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Five Things We’ve Learned About Americans and Moral Values

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Written by Frank Newport

Norms surrounding behaviors relating to sexual behavior and reproduction have been shifting in the U.S. in recent years. Where once normatively taboo, certain behaviors and lifestyle choices are now much more likely to be normatively sanctioned. Associated with these normative shifts has been the increased tendency for Americans to label themselves as socially liberal, dethroning the heretofore majority status enjoyed by the label “social conservative.”

Norms are shared expectations of behavior for specific situations. The behaviors associated with norms are often violated in practice, but the existence of the norm means that these violations tend to be manifested privately and not publicly. Historically, examples of normatively proscribed behaviors in the U.S. have included gay and lesbian relations, sex outside of marriage, having a baby out of wedlock and polygamy. As noted, American norms surrounding these behaviors have been shifting.

We at Gallup have reported on these shifts in a series of stories, and various news outlets and commentators have given their opinions on what these shifts may mean as the results have become known. Herewith are five things that seem particularly interesting to review about these shifting attitudes.

1. The shift toward more liberal attitudes on a number of social and values issues has occurred across the age spectrum, not just among young people. The changes are not the result solely of the ripple effect wherein young millennials adopt new positions on moral issues and as they age take their new values with them through the age cycle, gradually replacing older people who die off. Instead, we have seen the 65 years and older group move as much to the left as the shift among the 18- to 29-year-olds over the past decade and a half. Differences continue to persist between age groups, but what we have seen is a rising tide that has lifted all ships on this sea of moral behavior.

Here is the age trend on the moral acceptability of gay and lesbian relations:

150528_Moral_1

Note that the shift over the past 14 years in moral acceptability of gay and lesbian relations among Americans aged 55 and older is 28 percentage points (27% to 55%). The shift among 18- to 34-year-olds has been 27 points, almost exactly the same. This could be age creep to some degree, as each year a segment of those in the younger age group moves into an older age group. But if this was totally age creep, we would have seen the 55+ group holding steady as the young group aged first into the 35- to 54-year-olds group. But we didn’t see that. Older Americans have been changing their attitudes just as fast as younger Americans.

The 18- to 34-year-old group in 2015 is largely composed of individuals who were younger than 18 when we first interviewed on this topic in 2001. It is clear those who were younger than 18 in 2001 have manifested liberal positions on this issue as they moved into the 18 and older age range over the past 14 years. They show no signs of being less liberal than their brothers and sisters who came before them.

But overall, the best explanation seems to be that the forces pushing a higher acceptability of gay and lesbian relations (and other issues) are operating on the entire American culture across the age spectrum, not just on young people.

2. Americans have not shifted their views of all moral issues over time. The notable exception is the American public’s views of married men and women having an affair, which have not changed much. That particular behavior remains essentially culturally taboo (in the sense that it is viewed as morally unacceptable to 90%+ of the public), even as other behaviors relating to sexual behavior and procreation have shifted. This is a fairly remarkable phenomenon. One of the explanations for why the public’s acceptance of other issues has been rising is the fact that there is de facto evidence that the behaviors are occurring in the real world, and the public may come to the point where they feel it is appropriate to go ahead and accept the inevitable. But there is certainly evidence that extramarital affairs happen — among presidents, governors and senators, not to mention people from many non-political walks of life. Although I don’t have empirical evidence supporting this, it’s a reasonable assumption that many Americans know someone who has been involved in an extra-marital affair. The prevalence of these behaviors has not, however, changed the norms surrounding them. Having an affair is still not sanctioned in a moral sense by the public.

3. The largest shifts in cultural attitudes have been those relating to gay and lesbian issues. I’m sure there will be books written (some have already been published) and academic studies conducted examining how and why this truly remarkable shift in cultural norms has taken place in a period of just a few years. This shift will be particularly remarkable if the Supreme Court rules later this month that it is not legal for states to ban same-sex marriage.

I don’t think anyone has a total understanding of why these changes occurred, and as a sociologist I can say it’s difficult to think that we will ever know exactly what has gone on. We know that high profile individuals have publicly disclosed that they are gay or lesbian, and that could have made a difference. The entertainment industry has made particular efforts to show gay and lesbian characters as more mainstream in their productions. There have been changes in actual legislation relating to gay and lesbian behavior, including a cascade of states that have declared gay marriage legal within their boundaries. Leaders have publicly stated their support for gay and lesbian causes. Gay and lesbian leaders have very shrewdly positioned gay and lesbian rights as a civil rights issue, making it more difficult for others to oppose the changes. Fewer Americans now than in the past have formal religious identities, and this loosening impact of religion could be a factor.

4. Despite these shifts in attitudes, 72% of Americans say the state of moral values is getting worse in this country rather than better. And almost as many rate the state of moral values in this country as poor or only fair.

As my colleague Justin McCarthy pointed out in his review, these attitudes have remained very stable, despite the leftward shift in Americans’ (and Republicans’) positions on specific moral issues and how they label themselves. Gallup has been noting in a series of articles that Americans are shifting left on moral issues. But they aren’t shifting on their views of the state of moral values in the country. Why the change in one area and not the other?

In part, this can be explained by understanding that when Americans are asked about moral values (“How would you rate the overall state of moral values in this country today — as excellent, good, only fair or poor?” and “Right now, do you think the state of moral values in the country as a whole is getting better or getting worse?”) they are thinking about things other than just the norms surrounding sexual behavior and reproduction issues. When we asked Americans a few years ago to talk about what was wrong with moral values, many responded by talking about the lack of consideration of others, deficits in the public’s compassion, personal accountability, respect and tolerance; greed, selfishness, dishonesty — in addition to things such as the change in family structure, lack of religion, lack of morals (a somewhat tautological response) and fairly small percentages who mention sexual promiscuity, abortion and gay marriage, specifically. Thus, we have Americans largely saying that the overall moral tone of our culture is in bad shape and getting worse, even as they increasingly say that formerly taboo behaviors are morally acceptable.

5. All cultural shifts have consequences. One such consequence is politics. The New York Times columnist Charles Blow recently reviewed Gallup data discussing the political implications of these normative changes in a recent opinion piece, noting:

This change [more liberal positions on social issues] poses a particular challenge for the Republican Party and its national aspirations, not so much at the congressional seats, many of which are safe, but for presidential candidates.

Part of the issue, as the likely candidate Jeb Bush put it last year, is that for a Republican to become president, he or she would have to be willing to “lose the primary to win the general” election.

It was a catchy phrase and everyone understood what he was saying: Don’t allow the Republican debates and primaries to drag you so far right that you will never be able to recover in the general election. But the problem is that there is no way to compete in the general without first winning the primaries securing the nomination.

This general process is certainly not new. Candidates on both sides of the aisle have always — at least in recent decades — been forced to thread the needle of appealing to their more strongly ideological party base in the primary season, while retaining cross-appeal for the general election. The issue for conservatives now, as Blow and others have pointed out, is that the base of those who are socially conservative has shrunk among both the party loyalists and the general population. As an example, a candidate like Mike Huckabee, whose differentiator has been his religious background and strong positions on moral issues, may face more of a challenge now than in the past if he attempts to primarily run on a platform of social/values issues.

But, this isn’t to say that a candidate may not be able to position him or herself as having concerns about moral values in the nation more generally. As we have seen, stating that moral values are in decline would resonate with the attitudes held by a huge percentage of Americans. Candidates could, in theory, associate these concerns with evidence showing the value of marriage as an institution — given its positive relationship to personal well-being and to children’s outcomes (although the reasons for these relationships are complex). But, generally speaking, there is little doubt that it’s likely to be a more difficult environment in this election for conservative candidates to focus on specific moral issues than has been the case in previous cycles.

Frank Newport, Ph.D., is Gallup’s Editor-in-Chief. He is the author of Polling Matters: Why Leaders Must Listen to the Wisdom of the People and God Is Alive and Well. Originally published at Gallup.com.


Of the Father’s Love Begotten

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I am proud of my wife, Paulie.  She started young loving Jesus.  She gave her heart to Him when she was seven years old.  Her mother guided her to the foot of the cross.  And there she has remained.

Paulie’s most recent song is titled Of the Father’s Love Begotten.  It is an ancient hymn that she discovered.  She appreciated the words, and worked with Peter Vantine to create an original arrangement.

The hymn is a christmas carol that is based on a poem written by the roman writer Aurelius Prudentius.  He lived in the latter half of the third century AD.  After practicing law he retired to an ascetic life.

