AN Oregon administrative judge has fined Aaron and Melissa Klein $135,000 for refusing to sell a wedding cake to lesbians. As reported at WND:

Bureau prosecutors sought $75,000 for each woman – $150,000 total – during a hearing on damages in March. Under the current ruling, Rachel Bowman-Cryer should collect $75,000 and her “wife,” Laurel Bowman-Cryer, will collect $60,000. The couple testified in March to the emotional stress they attributed to their experience with Sweet Cakes, including the glare of media attention that followed. Read More »

THE brave new world of commercial reproduction creates a welter of interesting stories for journalists. There is never a dull day for the news media as long as the child-production factories, with their sleek labs and carpeted waiting rooms, roll along. Engineering human life is extremely complex and therefore extremely interesting. For instance, Cathy Lynn Grossman, (beaming in the photo above) of USA Today, reported earlier this week on the legal “challenges” involved in the cold-blooded, high-tech market for children. Who will be called a mother when one woman provides the eggs and another the womb? It is extremely complex and therefore extremely interesting. It was as if the beaming Grossman were reporting on the latest exciting app for IPhones. We are told the various legal and commercial maneuvers two homosexual men go through to procure twin girls, with the only drawback being that it is all so complex. She wrote: Read More »

A new report by the Heritage Foundation takes a detailed look at the “harassment, intimidation, vandalism, racial scapegoating, blacklisting, loss of employment, economic hardships, angry protests, violence, at least one death threat, and gross expressions of anti-religious bigotry” experienced by supporters of Proposition 8, the marriage amendment passed last year in California.

Read More »

.

One of the most significant cultural developments of recent decades has been the normalization of sexual love between women. This is but one of many cultural revolutions since the 1960s, but it’s an especially profound one. Divorce, promiscuity and male homosexuality were much less common, but they were still familiar. The phenomenon of “lesbianism” was virtually unknown 100 years ago. Women might have intense romantic friendships, but the idea of females making love, shacking up together and forming a permanent lifelong bond had almost no public circulation. 

What were once secretive and shameful relationships have been transformed with astounding rapidity into an entire subculture with its own travel agencies, vacation resorts, neighborhoods and popular artists. This subculture has established roots seemingly overnight. It is the direct and inevitable outgrowth of a world view that conceives of male and female as purely anatomical realities and denies spiritual complementarity between the sexes. It reflects the devolution of courtship and married love between men and women. It stems also from something vitally healthy and normal: the craving for intimacy amid the dehumanizing anonymity of modern life.

But, is this subculture as unshakable as it now appears? It is not. The normalization of lesbianism cannot proceed, and indeed could collapse altogether, without one thing: marriage.  Women want families.  It is lesbians most of all who are behind the push for same-sex marriage. Yesterday’s passage of a referendum that repeals Maine’s same-sex marriage law is a significant development. The losses have mounted. In all 31 states that have put this issue before the voters, same-sex marriage has been rejected. I’m not suggesting that homosexual activists are about to give up, but the odor of defeat is in the air.

No one can deny that homosexual activists have had their say. The electorate has listened to their side of the story. It has listened patiently and acted with especial kindness and tolerance toward lesbians. As they have moved into neighborhoods and set up their unconventional households, they have not experienced widespread hostility, evictions, or ostracism. They represent a revolution that puzzles many people, but the average person would just as soon not think about it. They don’t seem to be hurting anyone so why object?

But the public has its limits. It does not want lesbians to marry.

[Many comments have been added to this entry. See below.]

Read More »

CONSIDERING yesterday’s defeat of same-sex marriage in Maine, and the overwhelming tide of resistance by voters in states across the nation, could it be that this insidious campaign, this most quixotic of all domestic revolutions, has lost its momentum? Is it possible defenders of marriage have new reason to be buoyant and hopeful?

Rose, a lesbian who is politically conservative, says the fight has only begun:

I wish I was as optimistic as you are, but unfortunately, I have to say, “No.” Many on the losing side are comforting each other with the fact that it was nearly a fifty-fifty split, something that would have been impossible ten years ago. Things are rapidly changing and traditionalists will pass away as more children who read Hello Sailor in elementary school reach voting age. Hollywood and the elite on their side.

Read More »

VOTERS in Maine yesterday overturned a new law legalizing same-sex marriage, making Maine the 31st state to reject homosexual marriage by popular vote. In every state in which same-sex marriage has been put to a vote of the people, it has lost.

Because of Maine’s proximity to Vermont, New Hampshire and Connecticut, where same-sex marriage has been approved through court rulings and legislation, this was an important victory for supporters of traditional marriage. Child custody will become a divisive issue between contiguous states that do not have equivalent marriage laws.

Ultimately, the marriage issue must be settled uniformly across the nation. Since the Supreme Court is unlikely to rule against same-sex marriage, a federal constitutional amendment that defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman is the only hope for protecting the most fundamental of all political institutions. 

I spent some time the other day calling voters in Maine, urging them to get out and vote to repeal the same-sex mariage law adopted by the state legislature last spring. Most of the people on the list I was given by a marriage organization here in Pennsylvania were elderly residents of a small town. It occurred to me how strange it must be for them. After all, Maine is hardly San Francisco.

