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An Embarrassing Reconciliation On Gay Marriage

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The Internet is abuzz today with an Op-Ed in Sunday’s New York Times entitled, “A Reconciliation On Gay Marriage.” Co-authored by two men on opposite sides of the camp, David Blankenhorn of the Institute for American Values, and Jonathan Rauch of the Brookings Institution, the piece supposes a lot, offers a little, and ignores much. An analysis.

From the very beginning of reading “A Reconciliation On Gay Marriage“, one can’t help but notice the title feels a bit odd. “A Treaty On Gay Marriage”, or “A Bridge To Gay Marriage” would make more sense. The authors’ attempt at “reconciliation” is, at best, shrouded in sectarian mischief, and at worst, is no attempt at all. One wonders of their true motivation. As you know, a word used by the church, “reconciliation” is,

“A sacrament in some Christian churches that includes contrition, confession to a priest, acceptance of punishment, and absolution.”

So, from the very beginning, we realize this piece has a deep religious undertone and is written in service to the church. How? Once you read the article thoroughly you realize the authors have written it so delicately that it leads the reader to assume the church actually has a deciding vote in the battle on gay marriage. They do it from the start. And there need be no contrition, no absolution, and no apologies for the need for gay marriage. Certainly none from the church.

The authors pre-suppose a few items and need to be called on them. First, this is a country of laws. The Church, indeed any religious entity, has no say whatsoever in the law.

Second, going back to our earlier experiment in “separate but equal”, the vast majority of Americans were against equality for blacks when President Johnson convinced Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “Majority rules” has never been an acceptable argument or principle where the Constitution, the law, and human rights are concerned. “Separate but equal” gave us five decades of separate not equal. It was insufficient then, it is insufficient now.

Overall, my conversations with members of the gay community, whether in person, or on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, are that, as authors Blankenhorn and Rauch write, yes, “most, of course, want the right to marry, and nothing less.” In fact, the vast majority tell me their outrage at being treated as second-class citizens, and, while civil union is a step in the right direction, they feel it is but a step. Equal marriage, with the word marriage, is the goal of the vast majority.

Ignored is the fact that still, only two states offer same-sex marriage. So, the statement “Congress would bestow the status of federal civil unions on same-sex marriages and civil unions granted at the state level” really doesn’t do much for the millions of gays who don’t live in, or don’t want to, or can’t, travel to Connecticut or Massachusetts. The authors should have proposed an avenue to the repeal of DOMA and federal encouragement to the states to ensure an offer of same-sex civil unions.

The authors also ignore the elephant in the room. Gays could care less about the sectarian position on same-sex marriage. In fact, I took a poll recently on the social networking site “Twitter”. In response to my question, “Acceptable definition of legalized gay marriage: must it include religious marriage recognition? Is being married by “the church” a must?”, 74% chose the answer, “Hell, who cares? As long as you call it marriage and we get all the benefits, I don’t care who marries us!” 26% chose “It would be nice, but the religious aspect of marriage is not a deal-breaker.” And no one voted for, “Absolutely. If I can’t get married in a church/synagogue/mosque, etc., then I wouldn’t consider myself married.” Me thinks the church doth protest too much.

The authors’ solution, “federal civil unions on same-sex marriages and civil unions granted at the state level”? Yes. “Religious organizations need not recognize same-sex unions against their will”? Yes.

But make no mistake. The Church has no say in the matter of same-sex marriage. It is not a sectarian issue but a secular one. Gays have no desire to get into bed with the church and are happy to leave the church out of our business. But civil unions and domestic partnerships are merely the final steps to our rightful goal, full and equal marriage, called marriage, and not sanctioned by the church, but by man himself. No contrition, confession to a priest, acceptance of punishment, or absolution for that which is rightfully ours, necessary.

 

Also, take a look at these posts on Gay Marriage, here, at The New Civil Rights Movement.