According to wikipedia his poetry is “influenced by early Christian authors, such as Tertullian and St. Ambrose, as well as the Bible and the acts of the martyrs.”

While all the verses of the hymn are worthy of thought and meditation, this stanza tickled my fancy this morning.

Righteous judge of souls departed, righteous King of them that live,

On the Father’s throne exalted none in might with Thee may strive;

Who at last in vengeance coming

Sinners from Thy face shalt drive, evermore and evermore!

 It is comforting to realize that Christians have a King.  He is our loving heavenly Father.  And He has a son.  His name is Jesus Christ.  And these sent the third person of the trinity to dwell within us.  He is the Holy Spirit who empowers us.

We don’t elect this King.  He existed before elections, republics and nations.  As Prudentius observes, “On the Father’s throne exalted none in might with Thee may strive.”

In a couple weeks Paulie and I will fall on our faces and pray in front of America’s Supreme Court building in Washington D.C.  We won’t be there appealing to the nine judges who make up the court.  We are going to pray to the righteous judge of souls departed.  The righteous King of them that live.

America imagines that, in her might, she can prevail over this King, over God.  But our power is nothing.  It is not a matter of winning or losing.  It isn’t even possible to strive with this King.  This fight with God, this attempt to redefine marriage, is a figment of our imagination.  God isn’t even fighting.

None in might with Thee may strive.

And the answer to the oft-repeated question by all people of good will who ponder the trajectory of “gay” rights — “What’s next?” — is:

Who at last in vengeance coming

Sinners from Thy face shalt drive, evermore and evermore!

Our King will bring an end to the insanity.  Fathers don’t marry sons in the Kingdom of God.   And museums don’t honor perversion.  The heavenly kingdom makes sense.  Insanity is banished.

Paulie has written and produced over fifty songs.  We LOVE to give her music away.  We want to be  a blessing.  We want to build up your most holy faith.

Check out her music today.  Visit her online at www.paulieheath.com

 



The Long, Legal Road to Marital Anarchy

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As the calendar slips toward the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer, there’s a storm cloud hanging over America that will release its thunder in late June.

That’s when the U.S. Supreme Court is widely expected to declare a constitutional right to same-sex “marriage.”

We are at a moral precipice. America’s Founders could scarcely have imagined a handful of people in black robes becoming so powerful and arrogant that they could defy natural law with the stroke of a pen. The question is: Will they do it?

The drive to radically redefine marriage didn’t happen overnight. It’s the rotten fruit of the sexual revolution’s march through the institutions, along with 50 years of court rulings that pushed atomistic individualism at the expense of the family.

In his monograph The Supreme Court of the United States versus the American Family, the late Michael Schwartz noted: “While our legal system was maintaining the fiction that individuals were the only reality, we were living the truth that individuals are all members of families and that families are the real components of society.”

With the culture cut loose since the 1960s from its Christian underpinnings, Schwartz wrote, “the radical individualism that had been latent within our official legal structure is no longer held in check, no longer meets with the healthy resistance that had moderated and humanized it, and it is operating today in a fashion that is radically opposed to family solidarity.”

Mr. Schwartz penned this in 1983. But much happened before that. It took 178 years from America’s founding until the U.S. Supreme Court found a “right to privacy” in the U.S. Constitution.Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) involved a challenge to Connecticut’s law prohibiting the sale or distribution of contraceptives even to married couples. With William O. Douglas writing the decision, the court discovered a “right to privacy” in the “penumbra” of the Bill of Rights, largely based on the sanctity of marriage.

In 1972, contraception advocate Bill Baird challenged a Massachusetts law barring the sale of contraceptives to unmarried people. In Eisenstadt v. Baird, the court advanced the “right of privacy” beyond the marital relationship. Justice William Brennan cited Griswold for moral weight, and then abandoned the premise on which it rested —- the sanctity of marriage. The “right of privacy” shifted entirely to the individual.

It wasn’t much of a leap the next year when the court overturned all state abortion laws in Roe v. Wade, with Justice Harry Blackmun citing the penumbra-found right to privacy established inGriswold. This time, the court rested it primarily on the Constitution’s due process clause.

In 1976, the court handed down what Schwartz called “the most outrageously anti-family decision ever” in Planned Parenthood of Central Missouri v. Danforth. The ruling cut fathers out of the picture, with the court striking down Missouri laws requiring spousal consent before an abortion and parental consent before a minor’s abortion. The court thus made marriage irrelevant on the most momentous decision —- the taking or preserving of a human life that would be a member of the family.

In 1977, in Carey v. Population Services International, the court vacated a New York law that barred the sale of contraceptives to 15-year-olds and younger. Parents no longer had the right to know if their teens were equipping themselves for premarital sex.

The courts continued to pound away. In 1979, in Bellotti v. Baird, the Supreme Court established the “mature minor” standard, striking down a Massachusetts law requiring parental consent for a minor’s abortion.

Having driven wedges between husbands and wives and parents and their children, the courts turned to marriage itself. In 1993, Hawaii’s Supreme Court ruled that the state’s marriage law violated the state constitution’s equal protection provision regarding “sexual orientation.”

This triggered a massive effort to protect man-woman marriage in the law through the federal Defense of Marriage Act (1996) and dozens of state constitutional amendments or statutes. Meanwhile, Justice Anthony Kennedy authored rulings vacating Colorado’s voter-approved Amendment 2, limiting civil rights protections to categories other than “sexual orientation,” and in 2003 (Lawrence v. Texas) striking down anti-sodomy laws.

A decade later, in Windsor v. United States (2013) the court struck down portions of the Defense of Marriage Act, triggering an avalanche of rulings that legalized same-sex “marriage” in all but a handful of states. Several legislatures followed suit, but only in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota and Washington did voters change the definition.

So now we find ourselves at the end of a long legal jihad against marriage and family, wondering whether the Supremes will declare a new “right” out of whole cloth —- or pull back from that legal cliff.

A lot of loud voices are urging them to jump. But there is another voice, and it speaks in an entirely different language, directly to the human soul. Perhaps they will hear that one and honor His design for marriage.

This article was originally by The Washington Times.



‘Be Prepared’: ‘Gay’ Men with Boy Scouts in Tents

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I said it was coming. Many of us did. Two years ago this week the Boy Scouts of America voted to welcome into its ranks “open and avowed” homosexuality (boy-on-boy sexual attraction and behavior), thereby disavowing the “morally straight” Scout Oath its members are sworn to uphold.

Shortly thereafter I warned, “In so doing, the [Boy Scouts of America (BSA)] effectively waived the only legal defense it once had to preclude openly homosexual Scout leaders and gender-confused girls from its ranks: religious and moral conviction. It’s only a matter of time until the BSA is forced to capitulate to sexual extremists’ political demands and allow homosexual adults – men who define their identity based upon carnal appetites for other males – to take your boys on overnight camping trips.”

It’s happened. On Thursday BSA President Robert Gates announced that the organization’s unconditional surrender to the homofascist left is forthcoming and that the BSA will soon invite men who have sex with males (MSM) to become troop leaders. “The status quo in our movement’s membership standards cannot be sustained,” Gates disingenuously claimed, indicating that to maintain the BSA’s century-old proscription on “out” homosexual men would spell “the end of us as a national movement.”

This, of course, is hyperbolic nonsense and simply reflects a continuation of Gates’ long-standing pro-homosexual activism. While serving as secretary of defense he both advocated for and oversaw the implementation of the full repeal of the military’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy. This has effectively homosexualized the U.S. military, resulting in rampant anti-Christian discrimination and an explosion (a 33 percent spike) in male-on-male homosexual assaults. Does any honest, sane, thinking person imagine that a comparable increase in homosexual assault will not befall the Boy Scouts?

Michael Brown, Ph.D., is an expert on both homosexual activism and the disordered behaviors that define the homosexual lifestyle. He is author of such books as, “Can You Be Gay and Christian?” and the upcoming “Outlasting the Gay Revolution: Where Homosexual Activism Is Really Going and How to Turn the Tide.”

In an interview with WND, Dr. Brown said that he “believes if the Boy Scouts accept openly homosexual leaders, they will cease to be a positive moral force in the lives of American boys.”

Stated Brown: “This opens the door for sexual predators, a real danger, and it opens the door for gay boys to be flirting with straight boys under the auspices of the Boy Scouts.”

The BSA has already been plagued by a long history of man-on-boy homosexual assaults perpetrated by closeted Scout leaders. The shocking extent of the abuse has only recently been exposed as the BSA has worked hard to cover up the scandal.

