Even in deep blue New Jersey, pro-gay marriage Senate President Steve Sweeney (D) doesn't want a bill introduced by one of his fellow Democrats calling for a vote of the people on marriage to proceed. Presumably it’s because he fears he will lose such a public vote:
Sen. President Steve Sweeney today reiterated his position that he does not believe same sex marriage is an issue for voters to decide.
Sweeney was responding to a bill introduced by Assemblyman Reed Gusciora that would place the issue on the ballot next November.
"I have firmly stated before and will say again now that I do not believe you put civil rights on the ballot, period. It is the job of elected officials to ensure that everyone is provided equal protection and equal rights under the law. We should not hide from that responsibility...we should embrace it," Sweeney said in a statement. "We gave the governor an opportunity to ensure true marriage equality in this state, just as other states and nations have done. He punted by shamelessly issuing a conditional veto. I fully plan on overriding that veto before this legislative session is done."
Earlier this year the Legislature passed a measure legalizing same sex marriage, however the bill was vetoed by Gov. Chris Christie who said at the time the state should let voters decide.
While Sweeney voted in favor of the latest iteration of the "marriage equality" bill, he was not always so inclined. When the measure came before the Legislature in 2009, Sweeney abstained from the vote. He later called it the worst decision of his political career. -- PolitickerNJ
More evidence that despite what happened in these past elections, gay marriage backers still don't trust their ability to win state elections:
Gay-marriage advocates, coming off their first ballot-box victories, are targeting New Jersey and five other U.S. states where the road to legalization is simpler because voters can’t overturn laws through referendums.
In Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Minnesota, New Jersey and Rhode Island, lawmakers plan to consider or revisit the issue next year, and all except Minnesota already allow civil unions. Even though they prevailed in votes in four states Nov. 6 after a decade of defeats, backers say they prefer to make homosexual weddings legal through legislatures or courts. -- Bloomberg BusinessWeek
A state agency concluded Tuesday that an Ocean Grove association discriminated against a lesbian couple by denying their application to hold a civil union ceremony at its boardwalk pavilion.
In a 16-page decision, state Division of Civil Rights Director Craig Sashihara wrote that that the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association violated the state Law Against Discrimination in 2007 when it did not allow Harriet Bernstein and Luisa Paster to hold their ceremony at the pavilion, theAsbury Park Press reports.
Sashihara upheld a January decision reached by a state Office of Administrative Law judge.
“The laws of New Jersey prevailed,” Bernstein told the Asbury Park Press. “We’re delighted.”
... the state Department of Environmental Protection denied the association’s request for a tax abatement for the pavilion in 2008 because the structure was not available to all on an equal basis, the Asbury Park Press reported.
The association, which can appeal the decision within 45 days, has stopped renting out the pavilion for weddings since the incident, the Asbury Park Press reported.
If the left’s response to Chick-fil-A proves anything, it’s that the left has a clear method of attacking anyone who supports a traditional definition of marriage. Label that person a bigot and then protest everything they do.
This of course is the same plan of action applied to actor Kirk Cameron. During his 'Love Worth Fighting For' conference held in Ocean City, N.J., July 27, over 6,000 married couples showed up seeking counsel on how to better their marriages. Instead they found themselves the target of a protest launched by Ocean City's LGBT community, Ocean Grove United.
But the protesters were protesting an event that had nothing to do with same-sex marriage. In a statement emailed to The Christian Post, a spokesman from the event stated that the sole focus was on “strengthening marriage” and the event “had nothing to do with gay marriage.”
When Cameron found out the group was going to be protesting he extended an offer stating, "I think everyone who comes to the 'Love Worth Fighting For' event in Ocean Grove or anywhere else we do this event will feel nothing but welcomed”. Instead the group declined his offer and stood outside with posters reading “"Kirk! Your Words Hurt Us!”
The Union Township High School teacher who created a firestorm last year after allegedly posting anti-gay comments on her Facebook page, wants to retire on a disability pension rather than face tenure charges.
Jenye "Viki" Knox, 50, a tenured special education teacher who has taught in Union since 2000, wrote on her personal Facebook page that homosexuality is a "perverted spirit" and "unnatural immoral behavior," according to charges of unbecoming conduct brought by her district. She also criticized other teachers on Facebook for putting up a "Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual Transgender" bulletin board in the high school and for proposing a school gay-straight alliance, according to the charges.
