Dear Marriage Supporter,
The same-sex marriage movement is not about "live-and-let-live."
It is about radically redefining marriage for everyone, whether you like it or not—yes, even in the Sunshine state.
As you read this, there is a bill in the United States Senate, advanced by Senator Diane Feinstein of California, to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). DOMA is the only federal law protecting Florida's 2008 state constitutional amendment from outside legal challenges.
This is the same-sex marriage lobby's preferred strategy. They don't want to let the people vote. They're reluctant to trust legislators, who can be influenced by their constituents.
They want a single person, or a small panel of people, to decide for you what is "equitable" and what you are allowed to believe without repercussion.
We cannot allow this to happen.
That is why defending DOMA at the federal level and assisting with the various federal lawsuits that will make their way up to the Supreme Court in 2012 is a prominent part of NOM's strategic battle plan to protect marriage—and why it is critical for you, as a resident of Florida, to get engaged in the fight.
Will you make one urgent gift to NOM right now to ensure we have the funds necessary to protect marriage in Florida and in all 50 states?
Anything you can afford to donate is important, because with so many fights all over America, our resources will be stretched thin all year.
Today is the primary in Florida, a key stage in the race for the White House. Congress is up for grabs, we're waging a legislative battle in Washington, D.C. to stop DOMA from being repealed, and we have legal cases going all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
And on top of all that, we're also fighting in a dozen other states:
- Working to repeal same-sex marriage laws in Iowa, New Hampshire, and New York (in fact, there will be a vote very soon in the New Hampshire legislature to restore traditional marriage!);
- Protecting marriage in states where it is under fire (Rhode Island, Washington, New Jersey, Maryland);
- Passing marriage protection amendments in key states (including Minnesota, among others).
In the past few weeks, threats to marriage and religious liberty have also popped up in Virginia and Illinois, and we may need additional funds to fight in those large states as well.
The bottom line: 2012 will either be the year when traditional marriage makes a comeback...
...or it will be the year when the same-sex marriage lobbyists knock the doors down and begin their assault on marriage in all 50 states.
As always, the success of our campaign depends on you, marriage supporter.
So please, to protect marriage in Florida and all across America throughout 2012, make one urgent financial gift today.
Thank you in advance, and God bless you.
This message has been authorized and paid for by the National Organization for Marriage, 2029 K Street NW, Suite 300, Washington, DC 20006, Brian Brown, President. This message has not been authorized or approved by any candidate.
30 Comments
Please everyone, drain your life's savings, empty your retirement account, raid your kid's college fund and give it all to NOM. And in your golden years you'll have 3 things; no DOMA, marriage equality in all 50 states and cat food for dinner.
Such a sad existence belongs to those who actively try to prevent happiness for others...
Randell, if you have to worry about your fellow citizen's marriage, then you quite be a whole person yourself.
"The same-sex marriage movement is not about "live-and-let-live. It is about radically redefining marriage for everyone"
That's a completely nonsensical argument. In order to achieve marriage equality, the laws that we all live under must be changed. That doesn't equate to what NOM is trying to suggest: because the law allows for something, it's being forced upon you. Its like saying: the women's suffrage movement is not about live and let live, it's about redefining democracy for everyone.
We have marriage equality. There is no orientation test of marriage. What is being demanded is a legal redefinition of marriage.
But giving something a new label doesn’t change its underlying nature. The union of a husband and a wife is different from anything else. It is sui generis. To conflate it with something else is perverse and a crime against the language. To lump it with segregation, slavery, or denying women the vote is a grotesque slander. Redefining marriage into a gender irrelevant institution undermines the unique natural rights of the procreative family, undermines the ability of the state to protect women in their asymmetrical relationships with men, and threatens religious freedom. We have witnessed the shocking decline of the quality of life in our inner cities go hand in hand with the decline of the traditional marriage culture.