Parents, the BSA is about to place political correctness above your child’s safety to a level unprecedented in the once-honorable organization’s long and storied history. This is not an opinion. It’s an empirical, quantifiable certainty.

Consider, for instance, a study published in the left-leaning Archives of Sexual Behavior, of over 200 convicted pedophiles. It found that “86 percent of offenders against males described themselves as homosexual or bisexual.” This demonstrates, as observes Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council: “Since almost 30 percent of child sexual abuse is committed by homosexual or bisexual men (one-third male-on-male abuse times 86 percent identifying as homosexual or bisexual), but less than 3 percent of American men identify themselves as homosexual or bisexual, we can infer that homosexual or bisexual men are approximately 10 times more likely to molest children than heterosexual men.”

This makes perfect sense when coupled with another 2001 study in the same peer-reviewed publication. It found that nearly half of all “gay”-identified men who participated in research were molested by a homosexual pedophile as boys: “46 percent of homosexual men and 22 percent of homosexual women reported having been molested by a person of the same gender. This contrasts to only 7 percent of heterosexual men and 1 percent of heterosexual women reporting having been molested by a person of the same gender.”

(View this shocking hidden-camera footage of “gay” men admitting that they weren’t “born that way,” but that they were “made that way” through childhood sexual assault.)

The connection between homosexual abuse and “gay identity” is undeniable. Although clearly not all “gay”-identified men and women abuse children, or were abused as children, the verifiable reality is that an alarmingly high percentage of them do and were. As with most forms of abuse, the cycle is both circular and vicious. “Born that way?” Not so much. “Made that way?” Sadly, it appears so.

Yet the BSA will not let facts get in the way of its extremist sexual agenda. “We must deal with the world as it is, not as we might wish it to be,” Gates said on Thursday.

Absolute garbage. This is not the world as it is. This is a world of the secular left’s making. I will again predict here that the BSA will soon open its ranks to sexually confused girls. Earlier this month the Girl Scouts of America similarly announced that it will allow boys pretending to be girls to join its ranks.

Parents, you’ve been warned. If you leave your children in the Boy or Girls Scouts of America, anything that might happen is on your head.

Dr. Brown agrees: “Given the new direction of the Boy Scouts, Brown urges parents to seek out an alternative,” reports WND.

Urged Brown: “Now would be a great time to find out more about the Christian boy scouts alternative, Trail Life USA.”

Indeed, Trail Life’s Membership Standards state, without equivocation, “The basis for the program’s ethical and moral standards are found in the Bible. In terms of sexual identification and behavior, we affirm that any sexual activity outside the context of the covenant of marriage between one man and one woman is sinful before God and therefore inconsistent with the values and principles of the program.

“Within these limits, we grant membership to adults and youth who do not engage in or promote sexual immorality of any kind, or engage in behavior that would become a distraction to the mission of the program.”

Trail Life’s chairman, John Stemberger, says his organization is “saddened” by Gates’ announcement.

“It is tragic that the BSA is willing to risk the safety and security of its boys because of peer pressure from activists groups,” he said. “Trail Life USA remains committed to timeless Christian values.”

And the BSA remains committed to child-endangerment and extremist sexual activism.



Not Your Typical Neighborhood “Museum”

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Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth About Homosexuality is drawing the attention of neighbors to “The Leather Archives & Museum” – described by the business itself as “a library, museum, and archives pertaining to Leather, fetishism, sadomasochism, and alternative sexual practices.”

“There are three schools within the radius of this sadomasochistic so-called museum – and it’s not really a museum, it’s a perversion center,” LaBarbera states. “A center that’s glorifying homosexual perversion of the most awful kind should not be anywhere near children or anywhere near schools.”

LA&M – which the pro-family activist says was started by homosexual sadomasochists – claims to have in its collection “original erotic art and artifacts from alternative sex organizations and individuals.”

Churches also are located in the Rogers Park area – churches that LaBarbera believes would likely frown on what the center stands for.

“It glorifies the most heinous perversions, including pedophilia and incest,” he remarks. “And nobody knows what’s going on in there except the homosexual movement – and they try to keep it hidden.”

Volunteers with Americans for Truth About Homosexuality are handing out leaflets in the entire neighborhood, alerting residents to the operation and urging them to contact their aldermen to protest.

This article was originally posted at the OneNewsNow.com website.



Boys Scouts of American Urge Change in Policy to Allow Openly Gay Adult Leaders

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The national president of the Boy Scouts of America, Robert Gates, said Thursday that the organization’s longstanding ban on participation by openly gay adults is no longer sustainable, and called for change in order to avert potentially destructive legal battles.

In a speech in Atlanta to the Scouts’ national annual meeting, Gates referred to recent moves by Scout councils in New York City and elsewhere to defy the ban.

“The status quo in our movement’s membership standards cannot be sustained,” he said.

Gates said no change in the policy would be made at the national meeting. But he raised the possibility of revising the policy at some point soon so that local Scout organizations could decide on their own whether to allow gays as leaders.”

Almost exactly two years to the day, Florida Family Policy Council President John Stemberger predicted on CNN that the Boy Scouts of America would change its policy again and also allow openly gay adults to be leaders within two years. Stemberger who also serves as Chairman of the Board of Trail Life USA, a Christian scouting organization, released the following statement:

“Trail Life USA is saddened by the announcement regarding the anticipated membership change in Boy Scouts of America, as many families and boys will be negatively affected by this departure from their own long-standing principles.  It is tragic that the BSA is willing to risk the safety and security of its boys because of peer pressure from activists groups.  Trail Life USA remains committed to timeless Christian values and to the hundreds of Charter Organizations and 23,000 members in 48 states.”

Stemberger’s CNN Debate with Scouts for Equality leader Zach Wahl’s can be seen HERE:



Justice Who Loves Gay Marriage May Force it on Those Who Don’t

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A conservative legal organization is calling for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to recuse herself from deciding the marriage case now before the court.

“A judge should avoid the appearance of impropriety as much as possible,” says Roger Gannam, senior counsel with Liberty Counsel.

Ginsburg, a far-left justice, had conducted five same-sex marriage ceremonies before the high court heard the landmark Obergefell v. Hodges in April. A ruling is coming in June.

More recently, Ginsburg presided over the so-called marriage of two men in Washington, D.C., reportedly emphasizing the word “Constitution” in the ceremony to the delight of  ttendees.

Gannam complains that Ginsburg is an “activist” for same-sex marriage rather than an impartial justice while the Supreme Court, he points out, is weighing the future legal definition of marriage in the United States.

He also points to statements Ginsburg made last February to the press on the subject.

“She basically said she thinks America is ready for same-sex marriage,” says the attorney, “and what she doesn’t seem to understand, or at least respect, is that it’s not the job – it’s not the role of the U.S. Supreme Court – to decide what America is ready for.”

OneNewsNow reported last September that Ginsburg praised the “genius of the Constitution” for allowing her to preside over her first homosexual ceremony in 2013.

That praise apparently only goes so far. A year before that ceremony, Ginsburg told Egyptian legal scholars that they should pattern that country’s constitution on others around the world, not the one in the United States she would later describe as “genius.”



Phoning in Phony Polling

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Written by Tony Perkins

In the marriage debate, we pay a lot of attention to how polling questions are asked.

But a new report from Pew Research shows that we should watch where they’re being asked too. For years, Family Research Council and other conservative groups have watched the media twist and distort survey questions to feed their “inevitability” narrative on same-sex “marriage.”

But, in election after election, those same researchers seemed surprised that the attitudes they measured in surveys didn’t show up with nearly the same ferocity as they did in polling results. A lot of that has to do with how the questions are phrased.

More often than not, left-leaning survey houses “prime” their surveys with language designed to steer people toward a particular result. In questions about same-sex “marriage,” they focus on words like “rights” or “outlaw” — any term they’ve proven to spark more empathy in the people they’re quizzing.

The goal is to predispose men and women to answer a certain way. It’s effective at creating headlines — but not nearly as useful at predicting how those same people will vote on the issue.

Why is that?

Well, Pew thinks it has to do with where and how these interviews are happening: during a live phone call or on the web.

In an interesting (and telling!) study, “From Telephone to the Web: The Challenge of Mode of Interview Effects in Public Opinion Polls,” Pew found that Americans did adapt their answer a little bit based on the mode of questioning.

But the biggest and most surprising swings of opinions were on LGBT issues.

If people were allowed to answer privately and anonymously, as opposed to on the phone with the pressures of political correctness, their responses spiked as much as 14%! When Pew asked if gays, lesbians, and transgenders “face a lot of discrimination,” only 48% answered yes online. But on the phone, they were 14 points more likely to say so!

