Dear Marriage Supporter,

This has been another big week in the fight to defend marriage, so I'll get right to it!

Movement For, and Against, Marriage

In France, young people are gathering regularly to sing and pray for marriage. In Nantes, they gather at the foot of the Cross of Charette, where a famous French hero was executed in 1796.

In Great Britain, David Cameron's push for gay marriage has left his Conservative party in electoral tatters, as local elections this week proved. (From the Iron Lady to the Rubber Man in just two decades!)

Here in the United States, Delaware and Minnesota both redefined marriage, making a mockery in the latter state of the voters who were told there was no need to pass a marriage amendment because there was no threat to marriage.

Hard losses, yes, but the fight goes on—and not just in Illinois and the vast majority of other states that still protect marriage.

Bishop Thomas Tobin of Rhode Island has just published a letter to faithful Rhode Island Catholics, inviting them (and I think all of us) "to a moment of prayer and reflection as we respond to this new challenge of the post-Christian era into which, clearly, we have now entered":

"First, like many others, I am profoundly disappointed that Rhode Island has approved legislation that seeks to legitimize "same-sex marriage." The Catholic Church has fought very hard to oppose this immoral and unnecessary proposition, and we are most grateful to all those who have courageously joined us in this effort. When all is said and done, however, we know that God will be the final judge of our actions."

He asks God's blessing on our brothers and sisters who have same-sex attraction, "that they will enjoy much health, happiness and peace."

But, Bishop Tobin says, "Our respect and pastoral care, however, does not mean that we are free to endorse or ignore immoral or destructive behavior, whenever or however it occurs. Indeed, as St. Paul urges us, we are required to ‘speak the truth in love.'" (Eph 4:15)."

Speak the truth, but speak it in love.

You and I know how hard that can be and yet how necessary. We cannot simply stand bye and do nothing when the government is taking over the very meaning of marriage.

The Government-Sponsored Tyranny of Gay Marriage

British professor John Milbank suggests that in his country this drive for state control over the meaning of marriage and parenthood was the very point:

"There was no demand for "gay marriage" and this has nothing to do with gay rights. Instead, it is a strategic move in the modern state's drive to assume direct control over the reproduction of the population, bypassing our interpersonal encounters. This is not about natural justice, but the desire on the part of biopolitical tyranny to destroy marriage and the family as the most fundamental mediating social institution.

Heterosexual exchange and reproduction has always been the very "grammar" of social relating as such. The abandonment of this grammar would thus imply a society no longer primarily constituted by extended kinship, but rather by state control and merely monetary exchange and reproduction."

A biopolitical tyranny where marriage and parenthood are up for legal grabs. The replacement of the idea of the natural family with a set of legal fictions.

This is not the America I want for my children or yours.

This is certainly a time of great challenge, as Bishop Tobin told his flock, but he also points out an opportunity "to be steadfast and courageous, and to renew our commitment to Christ and His Church. As our Lord Jesus Christ told us, "In the world you will have trouble, but take courage, I have conquered the world." (Jn 16:33)

The fight for marriage brings together an amazing coalition of people of diverse faiths, different races, and backgrounds; I cherish working with and for each one of you. We will never quit, because marriage is a fight for something fundamental, a truth that will not change, however much government attempts to make it so.

Also, some exciting news to conclude with: The USCCB has issued a church bulletin insert for Catholic churches across the country which calls the Supreme Court case the Roe v. Wade for marriage, depending on the outcome. You can read and download it here.

Only seven weeks until the Supreme Court decides on your right to vote for marriage. Keep up the good fight!

Thank you for all you have done and continue to do for marriage.

Dear Marriage Supporter,

The news this week is tough. I'm not going to sugar coat it.

In Rhode Island, all five Republican state senators joined the Democrats in the state senate to pass a same-sex marriage bill. It now goes back to the House which had previously passed a gay marriage bill and the governor has promised to sign it.

The Rhode Island bill does not create a new category of marriage for same-sex couples. Rather, it completely redefines marriage for all people in Rhode Island.

Some religious liberty protections were added for churches. But as Scott Spear, a NOM Rhode Island Advisory Board member, told the press, "It won't be long before gay 'marriage' activists start pressing hard their new found rights on the faithful in Rhode Island. In Vermont, Christian innkeepers were sued. It was Christian florists in Washington state. Elsewhere photographers, bakers, event venue operators, notary publics, justices of the peace and town clerks have all been targeted for punishment if they do not agree to go along with gay 'marriage' in violation of their deeply-held beliefs."

