The Supreme Court has issued its rulings, threatening our right to protect marriage and to be respected as sincere in our actions as we do it.
Now it's our turn: fight or submit?
Its been a busy week fighting for God's truth about marriage on National TV in the wake of what Maggie Gallagher called the Supreme Court's “fatwa” against millions of Americans who believe marriage is the union of husband and wife:
If you are as mad as I am at this judicial usurpation of our rights as Americans, know this: you and I are not alone.
A Rasmussen poll released after the Supreme Court issued its terrible rulings on marriage reports Americans' support for the Supreme Court is plunging: Just 28 percent say the Court is doing an excellent or good job, while 69 percent say the Court is doing only a fair or poor job. “[P]ublic approval of the court has fallen to the lowest level ever recorded in more than nine years of polling,” reports Rasmussen. (And yes, liberal positive views of the court remain unchanged, it is the slippage among conservatives and moderates—more than 30 points since 2009—that is making the difference).
I'm not going to give you a song and dance: things are going to get tough. The sunshine patriots will retreat; the RINO's will be cowed.
Already a Colorado Christian named Jack Phillips faces a year in jail. His crime? Politely declining to bake a gay wedding cake!
This is not Jim Crow. Jack Phillips and others like him are not trying to force gay marriage advocates into a ghetto, or drink at separate water fountains. Jack is a man whose conscience does not allow him to participate in a gay wedding ceremony, which he sees as contrary to God's law.
How many people are going to be threatened with jail, the loss of their livelihoods, attacks on their good name, or worse if you and I do not stand up and fight back now?
Is Justice Anthony Kennedy's America the America you want to leave your children and grandchildren?
Not me, not mine, not my household, and not millions of other decent, loving, law-abiding Americans who refuse to be cowed, to accept the second-class status Justice Kennedy's America lays out for us.
Our 5-Point Plan to Fight Back
That's why NOM has announced our 5-point plan to sustain the movement for marriage in America and to protect your rights in the public square.
They are counting on you and me to give up and throw in the towel. We are going to instead surprise them with a redoubled defense of marriage in states from Indiana to Oregon. We will make sure the Republicans who have betrayed you across the United States feel your anger at their willingness to sell out marriage.
The ACLU has already announced plans to overturn marriage in Virginia, Illinois, North Carolina and New Jersey. They are coming soon to your state to overturn your votes and your values. NOM is working with national and state allies to ensure the best legal talent is available to protect your state's marriage laws. NOM was not only the biggest funder of Proposition 8, we were one of the biggest donors to Prop 8's legal defense fund.
We've seen what gay marriage means for Jack Phillips and other people of faith: outrageous new government pressures and penalties. We cannot accept this un-American status quo. NOM is working with topflight legal experts (like our Chairman, the distinguished constitutional law scholar and litigator Prof. John Eastman) to develop effective new protections at the national and state level for people of faith; we will call on Congress to pass new legislation; we will fight to elect Congressmen, Senators and a President who will stand tall and protect your most cherished rights.
This is an expensive new undertaking made absolutely necessary and mission-critical by Justice Kennedy's announced contempt for our Constitution, and your rights.
(You can learn more about NOM's plan to fight for marriage, for democracy and for your freedom, right here: “The Path Forward”)
Will you help us fight against Justice Kennedy's America and for your freedom? We need your prayers and we need your financial support to sustain a movement–today, tomorrow and twenty years into the future.
Like our prolife brothers and sisters, we now face a choice: submit or fight back. Millions of Americans must refuse to submit when the Supreme Court makes a ruling that is wrong on the facts, wrong on the Constitution, and wrong in the eyes of God.
Bobby's Story
Prof. Robert Oscar Lopez who recently won his fight for tenure at the University of California, has emerged as a advocate for the rights of children raised by same-sex couples.
The single most effective statement I've every seen was Bobby's testimony before the Minnesota State legislature, on what it was like for him to grow up without a father, but instead with two moms:
On Tuesday Prof. Lopez decided to share more of his personal story, and why he refused to be cowed or silenced:
“We all have or had a father. He's not replaceable with another mother. Sorry, he just isn't.
If the father's not part of our lives growing up, we suffer. There is a vacuum there. Often we seek the missing father's love through means that become self-destructive: over-pleasing bosses or male authority figures, sleeping with older men, drinking, drugs, lousy friends, narcissism.”
For years Lopez endured this self-inflicted abuse, seeking gay relationships with older men. For years he would have been one of those young men who said growing up with two moms and no dad was just fine with him:
“For the vast majority of my life, I didn't think about fatherhood. I grew up without a father around, so it didn't matter to me. I not only had no examples of what a father did--I also didn't care that I had no such examples. In a way I felt like it was cool to have grown up with a lesbian mom and her partner. We were unique. The fact that my father showed little concern for me seemed liberating--it indicated to me that I could show little concern for others, and somewhere a woman or maybe two women could pick up the slack for me. There was a sense of satisfaction in me, as a teenager, knowing that I could leap into the gay life, have all the sex I wanted, and never have to worry about being a dad because I couldn't get anyone pregnant. The thought of being gay was fabulous to me back then, circa 1985. Sex, sex, sex, no kids to worry about. No sacrifices. Best of all, I'd be able to go through adult life never having to revisit the missing figure in my life--the father who wasn't there for me. I could distract myself endlessly from the necessary healing that I'd have to undertake.”