It’s what some experts call “social desirability bias.” People give the answer they think you want to hear, instead of what they actually feel. That’s why there’s such a tremendous swing at the ballot box — sometimes as much as 6-10 percentage points on marriage protection amendments.

If you want to know where Americans really stand on marriage, the truth is in the ballots– where only three states directly voted to redefine it.

So be encouraged! All of these phony headlines about a seismic shift in cultural views are just the Left’s way of isolating people and forcing them into a P.C. box. Don’t buy it!

The other side doesn’t have “history” on its side — it has manufactured polling!

Tony Perkins is president of the Washington, D.C.-based Family Research Council. He is a former member of the Louisiana legislature where he served for eight years, and he is recognized as a legislative pioneer for authoring measures like the nation’s first Covenant Marriage law. 

This article was originally posted at the BarbWire.com website.



What is Marriage to Evangelical Millennials

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Written by Abigail Rine

A few weeks ago, I assigned the article “What is Marriage?” to the students in my gender theory class, which I teach at an evangelical university. This article presents an in-depth defense of the conjugal view of marriage, and I included it on the reading list as part of my efforts to expose students to a range of viewpoints—religious and secular, progressive and conservative. The goal is to create robust civil dialogue, and, ideally, to pave the way for thoughtful Christian contributions to cultural understandings of sex and gender. The one promise I make to my students at the beginning of the course is that they are guaranteed to read something they will find disagreeable, probably even offensive.

That promise used to be easier to keep.

When I first began teaching this course, my students were certainly curious about questions of gender, sexuality, feminism—the various “hot button” issues of our cultural moment—but they were nonetheless devout, and demonstrated, more or less, a Christian orientation to these topics. It wasn’t hard to find readings that challenged students’ shared values and assumptions, considering the secular bent of contemporary gender studies.

In just five years, however, this has changed. Students now arrive in my class thoroughly versed in the language and categories of identity politics; they are reticent to disagree with anything for fear of seeming intolerant—except, of course, what they perceive to be intolerant. Like, for example, “What is Marriage?”

My students hated it, as I suspected they would. They also seemed unable to fully understand the argument. As I tried to explain the reasoning behind the conjugal view of marriage and its attitude toward sex, I received dubious stares in response. I realized, as I listened to the discussion, that the idea of “redefining” marriage was nonsensical to them, because they had never encountered the philosophy behind the conjugal view of marriage. To them, the Christian argument against same-sex marriage is an appeal to the authority of a few disparate Bible verses, and therefore compelling only to those with a literalist hermeneutic. What the article names as a “revisionist” idea of marriage—marriage as an emotional, romantic, sexual bond between two people—does not seem “new” to my students at all, because this is the view of marriage they were raised with, albeit with a scriptural, heterosexual gloss.

While I listened to my students lambast the article, it struck me that, on one level, they were right: marriage isn’t in danger of being redefined; the redefinition began decades ago, in the wake of the sexual revolution. Once the link between sexuality and procreation was severed in our cultural imagination, marriage morphed into an exclusive romantic bond that has only an arbitrary relationship to reproduction. It is this redefinition, arguably, that has given rise to the same-sex marriage movement, rather than the other way around, and as the broader culture has shifted on this issue, so have many young evangelicals.

As I consider my own upbringing and the various “sex talks” I encountered in evangelical church settings over the past twenty years, I realize that the view of marital sex presented there was primarily revisionist. While the ideal of raising a family is ever-present in evangelical culture, discussions about sex itself focused almost exclusively on purity, as well as the intense spiritual bond that sexual intimacy brings to a married couple. Pregnancy was mentioned only in passing and often in negative terms, paraded alongside sexually transmitted diseases as a possible punishment for those who succumb to temptation. But for those who wait, ah! Pleasures abound!

There was little attempt to cultivate an attitude toward sexuality that celebrates its full telos: the bonding of the couple and the incarnation of new life. And there was certainly no discussion of a married couple learning to be responsive to their fertility, even as a guiding principle. To the contrary, the narrative implied that once the “waiting” was over, self-discipline would no longer be necessary. Marriage would be a lifelong pleasure romp. Sex was routinely praised as God’s gift to married couples—a “gift” largely due to its orgasmic, unitive properties, rather than its intrinsic capacity to create life.

The conjugal understanding of marriage, as articulated by Girgis et al, depends upon a view of sex that, in my experience, is not predominant in evangelicalism. Take Mark Driscoll’s book Real Marriage as a recent, if extreme, example. With its celebration of anal sex and breast augmentation as marital sex aids, Real Marriage is emblematic of how deeply the ideals of the sexual revolution have permeated our culture, even to its evangelical corners.

To my students, the authors of “What is Marriage?” are making a troubling move, reducing the purpose of marital sex to its reproductive function. What they seemed less able to recognize is that they have inherited the inverse: a view of sex with little meaningful connection to procreation. And once such a view of sexuality is embraced, there is not much foothold, aside from appeals to biblical authority, to support the conjugal understanding of marriage.

Abigail Rine, Ph.D., is assistant professor of English at George Fox University.

This article was originally posted at the First Things blog.



Religion, Race and Same-Sex Marriage

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Written by Dr. Frank Newport

Attitudes about same-sex marriage have undergone a rapid shift in American society. As recently as 2009, 40% of Americans said they believed that marriage between same-sex individuals should be legal and recognized by law as valid. Those views burst through the majority level in 2011, with support reaching a high of 55% in Gallup’s annual Morals and Values survey in 2014. We will have an update on these attitudes in the next couple of weeks with data from the May 2015 Morals and Values survey.

Support or opposition to the legalization of same-sex marriage is highly related to a number of demographic characteristics in the population, the most significant of which are religion and partisanship.

The table below is based on more than 4,000 Gallup interviews conducted between 2012 and 2014 in which the legalization of same-sex marriage question was asked. The average support for legalized same-sex marriage across these interviews was 54%. But support shifts from 29% among Americans who attend religious services once a week to 75% among those who never attend religious services. This represents a 46-percentage-point spread between the two extremes of groups defined by their religiosity.

Support for Legal Same-Sex Marriage by Religious Service Attendance

A few years ago, we asked those who opposed the legalization of same-sex marriage to explain their position in their own words. Almost half mentioned religion or the teachings of the Bible in response as their primary justification for their position.

What are some of the reasons why you oppose same-sex marriages?

This strong relationship between religiosity and approval of same-sex marriage creates important cross currents within some segments of the U.S. population. One of these segments is the black population. More than eight in 10 black Americans identify as Democrats or say they lean Democratic, 34 percentage points higher than the national average of 47%. We know that partisanship is highly related to attitudes about same-sex marriage, with 74% of Democrats and Democratic leaners approving compared with 32% among Republicans and Republican leaners.

But blacks in the U.S. are also highly religious. Forty-five percent of blacks attend church about once a week or every week, the highest of any major race or ethnic group, and above the U.S. population average of 39%. Only 12% of blacks never attend church, compared with 21% of all national adults. Blacks’ religiosity stands out in particular when compared with Democrats who are not black, only 27% of whom attend religious services about once a week or every week.

Thus, the fact that blacks are highly likely to identify as Democrats and to be highly religious leads to the type of cross-pressure I mentioned above. Democratic orientation carries with it a propensity to support same-sex marriage, while high religiosity carries with it a much lower probability of supporting same-sex marriage.

So where does this leave the black population? Fifty-one percent of blacks support same-sex marriage, slightly below the population average of 54%.

The impact of religion is starkly evident when we look at black Democrats (again, over 80% of all blacks). Black Democrats’ support for same-sex marriage is at 55%, well below the 78% support among all other (non-black) Democrats. Blacks are highly reliable Democratic voters in almost all elections, and as a group they are in sync with Democratic policy positions on many fronts. The issue of same-sex marriage, however, is a significant exception.

Support for Legal Same-Sex Marriage by Race and Party

Proponents of same-sex marriage have positioned the issue as a matter of civil rights, and the arguments heard this week before the Supreme Court played out on a legal canvas. The decision that will be forthcoming from SCOTUS this June on same-sex marriage will be a legal one. Yet, for a not insubstantial minority of Americans, the issue is not a legal one, but rather a moral and religious issue.