In contrast, private contract rights for same sex couples avoids this conflation and the threats it poses. Indeed, it gives same sex couples to define their relationship as whatever they want it to be without redefining the legal and linguistic foundations of everyone else’s marriage. That is live and let live.
So our dear Democrats instead of trying to reason with the GOP to create jobs and get the economy back on track are finding a "better" use of our tax dollars.
And this is coming from a California Senator. Boy, those California politicians really know where our priorities lie.
I hope someone runs against this woman and defeats her.
If NOM really wants to send a message in Florida it should spend its money to defeat Ilean Lehtinen, the extreme radical anti-family congressman that has sneaked into the Republican party and is threatening DOMA. A message must be sent that these radical positions will not be tolerated in the Republican party.
Did not Florida pass Amendment 2 a few years back. They made marriage a state amendment to the state constitution mandating that marriage is between a man and a woman.
How can this be unconstitutional? Since when is it against the constitution to amend your own constitution? What about the 10 amendment the one that deals with states rights?
"Clearly, though, same-sex “marriage” supporters want much more than certain benefits and privileges. Discussion of concrete benefits such as hospital visitation, inheritance rights, and so on, is really a side issue—such benefits could be secured by other means for individuals who need them (for example, a durable power of attorney for health care, a will, etc.). Nor—contrary to how it is usually portrayed—is the same-sex marriage proposal aimed at tolerance, since persons with same-sex attractions are already free to engage in private sexual behavior and to establish for themselves long-term romantic and sexual relationships. Rather, what proponents of same-sex “marriage” principally desire is the social affirmation and endorsement of homosexual relationships as such. "
http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/01/4597
Publius
Very well put.
Publius: In order to access the rights, benefits and privileges of marriages in a state that lacks marriage equality, the law requires a gay person to disregard all of the criteria a heterosexual is allowed to consider when choosing a mate (mutual love, attraction, compatibility to name a few). There is simply no equality under the law there. Therefore, the right of a gay or lesbian person to only marry someone of the opposite gender is no right at all.
Come on bobby corrupting marriage does not make it it equal; it makes it corrupted:
Turning good into bad
Sexual desires do not constitute rights, Bobby. There is a difference between the right to marry and ther right to have marriage redefined to suit one's sexual practices.
There are already lots of married gay families in Florida. It's just that those families are discriminated against specifically because of their gender.
Bobby,the permanent prohibition of the outrage you call "marriage equality" is essential to any well-ordered human society.Damage that prohibition and you radically redefine the rules we live under for the convenience of those who unconscionably defy a vital standard of conduct,and deserve only frustration until they surrender.Unless persons are of opposite sexes they can not be entitled,and must be firmly denied,the rights,privileges,and benefits that marriage exists solely to provide exclusively to those in opposite-sex relationships.
SOA: Gay and lesbian citizens deserve equal treatment under the law. Your desperate attempts to rationalize your bias cannot change that basic reality.
Bobby, you forget that if a person doesn't want to enter into marriage according to the requirements for marriage, they are not required to do so. The state doesn't regulate compatibility, love, or attraction. If your chosen partner happens to be of the same sex, you are free to make a life together. There is no law to hinder you from so doing. But your relationship may fall outside the jurisdiction of marriage.
Daughter of Eve: There's about 6 states (+ D.C.) where these relationships you speak of so condescendingly DO fall within the "jurisdiction of marriage."
Oops!
Not one of the states - 2 of which poised to revearse imposition of marriage corruption - fall within the jurisdiction of marriage because they are not recognized as marriages at the federal level; nor will they ever be recognized at the federal level.
By the end of 2012 (36) states will have enacted constitutional protections against marriage corruption and [at most] five states will be left that must correct the tyranny imposed on the people of said states by a decadent horde of miscreants.
No, not an "oops." Those are not "real" marriages, whether the state calls them such, or not.
"Gay and lesbian citizens deserve equal treatment under the law."