Elsewhere, these pieces on the Times’ Op-Ed are interesting:

Aw cute, some people still think the church opposes gay marriage in good faith

The Worst Op-Ed, Ever

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Election Denialism Embraced by ‘Large Proportion’ of Trump’s Followers: Report

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May 2, 2024

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Since at least 2012 Donald Trump has been engaging in election denialism. Now, a tenet of the Republican Party, the refusal to accept official election results they don’t like is ingrained in a large number of his followers.

“I think that the powers that be on the Democratic side have figured out a way to circumvent democracy,” Darlene Anastas, 69, of Middleborough, Massachusetts, told NBC News. The network “spoke to more than 50 Trump supporters, most of whom said they don’t believe Biden can win legitimately in November.”

“Poll after poll,” NBC also reported, “has found that a large proportion of the Republican electorate believes the only reasons Joe Biden is president are voter fraud and Democratic dirty tricks, buying into former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims about the 2020 election.”

NBC spoke with 72-year old George Crosby, from Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, who said, Democrats “cheat like crazy” (video below).

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“I think they cheated before, and I think they’re going to try to do it again, because they’re a bunch of communists,” Fitzwilliam added.

38-year old James Russon of Eagle Mountain, Utah told NBC, “There’s no way Biden could legally … win without unfair means.”

“He added that the only way Biden could prevail would be through ‘cheating’ or ‘a lot of deceased people voting.'”

62-year old Randall Minicola of Las Vegas said it would be “impossible” for Biden to win. “I don’t think he’s got a following. I mean, you look who’s behind him — the only thing he’s got is ghosts behind him. That’s what I believe. Where’s the supporters then? Are they in the basement with him? I don’t think so.”

NBC News did not report on where these particular GOP voters got their information or how they came to believe these claims, but it did note the “possibility of another election in which large numbers of Republicans refuse to accept a Biden victory has also been stoked by influential conservatives.”

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Trump’s election denialism is so strong that in 2020 CNN published “A list of the times Trump has said he won’t accept the election results or leave office if he loses.”

Election denialism continues to be spread throughout the right.

“A senile man is not going to get elected in the most powerful country in the world unless there’s fraud,” former Fox News host Tucker Carlson said in March, NBC noted. Carlson, a purveyor of conspiracy theories, has spoken very positively about Russia and its authoritarian president, Vladimir Putin, and against Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Numerous studies and fact checks have found mail-in voting to be safe and secure, with little opportunity for fraud, yet just last week Carlson, like Trump, was claiming massive election fraud. Undermining Americans’ faith in democracy was a main goal of Russian President Putin’s 2016 attack on the U.S. elections, according to a 2017 report issued by a group of U.S. Intelligence agencies.

But just last week Carlson claimed, “About one in five mail-in ballots in the last election was fraudulent, handing Biden the presidency. We know this because the people who committed the fraud have admitted it in a new poll.”

A portion of NBC’s report from Thursday also appears in this January 2024 NBC News video.

Watch the video below or at this link.

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Trump Won’t Commit to Accepting Election Results if He Doesn’t Win State He Falsely Claims He Won

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16 hours ago

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May 2, 2024

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Falsely claiming he won the state of Wisconsin in the 2020 presidential election Donald Trump is now refusing to commit to accepting the 2024 results for the Badger State this November.

In an interview with Wisconsin’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Trump appeared to dance around the issue, declaring he would only accept the official results “if everything’s honest.”

“If everything’s honest, I’d gladly accept the results,” Trump told the paper’s Alison Dirr and Molly Beck in an interview Wednesday. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”

“But if everything’s honest, which we anticipate it will be — a lot of changes have been made over the last few years — but if everything’s honest, I will absolutely accept the results,” he said.

The Journal Sentinel reports Trump “offered similar conditions when asked the same question by news outlets in 2016 and 2020.”

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“I’d be doing a disservice to the country if I said otherwise,” he said.

In that interview Trump once again falsely claimed he won Wisconsin in 2020, a state President Joe Biden actually won by more than 20,000 votes.

“If you go back and look at all of the things that had been found out, it showed that I won the election in Wisconsin,” Trump told the newspaper. “It also showed I won the election in other locations.”