The tenure charge case was to begin Tuesday before a state Administrative Law Judge, but Knox filed a motion earlier this month asking that it be delayed while she seeks a disability pension due to both a back injury and "psychological grounds." She did not elaborate. A judge Wednesday agreed to list the case as inactive for three months.
"If I can retire then there is no need for me to go through this unpleasant experience," Knox wrote in court documents.
"...53 percent of those surveyed in the new Quinnipiac University poll said they would support a gay marriage law, and that is down 4 percent from a poll conducted in March.
67 percent said they agree with Gov. Chris Christie’s call for a ballot referendum on the issue.
...“I think the people should be given the right to vote,” the New Jersey Family Policy Council’s Len Deo told Putney. He’d prefer a vote on marriage, like he said southern states did.
He wants the question to be ”Should marriage remain as the union of one man and one woman?”
“That’s a bunch of hogwash,” said Garden State Equality’s Steven Goldstein. He said a public vote would just invite opponents to spend millions on advertising.
“[The advertising would] try to influence voters and corrupt the political system,” said Goldstein.
The New Jersey Supreme Court heard oral argument on March 1 in a surrogate-mother suit, The Matter of the Parentage of a Child by T.J.S. and A.L.S., and in so doing, exposed the case's greatest weakness.
The class of women with the greatest rights at risk was unrepresented. While the parties and the Court pondered whether the justices could change statutory law, or declare it unconstitutional, the central issue was whether and when the fundamental constitutional liberty interests and state's rights of the unrepresented legal mothers could be terminated.
The birth mothers were not heard from. Of such stuff, bad law is made.
... The wife in T.J.S. seeks to cut off the rights of the legal mother, which are protected as an intrinsic fundamental right under the state and federal constitutions. The sperm donor, on the other hand, has no rights statutory or constitutional. T.J.S.'s wife has no rights either, by statute or either constitution.
The fact that the state does not recognize rights in an anonymous sperm donor who has no statutory or constitutional rights and who has no relationship with the child, does not compel the state to terminate the rights of a mother who has statutory and constitutional rights in the relationship she has with the child she carried for nine months under concepts of equal protection.
The two are simply NOT similarly situated. That was the conclusion of the Baby M Court.
The sad irony of T.J.S.'s argument is that it is made in the name of women's rights, while attempting to destroy well-established constitutional rights of women who went unrepresented.
We've seen this before, gay marriage activists attempting to fake more bi-partisan support for redefining marriage than actually exists. The New Hampshire Journal with the scoop:
The national gay marriage lobby group behind Standing Up for New Hampshire Families has privately used New Hampshire Democrats to volunteer and staff their activities despite posing for months as a Republican-friendly organization.
Standing Up for New Hampshire Families, which NH Journal has identified as an organization actually run out of New York and Washington, DC, has spent a tremendous amount of national money running ads designed to brand it as a Republican-leaning, pro-gay marriage organization. They have even appropriated the iconic red, white and blue Republican elephant in their advertising.
But recent e-mails obtained by NH Journal demonstrate that the manpower used to back their lobbying and allegedly grassroots efforts come exclusively from city and county Democrat organizations.
“You have to participate in either one of these phone banks tonight or Saturday,” directed James Hattan, co-chair of the Concord City Democrats to in an e-mail obtained by NH Journal. The phone banks are designed to trick Republican legislators that gay marriage has mainstream Republican support.
Similar e-mails were sent to other Democrat organizations urging them to pressure Republican lawmakers.
If you live in New Hampshire please contact your legislators and make sure they are aware of this breaking news.
This is just weird: a guy from Britain who lives in Massachusetts lecturing the Governor of New Jersey on the sacred right of Americans ... to redefine marriage?
But the Philly Business Journal, it turns out, is using the same source that all these outlets cite when they try to claim redefining marriage will stimulate the economy: the Williams Institute.
In a case that puts New Jersey again in the forefront of reproductive rights, the state Supreme Court heard arguments Thursday on whether an infertile wife should be recognized as the legal mother of her husband's biological child born to a surrogate gestational carrier from a donated egg.
... Deputy Attorney General Kimberly Jenkins defended the current process, saying that when a gestational carrier is introduced, a third party with rights is brought into the picture.
She said that under the Artificial Insemination Act, the sperm donor remains anonymous and has no voice in how his donation is used.
"Here, it's completely different," Jenkins said. "You have the introduction of a third party" who carries the child for nine months.