Targeting The Children

All true. But the people I'm most concerned about are the children in Rhode Island, who for the first time will be educated by this new law to believe that the rights of adults to marry any person they love trump a child's right to a loving mom and dad.

Sometimes that education will be direct: In Red Hook, New York, parents last week were outraged to find that 13 and 14 year old girls were asked in their public school to pretend to be lesbian couples and ask each other for kisses in a school anti-bullying assembly. When parents objected, their school told them basically to stuff it!

Same-sex marriage is not just an attempt to help ordinary gay people live their private lives as they choose—it is part of a push for an aggressive new public norm that affects us all.

Continuing The State Fights

For the politicians who refused to let the people of Rhode Island vote on marriage, this is not over!

In Delaware, another blue state, a gay marriage bill passed the house, as expected, although by an unexpectedly tight margin. The fight now goes to the senate to hold the line for marriage.

If you have a moment, please click here to use NOM's Advocacy Center to send messages to your elected officials, letting them know that you support marriage:

We intend to make sure that every Rhode Islander knows how their policymakers voted on this critical issue. We will hold the politicians accountable for their votes.

Republicans, especially, will have to answer for abandoning marriage—a core position of the GOP platform. In New York, when the dust cleared, 3 out of the 4 Republican state senators who betrayed their constituents and voted for gay marriage were no longer in office.

And we should also point out that there were some heroic marriage champions who stood up from the Democratic side of the aisle. In particular, I'd like to thank Senator Harold M. Metts, D-Providence/Slater, who testified:

I am puzzled as to why those who seek tolerance and now acceptance are so intolerant of others' religious beliefs and rights.

I was not intimidated over the years by being called a religious bigot, or some of the phone calls I received this week... the last time I checked, this is America and we are all entitled to our opinions.

Many from my community take exception to the attempts of the gay rights activists to hitch their wagon to the civil rights movement as it pertains to African Americans. I can change my sexual preference tonight if I want to, but I can't change my color.

What people do in the privacy of their bedrooms can never compare to what African Americans went through in slavery... Our people were treated like animals, they were exploited... raped. Families were split up... There [were] lynchings. There [were] castrations. And I could go on and on. Again, for many form my community, there is no grounds for the comparison.

International Organization for Marriage

Meanwhile, despite massive ongoing grassroots protests from the French people, the French parliament voted to redefine marriage. As I told the press "Even though the same-sex marriage policy being foisted on an unwilling public is profoundly unwise and anti-family, no citizen should ever express their disapproval through violent means. We condemn in the strongest possible terms violence by anyone on either side of this debate."

NOM will continue to work with our friends in France to defend marriage.

Specifically, NOM is working with the Collectif Famille Mariage (CFM), a charter member of the International Organization for Marriage (IOM). CFM—along with a wide coalition of pro-marriage organizations—is imploring France's Constitutional Council to carefully study and limit the scope of this law, which has been rushed through the Senate and the National Assembly.

In Brussels, Belgium at a panel discussion about free speech, Archbishop Andre Leonard was abruptly assaulted by four protestors who said his "homophobia" was the reason. They squirted him with water bottles shaped like the Virgin Mary, according to the Global Post.

The story notes: "[T]he archbishop himself remained composed and apparently at prayer throughout."

The picture above shows Archbishop Leonard picking up and kissing one of the bottles following the disruption.

So Much For Tolerance

Our friends at FRC released video footage of domestic terrorist Floyd Corkins' FBI interview, where he acknowledges that he used the Southern Poverty Law Center's "anti-gay hate list" to target his intended victims.

SPLC still has the target list up, as I write this, despite its use to target decent, loving, law-abiding Americans who work in mainstream organizations.

Still Not "Inevitable"

Meanwhile in Illinois, gay marriage advocates are still scrambling to find the last few votes to ram a gay marriage bill through that blue state legislature.

Opposition from downstate Illinois Democrats is one reason. But the biggest obstacle? As a NBC Chicago columnist puts it, "The toughest votes? Black lawmakers who are under pressure from the African-American Clergy Coalition to vote no. . . .a black legislator trying to move up to alderman, county board, state senate or Congress would be denied a Sunday appearance at a conservative black church. That's a valuable endorsement in the black community, so that may be enough to make a politician hesitate before pressing 'yes.'"