Trump’s “Big Lie,” that the 2020 election was “rigged” against him, along with his support for the January 6, 2021 insurrection, have been central to his 2024 campaign.

“Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the last presidential election in Wisconsin and his new comments placing conditions on when he would accept the results of the next election come as Republicans are seeking to persuade GOP voters to restore their trust in the state’s system of elections and embrace absentee voting,” the Journal Sentinel reported. “There’s no evidence to support that Wisconsin’s election was tainted by cheating or fraud in 2020. The results have been confirmed by recounts in Dane and Milwaukee counties that Trump paid for, court rulings, a nonpartisan state audit and a study by the conservative legal firm Wisconsin Institute of Law & Liberty, among other analyses.”

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In October of 2016, weeks before Election Day, during the final presidential debate, Trump was asked if he would make the commitment “that you will absolutely accept the results of this election?”

“I will look at it at the time,” Trump replied. “I’m not looking at anything now, I’ll look at it at the time.”

He then went on to sow doubt about the credibility of the election.

Trump’s refusal to accept election results stretches back more than a decade, even before he ran for president.

After he refused to accept his loss in 2020, ABC News reported “Trump has longstanding history of calling elections ‘rigged’ if he doesn’t like the results.”

“On election night in 2012, when President Barack Obama was reelected, Trump said that the election was a ‘total sham’ and a ‘travesty,’ while also making the claim that the United States is ‘not a democracy’ after Obama secured his victory.

“We can’t let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. Our nation is totally divided!” Trump wrote on Twitter

One month later, in December of 2012, Trump tweeted, “The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.” Ironically, four years later he became president after losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, but winning the Electoral College.

Watch the video above or at this link.

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‘No Place for Antisemitism’: Biden Denounces Violent Campus Protests, Hate Speech and Racism

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19 hours ago

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May 2, 2024

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President Joe Biden made rare, unscheduled remarks from the White House Thursday morning, denouncing the recent violent protests on college campuses, and telling Americans there is “no place” for antisemitism anywhere across the nation. He also denounced “hate speech” and “racism,” while declaring his support for the right to peacefully protest.

“There should be no place on any campus, no place in America for antisemitism or threats of violence against Jewish students,” President Biden declared. “There is no place for hate speech, or violence of any kind, whether it’s antisemitism, Islamophobia, or discrimination against Arab Americans or Palestinian Americans. It’s simply wrong. There’s no place for racism in America. It’s all wrong. It’s un-American.”

“Violent protest is not protected,” Biden said strongly. “Peaceful protest is.”

Stressing “the right to free speech,” and the people’s right “to peacefully assemble and make their voices heard,” President Biden also declared the importance of “the rule of law.”

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“We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or squash dissent,” the President also said, praising the ideal of peaceful protests, which he said are in the “best tradition of how Americans respond to consequential issues.”

“But,” he added, “neither are we a lawless country. We are a civil society and order must prevail.”

America is a “big, diverse, free thinking and freedom-loving nation,” Biden said, denouncing those “who rush in to score political points.”

“This isn’t a moment for politics, it’s a moment for clarity.”

“It’s against the law when violence occurs. Destroying property is not a peaceful protest. It’s against the law. Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations. None of this is a peaceful protest,” he warned. “Threatening people, intimidating people. instilling fear in people is not peaceful protest. It’s against the law. Dissent is essential to democracy but dissent must never lead to disorder or to denying the rights of others so students can finish a semester and their college education.”

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“Look. It’s basically a matter of fairness. It’s a matter of what’s right. There’s the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos. People have the right to get an education, the right to get a degree, the right to walk across the campus safely without fear of being attacked.”

“I understand people have strong feelings and deep convictions in America. We respect the right and protect the right for them to express that. But it doesn’t mean anything goes. It needs to be done without violence. Without destruction, without hate, and within the law. And I’ll make no mistake. As President, I will always defend free speech. And I will always be just as strong standing up for the rule of law. That’s my responsibility to you the American people. My obligation to the Constitution.”

The President also responded to reporters’ questions, including saying he saw no need to call up the National Guard.

Watch the videos above or at this link.

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