What changed Prof. Lopez life, by the grace of God, was a two-part miracle: falling in love with a woman, and having a child with her:
“My daughter was born and I loved her. I never had a moment of feeling anything toward her but love. But it became very clear, after my little girl was born, that there is a LOT more to being a parent than loving your kid. (This is where same-sex parenting advocates get it all wrong. Love is the least of your worries, the part that comes easiest. It's the duty to be a good parent that's tough.)
My wife didn't mince words; that's not her style. She told me point-blank I would have to be a good father to our daughter. “
Change took time and came hard, and it was a choice: “I didn't like fixing things, giving up drinking, or having to stick around and teach my daughter the rules of life. It just wasn't my style.
I was, I realized, just like my dad. I didn't want to be bothered. I didn't feel like a child should cramp my style or impede any of the plans I'd set for my own life. I assumed that as long as I felt something I called love in my heart, I could treat fatherhood as a part-time, temporary job.”
While serving in the Army Reserve in Afghanistan, he realized one day he was hoping to be killed so his wife could collect the $500,000 insurance policy and support their child:
“It dawned on me that day in 2010. I was a piece of [excrement], and there was no excuse for what I was doing. Wanting to die on the battlefield so I could have my cake and eat it too, be called a hero while escaping the task of being a real dad, was lower than low.”
That's when he finally made the choice to take on the magnificent calling of fatherhood and husbandhood and put it at the center of his life.
To break the cycle, finally.
Men do this only when they know they are necessary and important, and cannot be replaced in their children's life.
And that's why I, like Bobby, and like millions of other Americans continue to fight for the truth, for what's right, for marriage:
“Lesbian moms allow the sources of their children's sperm to run off and be unbothered, saying to themselves, 'those two [women] will care for my kid … I don't owe the world anything.' Gay dads are just two pairs of men running off to live in a world of men, avoiding the hassles and … demands of the women who bear them children. Both forms of same-sex parenting pass on more broken family ties, cause more erasure, sever children from their origins, and teach men to be fatherless and feckless all at once.”
Thanks to each one of you who makes this fight possible, through your letters of encouragement, through your financial sacrifices, and through your prayers, which our country needs now more than ever.
We will not cower, we will not run, we will fight for God's truth about marriage, and for our rights as freeborn Americans to participate in the democratic process on an equal basis.
Thank you for making this possible.
Fourteen months ago, President Obama was a bigot. Now he is simply wrong. That's what you have to believe to agree with Justice Anthony M. Kennedy's majority opinion for the Supreme Court on the Defense of Marriage Act.
Marriage is society's best way of ensuring the well-being of children. State recognition of marriage protects children, we saw yesterday, by encouraging men and women to commit permanently and exclusively to each other and take responsibility for their children.
Opponents of same-sex marriage called the Freedom to Marry's four-state strategy overly optimistic.
“We think it’s very telling gay marriage advocates are using the courts so heavily,” said Thomas Peters, communications director for the National Organization for Marriage. “They only support the voice of the people when they think it go their way.”
"...What is judicial activism? There are lots of opinions on that, but none is definitive. Apparently the origin of the term came not in a legal opinion at all, but in a 1947 Fortunemagazine article by historian Arthur Schlesinger in which he described the sitting U.S. Supreme Court as having 4 judicial activists, 3 judges who practiced “self-restraint,” and 2 in the middle. The distinction, Schlesinger argued, was based on their legal worldview, with the activists finding the law more malleable and subject to interpretation, whereas those engaged in self-restraint felt that legal terms had real meaning and it was not their place to provide a lot of interpretation.
According to attorney Nicolle Martin, the owners of a Colorado bakery could face a year in prison for refusing to make a cake for a gay wedding, Jim Hoft reported at the Gateway Pundit Monday.
"...Then there’s the IRS. We already have evidence of abuse there. For instance, the National Organization for Marriage, which opposes same-sex marriage, had its tax returns and private donor information leaked to the news media last year, presumably in order to embarrass Mitt Romney (he gave the group $10,000) and others during the presidential election.
Pope Francis issued his first encyclical Friday, a meditation on faith that is unique because it was written with someone else: Benedict XVI. In the document, though, Francis also drives home the point that marriage is an institution, at least under Catholic doctrine, that is exclusive to a man and woman.
The "win at all cost" push by advocates of same-sex marriage in California has now yielded a Supreme Court decision that has done much more than leave in place a decision by a single federal judge invalidating the votes of more than 7 million Californians.
The Left has had some success in its push to redefine marriage, for readily apparent reasons: They dominate the media, they dominate the academy and, as we saw last week, they dominate the courts. Certainly dominance in the elite sectors of opinion-shaping helps.