The process of using the Bible and religious teachings as the basis for decisions on what should be normative and/or legal in a society is not new, and biblical prooftexting of positions on issues is as old as the Bible itself. It is not a clear cut process. For example, some proponents of same-sex marriage in fact argue that taking religion and the teachings of the Bible seriously doesn’t lead to a condemnation of same-sex relations and same-sex marriage, but rather support for these positions.

What we do know is that the power of religion as a foundation for views of life, culture and society can be profound, and certainly is in this situation, as seen in the attitudes of black Democrats. It is an element of the debate that same-sex marriage proponents most likely will need to continue to confront head-on in the months ahead.

Frank Newport, Ph.D., is Gallup’s Editor-in-Chief. He is the author of Polling Matters: Why Leaders Must Listen to the Wisdom of the People and God Is Alive and Well.

This article was originally posted at the Gallup.com website.



A Prayer for Marriage

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Abba, Father.

Come now, Holy Spirit, and speak through Your humble servant. Let this prayer be Your prayer – truth in love, salt and light.

And war.

Lord Jesus, ours is a nation in rebellion. Evil is good and good evil. We are as drunkards, teetering at cliff’s edge – haughty, prideful, defiant and soft.

We plead Your return, but tarry as told. We lament, like Lot, that a once great nation has been given over to a reprobate mind.

Sodom crumbles about as we gaze palmward, distracted and glassy-eyed, at shimmering digital confections.

They pound at our temple doors, demanding to know our heavenly hosts.

Yet naught we do.

Save cower.

Your bride has been unfaithful, Lord Jesus. As it was in the days of Noah, we tempt our Lord God.

We entreat Your mercies, but merit Your wrath.

Yours is a righteous anger, Holy Spirit. It indwells, with You, our very soul.

We share in it.

As it was in the days of Noah, so now we eat, drink, marry and give unto marriage.

And as it was in the days of Noah, we arrogantly defy You, presuming to give unto marriage, that which cannot be given. “Vile affections.” A sterile, shameful, feculent mockery of Your masterful design for our fruitful multiplication.

What You cast asunder let no man join together.

Lord have mercy on those precious babes, acquired, like so much chattel, as selfish adults set up to play house.

The intentionally fatherless.

The deliberately motherless.

Be their Father where they have none.

You knew of this before time began.

They tear away at that which You designed and defined.

And so we, Your hands and feet, battle the powers and principalities who pull temporal puppets by marionette strings aflame from the pits of hell.

Forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do. We lift up those enslaved by all sins of the flesh. For those who do not, may they come to know You, be justified, sanctified and glorified.

Neither are we without blame.

Forgive us, Lord Jesus. We, Your bride, repent of our own part in this national sin. Forgive us for undermining this gift You have given – for succumbing to the devilish devices of divorce, infidelity and spousal neglect.

For our selfish ambition.

For making unholy, holy matrimony.

Embolden us.

Strengthen us.

Guide and direct us.

Mortify this national sin, oh God.

End it.

Kill it.

This week past we witnessed a circus – a Court called Supreme debated that which is closed for debate.

At least four of the nine appear poised to defy Your Supreme Authority.

Of the others, many a faithful were buoyed by words spoken.

Soften the hardened hearts of those black-robed autocrats who labor under the enemy’s deception, Father God. Humble them. Bless them. Direct them.

Even still, we gird for battle should Caesar misappropriate that which belongs to You. If this court attempts to do that which cannot be done – if our government defies You, then, with You, it becomes at enmity.

And we, Your faithful, will be marked subversive.

But waiver we shan’t.

Where the contrived “laws” of man are at odds with Your transcendent truths – with Your Law – it is You, oh Lord, to Whom we pledge obedience.

We will not comply with an unjust ruling.

And we will face persecution.

And we will count it all joy.

Because You are sovereign.

And victory is Yours.

 

 

 



Marriage and Equal Protection

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Written by Robert George

For the Court to strike down laws defining marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife would be to abolish the idea that men and women matter—equally—in the lives of the children they create. And it would be both a judicial usurpation of legislative authority and a federal intrusion into a matter left by the Constitution in the hands of the states.

If marriage were simply a form of sexual-romantic companionship or domestic partnership, then the equal protection clause of the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment would require the Supreme Court to strike down state laws limiting marriage licenses to male-female partners.

There would be no principled basis for distinguishing opposite- from same-sex relationships—or, for that matter, from multiple-party (“polyamorous”) ones. Any two (or more) people can feel affection for one another, believe that the quality of their relationship is enhanced by mutually agreeable sexual acts, and make a commitment to caring and sharing. So if our law understood these things as the essence of marriage, then restricting it to two-person, opposite-sex partnerships would be invidiously discriminatory—a denial of equal protection.

Historically, however, our matrimonial law has not conceived marriage as mere sexual-romantic companionship or domestic partnership; nor is there anything in the text, logic, structure, or historical understanding of the Constitution that commits the nation to such a conception of marriage.

In fact, the Constitution does not attempt to settle the question of how marriage should be defined. It dictates no choice among competing conceptions of what marriage is. It does not, for example, forbid polygamy or require states to permit it. Nor does it choose between marriage conceived as a genderless institution and marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife. Rather, the Constitution leaves the choice among competing conceptions of marriage where it leaves most policy questions, namely, to the judgment of the people and their elected representatives.

State Marriage Laws: Rooted in History, Biology, and Psychology

So, historically, how have the states understood and defined marriage?

They have understood and defined it as a relationship shaped by the needs of children for mothers and fathers, rather than as an institution whose purpose is to serve the interests or desires of adults by facilitating sexual-romantic companionship. Our laws, including those under review in the cases now pending before the Supreme Court, reflect the judgment that marriage is the conjugal union of spouses, rooted in the sexual-reproductive complementarity of male and female, which brings together a man and a woman as husband and wife to be father and mother to any children born of their union. As a social institution, it aims to secure for children the inestimable blessing of being brought up in the committed love—the marital bond—of the man and woman whose union brought them into being, and the related benefit of both maternal and paternal influences and care.

This understanding of marriage as a conjugal union recognizes that not all married couples will have children, though most will. But it responds to the biological fact that every child will have a mother and a father, and recognizes the psychological reality that children generally long to know and be known by, and to love and be loved by, both their fathers and their mothers. And it is built upon the fact  that the social purpose of legally recognizing and supporting marriage as an institution—the goal that gives the state any legitimate interest in marriage—is to ensure that as many children as possible are brought up by their father and mother in the marital bond. After all, the state has no interest whatsoever in the romantic lives of its citizens as such.

But what about the fact that some married couples cannot have children? Does that show that marriage cannot really be a conjugal relationship, but does in the end boil down to sexual-romantic companionship?

No. Our law, and the traditions of thought that have informed and supported it, have always understood marriage as the type of relationship that would naturally be fulfilled by the spouses having and rearing children together. And sexually complementary spouses can enter into precisely that type of relationship even when one or both happen to be infertile.

This understanding of the matter simultaneously and perfectly coherently holds two important truths: (1) the very idea of marriage is rooted in the male-female complementarity that makes sexual reproduction possible, and (2) the value of marriage cannot simply be reduced to its utility as a means to the end of having and properly rearing children. Men and women are so constituted that being in a marriage—a sexually complementary relationship that, as such, is naturally ordered to procreation and that would be fulfilled by having and rearing children together—is valuable in itself, and not merely as a means to something else, even where that something else is the great good of having and rearing children.

The Constitution Doesn’t Adjudicate between Competing Conceptions of Marriage

As a matter of constitutional law, defenders of state marriage statutes need not show that the conjugal conception of marriage is superior to the idea of marriage as mere sexual-romantic companionship or domestic partnership (though I certainly believe it is).

The question before the Court is whether the Constitution requires states to adopt the latter conception of marriage. Clearly, it does not. Thus, state laws defining marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife do not violate the equal protection guarantee, and there is no constitutional warrant for the Court’s imposing a genderless conception of marriage on the country, even if a majority of justices happen to favor such a conception as a matter of social policy. Courts are not legislatures, and judges should not usurp legislative authority, even for the sake of a cause they personally happen to believe represents social progress.

Still, it is worth noting that the historical understanding of marriage as a conjugal union has the immense advantage over the revisionist alternative of being able to provide a principled basis for the norms that even today most people believe pertain to marriage: (1) that it should be a union of two persons, not three or more; (2) that it should be sexually closed and not “open” (even by consent of both spouses); (3) that it should be pledged to permanence, and not conceived as a temporary alliance (for a set term, or “for as long as love lasts”).

