I enjoyed this column by a conservative writer whose column I always read, Rebecca Hagelin, who writes at TownHall.com.
This time her topic is marriage—and protecting traditional marriage. It’s a good read for Canadians.
Naturally the situation in the U.S. is different in many ways but there are also great similarities. The principle remains largely the same in both countries: Traditional marriage must be strongly defended everywhere.
For supporters of traditional marriage, 2004 was quite a roller-coaster ride. A series of court decisions — in Hawaii, Alaska and Vermont, but most infamously in Massachusetts, where the Supreme Judicial Court declared that bans on same-sex “marriage” are “rooted in persistent prejudices against persons who are … homosexual” — were still sending shock waves throughout the country. Officials in San Francisco began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
Suddenly we found ourselves arguing about the nature of an institution that, quite frankly, is the very bedrock of our civilization. And many advocates of so-called “gay rights” were only too happy to foment an attitude of lawlessness on the issue. Their goal: Turn same-sex “marriage” into a full-fledged civil right that then would have to be recognized at the highest levels of government.
The result, of course, would have been chaos. As my Heritage Foundation colleague Matthew Spalding put it in a Feb. 26, 2004, op-ed for the Washington Times, judges would have to “disregard thousands of years of custom and experience, flout the laws of every major society and thumb their noses at the beliefs of every major religious tradition.”
Many of us who realized how devastating such an outcome would be — that it would wreak havoc on all the other institutions that hold our country together — began insisting that the only way to protect marriage was a constitutional amendment. But when the U.S. Senate voted last July on whether to consider such an amendment, many senators weren’t convinced that an amendment was necessary, and it failed to pass.
Then, around election season, things began to change…
[…] The Indiana court went so far as to say that there is a “legitimate state interest” in supporting “opposite-sex marriage” because such couples “procreate responsibly and have and raise children within a stable environment.” Hallelujah. That’s exactly what’s at stake here. Hearing such common sense spoken by a court is a welcome change, indeed. […]
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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