “desperate” and “sophomoric,” and then a few days later, Steve Chapman made the sophomoric claim that legalized polygamy is “not so scary.”

I guess this is how the Tribune demonstrates diversity. They’ve got far Left columnists and far, far, Left columnists.

Chapman writes that society should “reconsider” bans on plural marriage, arguing that “the case for legalizing polygamy builds on the case for legalizing same-sex marriage.”

He asks, “ If a man is living, procreating and raising children with two or three women, what do we gain by saying he can’t easily formalize his obligations to them?”

In an earlier attempt at deep-thinking about the moral imperative of redefining marriage to serve the desires of homosexuals, Chapman offered a journey through the history of marriage. He was attempting to show that marriage has never had a stable form, but ironically every form of marriage he presented had one constant feature: sexual complementarity.

Much of Eric Zorn’s “argument” consists of a thicket of epithets and generalizations. To him anyone who believes marriage has an ontology central to which is sexual differentiation necessarily regards same-sex couples with “contempt” and “disgust.”

Conservatives in Zorn’s evidently insulated world are “Bible-thumpers and hankie-twisters” who seek to “engage in poisonous debates.” That unseemly crowd includes, I guess, Princeton University law professor Robert George.  Surely, Zorn knows that no defenders of true marriage twist hankies with the kind of vigor that homosexual activists do.

Zorn’s real knee-slapper is his claim that “legalizing plural marriage” would be a “far bigger leap” than the legal recognition of homoerotic unions as “marriages.” He argues that there is a “vast difference between same-sex marriage and plural marriage when it comes to social and legal implications and…civic reverberations.”

That he believes this is astounding.

Jettisoning sexual differentiation from the legal definition of marriage is a leap of far greater enormity than eliminating the criterion regarding numbers of partners. It is, in fact, the most radical redefinition of marriage in history. Its civic reverberations have been already and will continue to be profound, shaking the very foundations of America. At no time in our history have First Amendment religious, speech, and assembly protections been threatened as they are now.

Zorn goes on to spew more foolishness:

[T]his is not one of those rare issues like abortion that will never resolve and fade away no matter what the Supreme Court says. It’s more like the issue of integration of public schools, an idea that was deeply polarizing at the time of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling but opposed today only by the most virulent racists.

There are, indeed, parallels to be found between Brown v. Board of Education and Obergefell. Both Court majorities were wrong. The majority in Brown erred in affirming a false and destructive understanding of race. The majority in Obergefell erred in affirming a false and destructive understanding of marriage.

Zorn predicts that the marriage issue will “fade away.” Other “progressives” predict that the marriage issue will not fade away for the same reason that controversy over abortion has not faded away. Those liberals believe that because the democratic process was usurped and because the legal reasoning was deeply flawed, division over Obergefell will remain.

Both Zorn’s prediction and the other “progressive” prediction are wrong.

The marriage controversy will remain, and it will remain only in part because of the usurpation of the democratic process and lousy legal reasoning in Obergefell. It will also remain because eradicating First Amendment protections tends to provoke conflict.

But more fundamentally, cultural turmoil will remain because the philosophical assumptions that justify the legal recognition of non-marital unions as marriage are wrong. Just as preborn babies have a nature that sophistry can never fully conceal, so too does marriage. As with legalized feticide, opposition to same-sex faux-marriage will continue because the assumptions upon which it depends are false.

Homosexuality is not analogous to race. Zorn continually compares homoeroticism to race but doesn’t explain what constitutes either. Until recently, most people understood that race was a biologically heritable condition that carried no inherent implications regarding feelings or volitional acts. In contrast, homosexuality is constituted centrally–if not solely–by subjective feelings and volitional acts. Moreover, as conservatives learned over the past year, even homosexual scholars assert that “sexual orientation”–unlike race–is fluid.

The post-Dolezal understanding of race as a social construct opens up a can of intellectual worms for “progressives” because if homosexuality is analogous to race and, therefore, merely a social construct, one cannot appeal to biological immutability as a strategic way to condemn moral disapproval of homoeroticism. Clearly not all social constructs—which are self-evidently constructions of flawed humans—can be inherently good.

Oh those darn tangled webs.

So, why oh why do progressives get away with perpetually exploiting race as an analogue for homoeroticism? Why aren’t the Zorns of the world compelled to explain precisely the points of correspondence between race per se and homoeroticism per se? Do they even care if there are no ontological points of correspondence so long as they are winning in the public square?

I think we all know the answer to that. They don’t care any more about intellectual soundness than they do about the natural right of children to be raised by a mother and father.

The cool kids are wrong again.

If only liberals would listen to Pope Francis on marriage.

Plural marriage is a’comin’, folks. No doubt about it. Time to teach your children well.

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