 “Someone just called me 20 minutes ago,” one man complained.

I apologized.  “Oh, that’s okay,” he said. “It’s a good cause.”

   Read More »

The California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists (CAMFT) devoted a special issue of its bimonthly journal The Therapist to same-sex marriage last spring. It included articles both for and against homosexual unions. After receiving a barrage of complaints from homosexual activists and their supporters, the organization, which represents 30,000 therapists, removed the opposing pieces last month. It then apologized to its members and, in a convoluted statement that appears to mollify both supporters and critics, came out squarely against Proposition 8, the state constitutional amendment supporting traditional marriage.

In one of the expunged articles, Dawn Stefanowicz, an author and accountant, discusses life with her gay father.

Read More »

This winter, the legal battle against California’s ban on same-sex marriage heads to federal court and may ultimately end up before the U.S. Supreme Court. The court may declare government-supported traditional marriage unconstitutional, setting the stage for civil upheaval and an inevitable battle over a federal amendment. The most radical of social experiments is closing in upon us. What do America’s soccer moms think? After all, they live in a world sustained by marriage.

The sad fact is, many support it. In fact, many grow teary when talking about it, especially at the mention of the homosexuals they know. Though their homosexual friends may live with little social disapproval, deed property to one another, and even raise children, they cannot have a wedding. Weddings are beautiful and everyone deserves one. Human identity is meaningless without marriage to whomever one pleases.  

The truth is if soccer moms could peer into the future, they would be very unhappy with the results of homosexual marriage. If they could see the boys raised by pederasts; the children conceived by anonymous sperm donors who care nothing about their existence; the lesbians who look wistfully on a life spent only with women; the increased suicide rate and health problems that are associated with widespread homosexuality even in societies that endorse it; and the greater disinclination by men to enter into an institution that joins together two guys, their feelings would be affronted. They would see that feeling and compassion are on the side of traditional marriage.

So soccer moms are not really guided by emotion after all. They are guided by ideas. The ideas are not of their own making. They are in the very air around them and the soccer mom lacks the time and inclination to see them for what they are. She is a traditionalist at heart. She is a traditionalist and yet does not want to seem too backward. Perhaps she can hide her devotion to stability and normalcy. Perhaps she can hide her devotion to these by supporting innovation in the lives of others. If she can sit in a television studio and calmly watch as a prostitute gives a tour of her work place, is there any level of social experimentation that the soccer mom won’t tolerate? Is there any limit to her radical compassion?

Soccer Mom, Know thyself.  This world you approve of does not approve of you.

Read More »

The need for a federal constitutional amendment defending traditional marriage became more apparent yesterday when Massachusetts became the first state to seek a judicial repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act.

In its suit against the U.S. Government filed in federal court in Boston, Massachusetts claims the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) denies “equal treatment under the law” to the 16,000 homosexual couples who have married in the state. The federal law, enacted in 1996, gives states the authority to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states. Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage in 2004, but homosexual couples married there cannot have their marriages recognized in most other states.

The argument on which the suit is based is spurious. There is no denial of civil rights to homosexuals under traditional marriage laws. Anyone – homosexual or heterosexual – is permitted to marry a person of the opposite sex. Anyone – homosexual or heterosexual – is permitted to have a spouse of the opposite sex receive federal marital benefits such as Medicaid. Traditional marriage laws and regulations are equally applied to all adults. Homosexuals are entitled to marry everywhere in America.

It is not possible for states with dramatically opposed definitions of marriage to amicably coexist. State laws govern millions of child custody decisions made every year. Nevertheless, President Obama has vowed to seek DOMA’s overturn.

The state senator leading the effort to legalize same-sex marriage in Pennsylvania said yesterday that in the many dozens of conversations he has had with supporters of traditional marriage, he has never once heard a “rational” argument for keeping marriage as it is.

Daylin Leach, a Democrat, has introduced a bill to legalize same-sex marriage. Though he appears to make friendly overtures to opponents of traditional marriage, he trivializes and ridicules their concerns. He said fears that same-sex marriage could ultimately lead to group marriage or marriage between friends or relatives were silly, comparable to worrying the state might sanction marriage between a man and a lawn mower. 

Leach is delightfully open-minded. He just has never heard a reason for marriage between a man and a woman that wasn’t based on irrational prejudice and religious sentiment. “That’s not my religion,” he said, speaking on Dom Giordano’s talk show.  A civil institution that is thousands of years old, a tradition that predates Christianity, that was alive and well in the ancient world despite open homosexuality, is founded on irrationality and small-mindedness.

Here’s a question I have for Mr. Leach. If marriage between a man and a woman is irrational, why did it ever come into existence in the first place? Why has it lasted so long?

A man and a woman together are the indivisible unit of procreation. Is that wild opinion? Does Leach know of any human being conceived without the biological input of both a man and a woman? 

Studies – not opinions – show that children raised in homes with both a father and a mother fare remarkably better in life than those who grow up with just one or the other. A man and a woman are not just the indivisible unit of physical procreation. They are the indivisible unit of psychological procreation. Are these findings, which confirm over and over, that children have a universal desire and need for a father and a mother irrational? I would like the reasonable senator to explain. 

Read More »