But wasn’t marriage once defined as a same-race relationship, with interracial marriages being banned? Didn’t the Supreme Court strike down anti-miscegenation laws as unconstitutional limitations on the freedom to marry? Aren’t laws defining marriage as conjugal (opposite-sex) guilty of the same offense?

Protecting Marriage as a Conjugal Union Is Not Analogous to Racism

Throughout history and across cultures, marriage has been defined as a conjugal partnership precisely because the sexual-reproductive complementarity of man and woman has been understood as central to it. That has been true even in cultures that permit polygamy. Race was generally not regarded as having anything to do with what marriage is or the social purposes it served. After all, a man and a woman of different races can unite in a bond of precisely the sort that is oriented to procreation and would be fulfilled by their having children together.

Anti-miscegenation laws were innovations that were introduced in certain states of the United States and a few other jurisdictions for one purpose only: to sustain and reinforce a vicious system of white supremacy and racial subordination and exploitation that began with race-based chattel slavery. These laws did not treat interracial marriage as impossible or a contradiction in terms, but rather prohibited people from entering into such marriages and punished them if they did. The objective of these laws was not the laudable one of maximizing the odds that children would grow up with the blessing of both a mother and a father in their lives. The goal, rather, was the ignoble one of maintaining “racial purity” and preventing the “mongrelization” of the allegedly superior race.

In the case of Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws precisely because they represented and reinforced just the kind of racial injustice that the Fourteenth Amendment was enacted to dismantle. The racial classifications these laws introduced were rooted in sheer prejudice and lacked any rational basis or relationship to a legitimate governmental interest.

By contrast, conjugal marriage laws did not arise out of racism, sexism, or any other form of bigotry. They were created and became the norm virtually everywhere for the vital purpose of bringing the two sexes together in a bond that is uniquely apt for nurturing and educating children. The idea of marriage as a conjugal partnership is not rooted in the bigoted belief that any person or group of persons is inherently inferior to any other, but rather in the understanding that moms and dads are not substitutable—both are necessary for parenting.

The goal of anti-miscegenation laws was to keep the races apart—so that one could exploit the other. The point of conjugal marriage laws is to bring the sexes together—so that as many children as possible can be brought up in the committed bond uniting their parents. Racial sameness has nothing to do with marriage. Sexual difference—complementarity—is central to the very concept of marriage. Indeed, but for the fact that human beings happen to be among the types of creatures that reproduce sexually, no culture would ever have conceived the idea of marriage.

For the Court to strike down laws defining marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife would be to abolish the idea that men and women matter—equally—in the lives of the children they create. And it would be both a judicial usurpation of legislative authority and a federal intrusion into a matter left by the Constitution in the hands of the states.

Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He has served on the US Commission on Civil Rights and the President’s Council on Bioethics. He is co-author (with Sherif Girgis and Ryan Anderson) of What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense. Originally posted at thePublicDiscourse.com.



Follow the Money: HRC/Amicus Brief

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Written by Chris Walker

This past Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court of the United States heard arguments for Obergefell v. Hodges in what is shaping up to be a landmark case in the national marriage debate. At issue are the questions of whether the Fourteenth Amendment requires states to license marriages between two people of the same sex and whether the Fourteenth Amendment requires states to recognize marriages between two people of the same sex licensed and performed out-of-state.

By now, conservatives should be very familiar with an influential organization that has carried the banner for same-sex marriage advocacy, the Human Rights Campaign. However, many may be unaware of the powerful network of corporations that are involved with HRC’s longstanding push to overturn marriage laws in America.

Just a few years back, HRC organized the Business Coalition for DOMA Repeal as a series of cases, such as Windsor, challenging the federal Defense of Marriage Act were heading to the Supreme Court. Fast-forward to 2015 and we see a growing number of corporations advocating for ultimate overhaul of state marriage laws in Obergefell.
In March of this year, 379 business entities signed an amicus brief urging the Court to rule against traditional marriage laws. Not surprisingly, many of the companies signing the brief are listed as corporate supporters of HRC. Just a few examples of these include American Airlines, Bank of America, Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Starbucks.
Other signers that are also confirmed sponsors of the annual HRC National Dinner include Marriott, Microsoft and Wells Fargo.

2nd Vote has compiled a resource page that list the companies involved with HRC, as well as the companies advocating against traditional marriage laws. This page also includes a list of all the signers of the amicus brief and links to the language contained in the brief.

CLICK HERE to see the list of corporate sponsors.

In dissent of Windsor, Justice Antonin Scalia appears to have been eerily prescient in his criticism of the majority’s ruling when he wrote: By formally declaring anyone opposed to same-sex marriage an enemy of human decency, the majority arms well every challenger to a state law restricting marriage to its traditional definition. Indeed, the ruling in Windsor gave groups like HRC a valuable rhetorical tool to enlist the support of major corporations to fund their agenda.

However, that agenda that we actually fund by doing business with many of these companies goes against our values on several levels. Recently, we have seen major corporations in Indiana eagerly joining the campaign to spread disinformation on laws protecting religious liberty. Perhaps just as concerning, we see the business alliance with HRC pushing for judicial activism that could threaten the very tenets of the legislative process and federalism.

Conservatives should inform themselves on the potential ramifications of Obergefell and hold these companies accountable for their advocacy that benefits their own self-interest, which the evidence shows is not constitutionalism, nor is it the defense of our most sacred social unit.

 

Chris Walker is the Executive Director of 2nd Vote, a conservative shopper app. To find out more, download the free app or visit 2ndVote.com. Originally posted at Redstate.com.



Bait And Switch: How Same Sex Marriage Ends Family Autonomy

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Written by Stella Morabito

Abolishing all civil marriage is the primary goal of the elites who have been pushing same sex marriage. The scheme called “marriage equality” is not an end in itself, and never really has been. The LGBT agenda has spawned too many other disparate agendas hostile to the existence of marriage, making marriage “unsustainable,” if you will. By now we should be able to hear the growing drumbeat to abolish civil marriage, as well as to legalize polygamy and all manner of reproductive technologies.

Consider also the breakneck speed at which the push for same sex marriage has been happening recently. The agenda’s advocates have been very methodical in their organization, disciplined in their timing, flush with money, in control of all information outlets, including media, Hollywood, and academia. And perhaps most telling is the smearing of any dissenter in the public square, a stigma made de rigueur by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in his animus-soaked opinion that repealed the Defense of Marriage Act.

We’ve seen also how the Obama Administration’s push for same sex marriage has occurred in lockstep with policies that are hostile to marriage, such as the severe marriage penalty written into Obamacare.

Activist judges have taken their cues from Attorney General Eric Holder who used the DOMA repeal to proclaim open season on any state that recognizes marriage as an organic (i.e., heterosexual) union of one man and one woman. In their crosshairs are state constitutions, businesses, students, communities, churches, and all of those bogus “conscience clauses” that were written into same sex marriage legislation in order to sway wavering state legislators to vote “aye.”

The tipping point came soon after certain big name conservatives and pundits swallowed the bait on same sex marriage. Folks like Michael Barone, John Bolton, George Will, S. E. Cupp, and David Blankenhorn have played a huge role in building momentum for this movement, which, as we will see, is blazing a trail to the abolition of state recognized marriage. And whether they know it or not, advocacy for same sex marriage is putting a lot of statist machinery into motion. Because once the state no longer has to recognize your marriage and family, the state no longer has to respect the existence of your marriage and family.

Without civil marriage, the family can no longer exist autonomously and serve as a wall of separation between the individual and the state. This has huge implications for the survival of freedom of association.

The notion of marriage equality was never about marriage or about equality. It’s all about the wrapping paper. It’s been packaged as an end in itself, but it is principally just a means to a deeper end. It is the means by which marriage extinction – the true target — can be achieved. If marriage and family are permitted to exist autonomously, power can be de-centralized in society.  So the family has always been a thorn in the side of central planners and totalitarians. The connection between its abolition and the limitless growth of the state should be crystal clear. So anyone who has bought into this movement, or is tempted to do so, would want to step back and take a harder look.

Six Indicators We’re Headed Directly for Abolishing Civil Marriage

We can sort out six developments that indicate we’re on the fast track to abolishing civil marriage. They include: 1) The blueprint for abolishing family, developed by the founder of feminist legal theory, Martha Fineman; 2) support and advocacy of  Fineman’s model by facilitators and regulators in the Obama Administration; 3) the statements of prominent LGBT activists themselves, including their 2006 manifesto which in effect established the abolition of marriage as the goal of the same sex marriage movement; 4) the demographic shift to single rather than married households; 5) the growing shift in social climate from marriage equality to marriage hostility; and 6) the recent push to export the LGBT agenda globally, particularly targeting poor and developing nations of Africa.

