GAY TRUTH

When it comes to controversial moral debates like same-sex marriage, trite sayings such as this one on the right are echoed quite often in a culture where the make-up man has become more important than the speech writer. It’s short, it’s rhetorically powerful, and using only eighteen words, it gets the intended job done. But often the truth of the matter takes a bit longer to unpack than can be offered in a thirty-second sound bite. An assertion can be uttered in seconds, while offering a reasoned argument requires clear thinking, patience, and energy, virtues and luxuries many people either can’t afford or simply don’t want to make time for. The issue of same-sex marriage is a hot topic that is not going away anytime soon. It is important to be persistent in clarifying the issues, especially in the face of saucy slogans such as this. So what’s wrong with this oft-repeated cliché? Problem #1: It Frames the Same-Sex Marriage Debate as an Equal Rights Issue “Denying equal rights …” Ind...

The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit Wednesday challenging Michigan 's practice of allowing adoption agencies to spurn potential LGBT parents under the guise of religion ....Religious exemption laws let people, churches and sometimes corporations cite religious beliefs as a reason not to enforce a law — such as declining to marry a same-sex couple or letting state-funded foster agencies refuse to place kids with same-sex couples. The Michigan adoption law leads to “fewer options for children” when the pool of qualified adopters is diluted because of unreasonable legislation, ACLU lawyer Leslie Cooper said. “There is a desperate need for families. We need more families, not fewer.” Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder signed the state’s common sense bill into law in June 2015. The law in essence lets faith-based agencies say no to homosexuals and lesbians parents if saying yes violates the group’s religious or moral beliefs. The ACLU is hoping for a “clearer ruling” in court...

Sorry, guys, I don’t make cakes for same-sex weddings.” With that blunt comment, Jack Phillips , a baker who designs custom wedding cakes, sent two men out the door and set off a legal battle between religious liberty and gay rights that comes before the U.S. Supreme Court this fall. The Trump administration last week sided with Phillips and argued that decorating a wedding cake is a type of “expressive conduct,” similar to burning a flag or marching in a parade. If so, they say, the Constitution’s free-speech protection gives the baker, a devout Christian, the right to refuse to participate in the marriage celebration of two men. But Colorado has barred Phillips from making any more wedding cakes because he refuses to abide by its civil rights law. Since 2008, it has required public businesses to serve all customers equally and without regard to their sexual orientation. The state, allied with the American Civil Liberties Union , says this case is about discrimination, not the r...

A Kentucky family court judge won’t hear adoption applications by “practicing homosexuals ” because he believes such adoptions are never in the child’s best interest. Judge W. Mitchell Nance released an order  April 27  stating he’s ethically required under the state’s judicial code of conduct to recuse himself from cases where he has a “ personal bias or prejudice.” He wrote that he believed as “a matter of conscience” that “under no circumstance” would “the best interest of the child … be promoted by the adoption” by a “practicing homosexual.” And because his “conscientious objection to the concept of adoption of a child by a practicing homosexual” could be seen as a “personal bias or prejudice,” Nance disqualified himself from hearing all such cases. Nance’s order was sent out to all attorneys in Metcalfe and Barren counties and directed them to inform the court when they had adoption applications by homosexual parties so another judge could take the...

English: Justice Anthony Kennedy, 2009. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) The U.S. Supreme Court issued its monumental ruling on same-sex “marriage” on Friday, declaring that all 50 states must and are “required ” to legalize “gay marriage” under the U.S. Constitution . “The court now holds that same-sex couples may exercise the fundamental right to marry. No longer may this liberty be denied to them,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the 5-4 decision, with the majority being the liberal justices on the bench: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg , Justice Elena Kagan , Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Steven Breyer and the aforementioned Justice Kennedy. While the court recognized the longstanding definition of marriage as being “a union between two persons of the opposite sex,” the five justices opined that “the history of marriage is one of both continuity and change.” “That institution—even as confined to opposite-sex relations—has evolved over time,” Kennedy said. “No union is mo...

English: Antonin Scalia, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) As one of the four justices that dissented from today’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling declaring that all 50 states must legalize same-sex “marriage, Justice Antonin Scalia issued a sharp rebuke of his colleagues’ arrogance, warning that “pride goeth before a fall.” “The opinion is couched in a style that is as pretentious as its content is egotistic,” he wrote. “It is one thing for separate concurring or dissenting opinions to contain extravagances, even silly extravagances, of thought and expression; it is something else for the official opinion of the court to do so.” Scalia was speaking of his disapproval of five black-robed justices issuing an edict that he opined was “highly unrepresentative” of the nation and “hardly a cross-section of America .” “Today’s decree says that my ruler, and the ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine...

Gay Couple with child (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Both before and after the Supreme Court ’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, some Christians argued that allowing same-sex couples to marry is not inconsistent with traditional Christian teaching on  marriage . At the heart of these arguments is the assertion that same-sex relationships are, to borrow a phrase from gay writer Andrew Sullivan , “virtually normal.” That is, same-sex relationships are, with one very obvious exception, not all that different from traditional marriages. Thus, just as the Supreme Court held that similarly-situated couples should be treated equally under law, similarly-situated couples should be treated equally in our churches. The problem is that same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples are not nearly as alike as those making these arguments would have us believe. This reality was amply demonstrated in a recent broadcast of “ Weekend All Things Considered .” Host Arun Rath spoke to J. Bryan Lo...

English: Anthony Kennedy, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) As many expected, the Supreme Court , by a 5-4 vote, ruled that under the Constitution, “ same-sex couples may exercise the fundamental right to marry .” Brushing aside arguments about history and the purpose of marriage, Justice Kennedy , writing for the majority, wrote “No longer may this liberty be denied to them.” This ruling is no surprise. All along, court-watchers knew that it would all come down to what Justice Kennedy thought about the issue. The votes of the other eight justices were never really in doubt. And it was obvious that Justice Kennedy, as the author of Planned Parenthood ’s infamous “mystery passage,” would have trouble excluding same-sex marriage from “the right to define one’s own concept of existence.” Justice Kennedy’s opinion, along with the four dissenting opinions, will be dissected and analyzed for some time. For now, though, I’d like to ta...

To hear some commentators talk, America ’s struggle over the meaning of marriage is already over, and conservatives have lost. Like latter-day Edgar Allan Poes, they are busily preparing a premature burial for marriage as a male-female union. Conservatives should imitate Poe’s protagonist and refuse to cooperate with this ghoulish enterprise, showing their opponents that they and their cause are very much alive. Recent suggestions of surrender are noteworthy because they go beyond the now-familiar claims from the left about the “inevitability” of nationally approved same-sex marriage , claims that were always intended as a substitute for actual argument about the proper understanding of marriage. Now, even some voices on the right are speaking of American conservatism ’s coming defeat and surrender on the question of marriage. Calls for capitulation are premature, however, for reasons of both principle and politics. A Matter of Principle As a matter of principle, the Amer...