And in Minnesota, polls are showing the public is rather shocked to find a gay marriage bill being pushed through the state legislature... apparently they believed the ads opponents to the state marriage amendment ran suggesting a constitutional amendment was not necessary!

A Star Tribune poll in February found just 38 percent of Minnesotans support the gay marriage bill. And as our friends at Minnesota for Marriage pointed out, the further one moves away from Minneapolis, the more the support drops.

While 57 percent of people in Hennepin and Ramsey counties support same-sex marriage, only 19 percent of those in what they call "outstate" Minnesota do.

Greater Minnesota is "very, very much opposed to the metro area's attempt to force gay marriage on the rest of the state," Autumn Leva of Minnesotans for Marriage told the press.

I promise you one thing: we here at NOM will never stop fighting for marriage, working with good people of all races, creeds and colors in every state of these wonderful United States.

In the tough times the sunshine patriots run. But you can count on us standing up to the forces seeking to undermine marriage everywhere across this great land! And now as part of a new international movement for marriage!

Together we are making a difference!

One final request for this week: I'd like to ask for your prayers for Pastor Jim Garlow of San Diego's Skyline Church whose beloved wife Carol passed away this week after battling cancer bravely for many years.

In lieu of flowers the family has asked that donations be made to the Carol Garlow Memorial Fund which supports a transitional home to help troubled adults become godly men and women.

Jim is a friend of mine and a hero of mine for standing up for marriage in the great Prop 8 battle. Carol was a great woman, a loving and much loved, wife, mother, Christian prayer warrior, and benefactor to her congregation and community. She will be greatly missed by all who knew her.

Jim, old friend, my heart goes out to you. May God comfort you and your family in this season of loss.

Thank you for standing for marriage. And thank you for your prayers for me and my family and for all those on the front lines of this great and noble fight for God's first institution.

What He has created, we will not abandon.

Dear Marriage Supporter,

You and I have been through thick and thin in this fight for marriage. We know how important truth is to this fight, and how so many of our opponents recoil from the very idea of truth.

There is no better example than the news this week that Washington's Attorney General Bob Ferguson is using taxpayer funding to bring a lawsuit against a small Washington state florist named Barronelle Stutzman, owner of Arlene's Flowers and Gifts. Stutzman's crime? Refusing to sell flowers for a gay wedding.

For this 'thought crime' against gay marriage, her whole livelihood is now put at the stake.

It was only a few months ago, before the November elections, when gay marriage advocates were sanctimoniously getting on television and reassuring voters that our claims of the religious persecution that comes hand in hand with redefining marriage were unfounded. Made up. Untrue.

They knew at the time they were not telling the truth. Because now, just a few months later, the ACLU and a State Attorney General are the ones at the forefront of making sure that Christians who disagree with gay marriage pay a price for acting on their convictions.

Failure to tell the truth—call it a lie—arises from the fundamental lie: same-sex unions are not marriages because they cannot ever, under any circumstances, do the fundamental, key, and irreplaceable work that marriages do: bringing together under one home, in one family, the two great halves of humanity, male and female—to create homes in which children are known and loved by their own mother and father.

Not every marriage succeeds in creating the full range of goods that marriage aims at. But when marriages succeed in doing so, it's because they combine elements and circumstances that no same-sex couple can.

Suppressing the truth is what same-sex marriage advocates have to do to "win" the debate (temporarily, anyway).

How Truth is Suppressed

That's why, when a distinguished social scientist does an ordinary act like publishing his research in a major peer-reviewed journal—all pandemonium must break loose to discredit him. Not just disagree with him. Not just contextualize or re-contextualize his data—that would be normal scientific debate. But to smear him as a non-scientist and to ignore his work.

That's the crucible University of Texas Prof. Mark Regnerus has been going through and still is going through.

C-FAM's Austin Ruse recently pointed this out in his piece on Regnerus: "Science Study Still Spooking Gay Advocates."

Ruse points to Dr. Susan Yoshihara, research director of C-FAM, who used the Regnerus study before the legislature in Rhode Island. So-called "fact-checkers" claimed her testimony was false:

Politifact, a self-styled watchdog of political truth, branded Yoshihara's claim as false. Yoshihara, however, says the Politifact piece itself backed up her claim when they quoted a "prudent scholar" who said the issue is not settled in the scientific literature, which was Yoshihara's claim in the first place.

Ruse also cites the recent claim by former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, who said that "The study was pretty well demolished by peers."