1) The Gender Theorist Model: Replace civil marriage with government-regulated contractual relationships

Collectivist style parenting may still seem like the stuff of science fiction to a lot of folks, but the ground for it has softened a lot since Hillary Clinton’s 1996 treatise It Takes a Village and American Federation of Teachers president Sandra Feldman’s 1998 op-ed “The Childswap Society.” We now have MSNBC anchor Melissa Harris-Perry declaring open war on traditional families by announcing “We have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.”

She envisages that the State will fill the vacuum left by the abolition of family

The abolition of marriage and family has been a longtime project of gender theorists. Among them is internationally renown feminist law theorist Martha Albertson Fineman whose 2004 book The Autonomy Myth argues strenuously for “the abolition of marriage as a legal category.” Her treatise is breathtaking in its brazen approach to ending family autonomy and privacy.

Fineman advocates for a system that would unavoidably result in the regulation of personal relationships through legal contracts. “Contract,” she writes “is an appealing metaphor with which to consider social and political arrangements. It imagines autonomous adults” hashing out the terms, etc. Yet she envisages that the State will fill the vacuum left by the abolition of family [emphasis added]:

“. . . in addition to contract rules, I anticipate that ameliorating doctrines would fill the void left by the abolition of this aspect of family law. In fact, it seems apparent to me that a lot more regulation (protection) would occur once interactions between individuals within families were removed from behind the veil of privacy that now shields them.”

Fineman operates on the apparent assumption that family privacy serves no purpose other than to afford institutional protection for men behaving badly. Her prescription is sweeping: “Once the institutional protection [is] removed, behavior would be judged by standards established to regulate interactions among all members of society.” [emphasis added]

There you have it. All of your social interactions judged by certain standards. Standards established by whom? The state. And lest our eyes glaze over at mention of it, we ought to think of the State for what it really is: a hierarchy of cliques, with one dominant clique at the top. (Think mean girls in charge of everything and everyone.)

Fineman replaces the word “spouse” with the term “sexual affiliate,” because, she professes, what we think of as “family” should be defined by its function, not its form. In other words, only “caretaker-dependent relationships” would be recognized in the sense that “family” is recognized today.

So the abolition of marriage, according to Fineman:

“would mean that sexual affiliates (formerly labeled husband and wife) would be regulated by the terms of their individualized agreements, with no special rules governing fairness and no unique review or monitoring of the negotiation process.”

Feel better?  Fineman also states approvingly that:

“if the family is defined functionally, focused on the caretaker-dependent relationship, the traditionally problematic interactions of sexual affiliates (formerly designated “spouses”) are not protected by notions of family privacy.”

Indeed, no interaction could be protected by “notions of family privacy” in Fineman’s model. She elaborated further and more recently on all of this in an October 2013 article in the Chicago-Kent Law Review.

2) Friends in High Places promote Fineman’s Model of State-Regulated Contracts

Cass Sunstein, who served as President Obama’s regulatory czar from 2009 to 2012, has advocated strongly for the abolition of civil marriage and its replacement with contracts that would negotiate the terms of personal relationships.

In 2008 Sunstein published an article in the Cardozo Law Review arguing that there is no constitutional right to marry and suggesting that “states may abolish marriage without offending the Constitution.” And an entire chapter of a popular book Sunstein co-authored with Richard Thaler in 2008 is devoted to arguing for the abolition of civil marriage. This is from Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness.

“Under our proposal, the word marriage would no longer appear in any laws, and marriage licenses would no longer be offered or recognized by any level of government.  . . . Under our approach, the only legal status states would confer on couples would be a civil union, which would be a domestic partnership agreement between any two people.*(*Footnote:  We duck the question of whether civil unions can involve more than two people.)”

Sunstein and Thaler dub their approach “libertarian paternalism,” an odd jargon which seems contrived to win over readers by evoking a strange juxtaposition of moderation and a heavy touch of the archaic.

Clearly, Sunstein has been laying the groundwork for the abolition of civil marriage. He purports that this would get the government out of a “licensing scheme,” but his specious phrasing is a fig leaf covering up the predictable effects of his approach: greater government regulation of personal relationships. His popular writing on the subject comes in the guise of “privatization” of relationships – even as gender theorists like Fineman argue against America’s “obsession” with privacy and individualism. But this is not a difficult circle to square. Thaler and Sunstein argue, pretty much in line with Fineman, that people ought to make use of contracts to define the terms of their relationships. And contracts invite – indeed, for Fineman, they demand – that the government function as an intimate partner in this legal ménage a trois.

3) LGBT Activists Say So Themselves: The Goal is to Abolish Marriage

“Gay marriage is a lie,” announced gay activist Masha Gessen in a panel discussion last year at the Sydney Writers’ Festival. “Fighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we’re going to do with marriage when we get there.”  [Applause.] “It’s a no-brainer that the institution of marriage should not exist.”

Gessen was merely echoing a message from an LGBT manifesto of 2006 called Beyond Same Sex Marriage. The manifesto is a blatant rallying cry to bring about a post-marriage society, one in which there is no room for state-recognized marriage.

“It’s a no-brainer that the institution of marriage should not exist.”

Ethics and Public Policy Institute scholar Stanley Kurtz wrote extensively about this document in two National Review articles, entitled The Confession and The Confession II. Kurtz noted that the intent of the sponsors of the manifesto – which as of 2006 had hundreds of prominent signatories, including Cornel West, Barbara Ehrenreich, Martha Fineman, and Gloria Steinem – was “to dissolve marriage by extending the definition to every conceivable family type.”

Sunstein needn’t have “ducked the issue” of more than two parties in a domestic contract because legalizing polygamy is central to the manifesto. And there can be no doubt that the legalization of polygamy would result in the abolition of all state-recognized marriage. Polygamy — repackaged in the now trendy term “polyamory” – comes with an array of configurations too dizzying and with too many moving parts to be sustained as state-recognized marriage.

Despite the existence of the manifesto, the official line of the LGBT community still seems to be that gay marriage is only about equal rights for couples who love one another. Their spokespersons have been disciplined – with a friendly media running cover for them – in maintaining the official line so as not to provoke a debate about the real agenda to abolish marriage.

Supposedly conservative gay activists like Jonathan Rauch have also run cover and protected the timing of the agenda by claiming that the manifesto was merely a “fringe” of the LGBT movement. It’s irrelevant whether or not Rauch really believes his own propaganda that gay marriage will somehow strengthen a marriage culture by bringing loving gay couples into it. The main effect of the Rauch meme is to accelerate the abolition of civil marriage by hastening a legal framework for genderless marriage that will pave the way for total abolition of  civil marriage, and with it private family life.

It’s clear the gloves are coming off and timing has entered a new phase. The push for polyamory has gone mainstream, right on schedule. Supportive puff pieces on it are popping up in places like Atlantic Monthly and the erstwhile women’s magazine Redbook. In the end, polyamory serves only as a transitory way station between the legalization of same sex marriage and the abolition of civil marriage.

4) Growing Dominance of Singles

Recent decades have seen a sharp upsurge of unmarried households. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2012 there were 103 million unmarried people 18 and older. That’s 44 percent of all US residents over 18. And 62 percent of those 103 million had never been married. Unmarried individuals represented 56 million households in 2012. The rise in singles has had an undeniably huge impact on the electorate. In the 2012 election 39 percent of the voters were unmarried, compared to 24 percent of the voters in the 1972 election.

The “Communication League for Unmarried Equality,” is a coalition of singles’ rights organizations which argues that government benefits for marriage – including tax breaks and survivor benefits in social security — amount to marital status discrimination. Its advocates argue that civil marriage unjustly awards financial, social, and cultural benefits to married individuals at the expense of unmarried individuals who end up subsidizing marriage and children, without compensation.  In addition, proponents of “unmarried equality” insist that the existence of these privileges serve to perpetuate prejudices and stereotypes about singles that inflict harm on them. (Sounds like a Supreme Court case brewing.)

Bella DePaulo spearheaded the movement as a blogger and author of Singled Out and Singlism: What it is, Why it Matters and How to Stop It.” According to DePaulo, the discrimination she calls “singlism” may seem more subtle than racism or sexism, but is just as damaging. She has tip-toed to the edge of advocating for the abolition of marriage, with a professor of feminist philosophy Elizabeth Blake, by saying that marriage should be “minimized” (for now) so that singles have the same benefits as married individuals. Which, naturally, means abolishing marriage.