They already do, Bobby. Everyone can marry a member of the opposite sex regardless of gender, race, or sexual preference. But no one has the right to have marriage redefined to suit their sexual practices. Claiming that only homosexuals do falls under the area of special rights and has failed to be recognized by most courts.
So Layne, I suppose that if gays get divorced from their same sex partners or go through multiple SS "marriages" then that discredits the entire cause of marriage redefinition then?
SOA,
The reason why marriage corruption supporters support the corruption of marriage is because they want the violation of your vows to God to be common place. These miscreants are looking to punish God for the gift of free choice and personal responsibility because, in their world, it is God's own fault for trusting them.
Welcome to the wonderful world of the sociopath; where up is down and down is up.
All the people who post here and loathe NOM lost in Florida in 2008, 62%-38%, despite outspending proponents of the amendment 3-1 and having a large Democratic turnout, and despite opponents having to reach 60%. This is why they are bitter, and running to the courts.
Very well put Mike P. as I could not agree with you more. They also resort to name calling.
Check is in the mail.
Bobby,citizens calling themselves "gay and lesbian" can not exempt them from public policies discouraging the practice of same-sex sexual relationships,and only increases the necessity of enforcing such policies.THAT is the "basic reality",despite your desperate attempts to rationalize refusal to emnbrace "bias" against such indefensible relationships!!
@Bobby
“mutual love, attraction, and compatibility” are not sufficient to create a constitutional right to marriage. For example, there is no constitutional right to marry someone who is already married to someone else no matter how much mutual love, attraction, and compatibility there may be.
But if we invent such a right, then that right also demands a right to polygamy.
In 2003, the Massachusetts Senate had certified a question to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court asking if a proposed civil unions bill that EXPLICITLY provides that “eligible same-sex couples the opportunity to obtain the benefits, protections, rights and responsibilities afforded to opposite sex couples by the marriage laws of the commonwealth, without entering into a marriage” and that “spouses in a civil union shall have all the same benefits, protections, rights and responsibilities under law as are granted to spouses in a marriage”. Opinions of the Justices to the Senate, 440 Mass. 1201, 802 N.E.2d 565 (Mass. Sup. Jud. Ct. 2004)
Several gay rights groups submitted amici briefs arguing that the civil unions bill would violate the Massachusetts ERA, on the basis that civil unions are “separate and unequal” and a form of “segregation”, GLAD Brief, Opinions, at 12, because they denied the “social recognition” that comes with marriage, Id. at 24,they would “mark [same-sex couples] as inferior to their heterosexual counterparts and diminish their status in the community”regardless of whether they provided “the same benefits, protections,rights and responsibilities under law as are granted to spouses in a marriage”, Civil Rights Brief in Opinions at 12 , and that civil unions “would not constitute equality, because their relationships still would not be recognized by the rest of society as being as valued as heterosexual relationships.” id. at 13
And in Li v. State of Oregon, 338 Or 376, 388, 110 P3d 91 (Or. Sup. Ct. 2005) plaintiffs had argued that civil unions would be “inherently stigmatizing and inherently separate and unequal” Reply Brief of Plaintiff-Respondents/Cross-Appellants, Li, at 10.
And in Jackson v, Abercrombie , the plaintiffs are suing because of the "special status" of marriage, not just
the "bundle of rights" which the civil union law would allow them. See Complaint in Jackson v. Abercrombie, CV11-009734-ACK-KSC, at 13, quoting Kerrigan v. Commissioner of Public Health, 289 Conn. 315 at 289, 957 A.2d 407 at 416 (Conn. Sup. Ct. 2008)
The underlying fallacies of these arguments are the assumptions that the social recognition and social value, and social status of marriage is independent of the male-female dynamic, and that heterosexual relationships are valued BECAUSE they are called marriages. If this be so, it is not because of anything in the proposed civil unions acts, but the solely due to the construction sodomist fundamentalists choose to put upon it.
In other words, the purpose of same-sex “marriage” is to make sodomist fundamentalists feel better about themselves.
Awesome Michael E. that was just awesome.