Chief Justice Stuart Rabner again noted that an infertile father is automatically treated as the father on the birth certificate, even though he has no biological connection to the child.
"We're not dealing with the same situation," Jenkins said. "The baby [created with donated sperm] is actually being born within the marriage. Here we have a third party who does have rights."
The Rev. Susan Russell writes in The Huffington Post's Gay Voices:
Yes, I rise to defend bigotry -- but not to defend acts of bigotry that get in the way of our being that nation "with liberty and justice for all" to which we teach our kids to pledge allegiance. Rather, I rise to defend the naming of those acts as bigotry -- which is critical if we're going to fully become that nation "with liberty and justice for all" to which we teach our kids to pledge allegiance.
Because here's the deal. A nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal can only live up to the high calling of that dedicated proposition by recognizing that all Americans suffer collateral damage when the fundamental rights of any Americans are subject to bigotry-based discrimination.
A case in point is the blog I wrote the week before last calling out Governor Chris Christie for vetoing marriage equality in New Jersey. In it I said that Christie "chose bigotry over equality" and "was standing on 'the Lester Maddox side of history.'" I said it, and I meant it -- and I still do.
Gov. Christie of New Jersey and the Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart get into a spirited debate about marriage, referendums and President Obama's "silence" on marriage.
Christie says at one point: "Let's have the President of the United States show some courage, come on this program, look into the camera like I'm looking into the camera and state his position [on marriage]. He won't. Because he wants to have it both ways. I'm not looking to have it both ways. I vetoed the bill. That's my position. What I've offered to the supporters of same-sex marriage is, if one of your reasons for why I should have signed it, was because you're telling me the majority of the people in New Jersey want it, then prove it. Put it on the ballot and prove it. At least I'm standing up for what I believe in. The President has hidden on this issue. He wants to have it both ways. And the public pronouncements, out of his mouth, are "he opposes same-sex marriage." The President opposes same-sex marriage."
Chris Christie is publicly opposed to same-sex marriage and indeed, to his credit, he fulfilled a campaign promise by vetoing a gay-marriage bill. But he raised eyebrows and doubts by appointing to the New Jersey Supreme Court an openly gay judge who has publicly pushed for gay marriage.
Now a New Jersey judge has reinstated a gay couple’s claim that New Jersey’s marriage laws violate the federal Constitution — in part, she said, because the defense of the marriage law offered by Christie’s attorney general, Jeffrey Chiesa, was so weak: “tradition.”
Chiesa is not some rogue Republican; he was Christie’s chief counsel for several years before the governor made him AG. It raises eyebrows, because it’s frankly what Obama’s attorney general did for years — pretend to defend the law, by offering only a token defense. Odd to see this happening now with a Republican governor beloved by Ann Coulter.
The gay newspaper The Advocate reports on the President's continuing effort to vote "present" on the marriage debate:
White House press secretary Jay Carney dodged comment on this week’s marriage equality victory in Washington as President Obama was scheduled to visit the state for a Friday tour at Boeing Co., where he spoke about measures to boost American exports.
Speaking with reporters aboard Air Force One, Carney also declined direct comment on New Jersey governor Chris Christie’s vowed veto of a marriage equality bill passed by the state assembly Thursday. Lawmakers have two years to override a veto.
“I would say only broadly, as I have said in the past, without weighing into individual states and their actions, that this President strongly supports the notion that the states should be able to decide this issue, and he opposes actions that take away rights that have been established by those states,” Carney said Friday.
Sen. President Steve Sweeney today reiterated his position that he does not believe same sex marriage is an issue for voters to decide.
Gay-marriage advocates, coming off their first ballot-box victories, are targeting New Jersey and five other U.S. states where the road to legalization is simpler because voters can’t overturn laws through referendums.
The class of women with the greatest rights at risk was unrepresented. While the parties and the Court pondered whether the justices could change statutory law, or declare it unconstitutional, the central issue was whether and when the fundamental constitutional liberty interests and state's rights of the unrepresented legal mothers could be terminated.
Yes, I rise to defend bigotry -- but not to defend acts of bigotry that get in the way of our being that nation "with liberty and justice for all" to which we teach our kids to pledge allegiance. Rather, I rise to defend the naming of those acts as bigotry -- which is critical if we're going to fully become that nation "with liberty and justice for all" to which we teach our kids to pledge allegiance.