“Singlism” itself is not yet considered a form of illegal discrimination. But DePaulo believes it should be:

“Because singlism is built right into American laws, it is not possible to be single and not be a target of discrimination. If you have followed the marriage equality debate, then you probably know that there are more than 1,000 federal laws that benefit or protect only those people who are legally married. Even if same-sex marriage becomes legal throughout the land, all those people who are single — whether gay or straight or any other status — will still remain second class citizens.”

5) Morphing of the Memes – from Marriage Equality to Marriage Ambivalence to Marriage Hostility

“Why would anyone get married?” That’s a quote from Nancy Pelosi in a Valentine’s Day interview last month, downplaying the importance of marriage. While some might say she’s simply courting the singles demographic, she’s mostly reinforcing and echoing a narrative that marriage is irrelevant or perhaps even harmful. She is contributing to the drumbeat to abolish civil marriage.

Let’s not forget Julia, the mascot of Obama’s reelection campaign who serves as a Stepford wife to the State.

Major cultural forces – the media, academia, and Hollywood – have already adopted an increasingly hostile view of marriage. We can see it in the use of the term “greedy marrieds” from a recent New York Times feature “The Changing American Family“: “Single people live alone and proudly consider themselves families of one — more generous and civic-minded than ‘greedy marrieds.’”

And look at NBC Sports in its coverage Olympic gold medalist skier David Wise. It described him as living an “alternative lifestyle” because he happened to be young and married with children.  The clear inference was that he was abnormal.

The promotion and glorification of single parenting which got its start with the Murphy Brown TV series of the 1990s has gone into hyperdrive now. Check out online services such as Modamily, that matches people with “parenting partners,” with whom they can draw up a contract, arrange for artificial reproductive technologies, and forgo marriage.

And let’s not forget Julia, the mascot of Obama’s reelection campaign who serves, with more than a bit of irony, as a Stepford wife to the State. The narrative was clearly hostile to the idea of marriage and supportive of policies to abolish it.

6) LGBT Push for Same Sex Marriage in Developing Countries

The rush by LGBT activists and the Obama administration to lift bans on gay marriage in all 50 states is peculiarly fast and furious. Oddly so for a movement that seems to be gaining steam and social compliance. A reasonable question would be: What’s the rush if things are going so swimmingly your way? The only answer seems to be one of fragile timing.

The sudden LGBT push globally, especially in Africa, should give us pause as well. Why the abrupt shove into poor countries, threatening to cut off aid unless they comply with such a massive cultural shift and adopt the Western LGBT agenda? Why the laser focus on Uganda and Malawi instead of places like Iran where abuses of homosexuals are likely just as common?

We are witnessing a major strategy to export gay marriage – and all it entails for the abolition of marriage — worldwide. President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry have made an example of Uganda by threatening to cut off its aid over the existence of its anti-sodomy laws. Other developing nations are expected to take note and fall into line, creating a cascade effect until any other nation who resists will feel the noose tightening.

We might reasonably ask why this particular agenda is getting so much attention while the world goes to hell in a hand basket. Syria is overrun with vicious terrorist gangs at least as bad as its president. Russia is flexing its muscles, having just invaded the Ukraine and Crimea. Christians are being exterminated in record numbers throughout the Middle East. We’re looking at nuclear weapons in Iran. There’s a nuclear threat from North Korea, which not only starves its own people but is run by a guy who, it was said, feeds his political enemies to starving dogs. And yet President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry have been spending special quality time focusing on the LGBT agenda in in the poor countries of Africa?

Clearly the Western LGBT agenda represents a new brand of cultural imperialism that is not content to shape life at home, but intends to propagate itself – and all it entails – worldwide.

Ending Marriage Leads To A Centralized All Powerful State

The hard push for marriage equality was never about marriage. Neither was it about equality. It’s a convenient vehicle to abolish civil marriage, whether to rid the world of paternalism, evade responsibility for children, “privatize” relationships, or whatever. Abolishing marriage strips the family of its autonomy by placing it much more directly under the regulating control of the state.

Once the state no longer has to recognize the marriage relationship and its presumption of privilege and privacy, we all become atomized individuals in the eyes of the state, officially strangers to one another. We lose the space – the buffer zone – that the institution of the natural, organic family previously gave us and that forced the state to keep its distance.

Isn’t it ironic that feminists would replace the “paternalism” of marriage (what happened to strong women?) with the new paternalism of state regulation of personal relationships? Isn’t it ironic that singles in this scheme of things simply end up marrying the state?

At some point, we must conclude that freedom of association has its source in state acceptance of the core family as the primary buffer zone between the individual and the state. There is no escaping this fact, no matter a particular generation’s attitude or public opinion polling, or advances in medical technology, or whatever else comes our way.

Marriage Is The Template For Freedom Of Association

Without state recognition of – and respect for – marriage, can freedom of association survive? How so? On what basis?

Civil marriage provides the entire basis for presuming the rights and responsibilities of biological parents to raise their own children. It also assumes the right of spouses to refuse to testify against one another in court. It presumes survivorship – in guardianship of children as well as inheritance of property. If we abolish civil marriage, these will no longer be rights by default, but rights to be distributed at the pleasure of a bureaucratic state.

When a couple enters into a civil marriage, they are not inviting the government into their relationship, but rather putting the government on notice that they are a family unit. It’s the couple – not the state – that’s in the driver’s seat.Otherwise, they needn’t marry. Otherwise, central planners wouldn’t be so intent on abolishing marriage as a private and autonomous association from which the state must keep its distance, unless one partner wishes to exit by divorce.

Children – i.e., all of us born into a family – inherit that presumption of autonomy and broadcast it into society. We do so whether or not we ever get married ourselves. The presumption of family autonomy and privacy informs our right to freely associate with others – through romances, friendships, business contracts, and so on. It would be catastrophic to freedom if we threw it away.

State recognition of this autonomy cannot exist without state recognition of marriage. In fact, traditional marriage — just like traditional oxygen if you will – helps all of society breathe more freely.

If civil marriage is abolished, you can say hello to the government at your bedroom door because that comfortable little meme about “getting the state out of the marriage business” will have flown out your bedroom window while you were sleeping.

Stella Morabito can be followed on Twitter here.  She blogs at www.stellamorabito.net. Originally published at thefederalist.com.



Christian Leaders Affirm Support for Traditional Marriage Ahead of Supreme Court Case

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Pastors Say Marriage Must Be Preserved for Sake of Children

Written by Stoyan Zaimov

Religious leaders from a wide array of denominations have released a joint statement reaffirming their support for traditional marriage ahead of the Supreme Court’s hearing of oral arguments on Tuesday. The Christian leaders have said that reaffirming marriage as being between one man and one woman is vital for protecting children and offering them both a father and a mother.

“As religious leaders from various faith communities, we acknowledge that marriage is the foundation of the family where children are raised by a mother and a father together,” the statement reads, in part.

The Rev. Leith Anderson, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, the Most Rev. Foley Beach, the archbishop and Primate of the Anglican Church in North America, and Most Rev. Salvatore J. Cordileone, the archbishop of San Francisco and chairman of the USCCB Subcommittee for the Promotion and Defense of Marriage, are just some of the notable names that have signed the letter.

On April 28, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on whether states have the right to determine their own definition of marriage, or whether the Constitution requires all 50 states to make same-sex marriage legal.

Presently 36 states, as well as the District of Colombia, have legalized same-sex marriage, while 13 states have bans on the practice.

The joint letter states that defending the traditional definition of marriage is about the well-being of children, and insists that every child has the right to both a mother and a father.

“Marriage as the union of a man and a woman is the only institution that encourages and safeguards the connection between children and their mother and father,” the religious leaders said.

“Although this connection cannot always be realized and sustained — and many single parents, for example, are heroic in their efforts to raise their children — it is in the best interests of the state to encourage and uphold the family founded on marriage and to afford the union of husband and wife unique legal protection and reinforcement.”

They add that there are “serious consequences” to redefining marriage also for religious freedom, as it would require same-sex relationships to be treated as the same as heterosexual unions.

“No person or community, including religious organizations and individuals of faith, should be forced to accept this redefinition. For many people, accepting a redefinition of marriage would be to act against their conscience and to deny their religious beliefs and moral convictions,” the statement continued.

“Government should protect the rights of those with differing views of marriage to express their beliefs and convictions without fear of intimidation, marginalization or unwarranted charges that their values imply hostility, animosity, or hatred of others.”

This article was originally posted at the ChristianPost.com website.