But for me the worst was a claim in the LA Times that the Supreme Court was just silly to entertain the idea children do best with a mom and dad. Justice Scalia had made the assertion that "there's considerable disagreement" about whether "raising a child in a single-sex family is harmful or not," an assertion no doubt based in part on Regnerus's research.

"Those comments startled child development experts as well as advocates of gay marriage, because there is considerable research showing children of gay parents do not have more problems than others," the LA Times went on to report with a straight face…. '"There is a fundamental, scholarly consensus that children raised by same-sex couples do just fine,' said Stanford sociologist Michael J. Rosenfeld."

Yet I know of—and I'm no sociologist—at least 5 studies published in peer-reviewed journals whose results contest the "no difference claim": Mark Regnerus (2012), Loren Marks (2102), Douglas Allen (2012), Daniel Potter (2012), and Theresa Sirota (2009).

Listen, social science is not a "hard science," and I don't need to know from merely scientific evidence what I know in my heart from my own experience and the experience of so many children raised in fragmented families: children long for and need their mother and their father. But simply as a statement about the scientific literature, the claim there is now a "consensus" is untrue. The claim can be made only by ignoring the reputable scientists whose works disagree with that claim.

Truth matters to us, but it's not clear it matters to gay marriage advocates.

If you doubt me, listen to the voice of the extraordinary British writer Brendan O'Neill—a one-time Marxist, a man of the Left, who has spoken out repeatedly against the use of elite power to shut down the debate over same-sex marriage across the pond:

I have been doing or writing about political stuff for 20 years, since I was 18 years old, during which time I have got behind some pretty unpopular campaigns and kicked against some stifling consensuses. But I have never encountered an issue like gay marriage, an issue in which the space for dissent has shrunk so rapidly, and in which the consensus is not only stifling but choking. This is the only issue for which he has been not only booed but threatened with death.

"Is it a good thing, evidence that we had a heated debate on a new civil right and the civil rights side won?" O'Neill asks. And then he answers his own question:

I don't think so. I don't think we can even call this a 'consensus', since that would imply the voluntaristic coming together of different elements in concord. It's better described as conformism, the slow but sure sacrifice of critical thinking and dissenting opinion under pressure to accept that which has been defined as a good by the upper echelons of society: gay marriage. Indeed, the gay-marriage campaign provides a case study in conformism, a searing insight into how soft authoritarianism and peer pressure are applied in the modern age to sideline and eventually do away with any view considered overly judgmental, outdated, discriminatory, 'phobic', or otherwise beyond the pale.

"Gay marriage," he writes, "brilliantly shows how political narratives are forged these days, and how people are made to accept them."

Narrative is the relevant word here. Not hard truths uncovered, but stories created to whose allegiance people are held by threats, by bribes, and by conformist pressures.

The editor of First Things, Rusty Reno, has a similar set of concerns for what all this means for our democratic society. "If government can reshape marriage, it can reshape everything," his article explains:

Tyranny isn't just a situation in which the government is telling you what to do at every moment. It's also a society in which government says that, if necessary, it can. In this respect gay marriage reflects a dramatic enlargement of government. If legislatures and courts can redefine marriage, what can't it intervene to reshape and re-purpose?

The tyranny of the conformists, backed by government's coercive power, were on display in Washington State when the ACLU decided independently to sue the same florist the Attorney General is pursuing.

But first they sent this poor woman a letter:

Robert Ingersoll and Curt Freed's lawyers, working with the legal powerhouse at the ACLU of Washington, sent a letter today to Arlene's Flowers owner Baronelle Stutzman saying she has two options: (1) She can vow to never again discriminate in her services for gay people, write an apology letter to be published in the Tri-City Herald, and contribute $5,000 to a local LGBT youth center, or (2) she can get sued for violating the Washington State Civil Rights Act.

Conform to our falsehood. Pretend you believe things you do not. Or face the consequences.
George Orwell, call your office.

But here's the good news in all this: It's going to get bad, we already know this. But in the end truth has a power that no narrative, no story can compete with.

Our job is to remain firmly fixed on the truth about marriage, to speak up for it with love in in our heart, and with the courage to never bow before the false gods, the untruths, the made-up stories offered to us in place of reality.

I am so honored to be fighting shoulder to shoulder with you for God's truth about marriage.
Thank you for making this enormous megaphone possible.

I treasure your friendship, your prayers, your words of encouragements, your sacrifices of time and treasure on behalf of this great cause.

Bless you!