Free Republic

Gay marriage may soon be recognized in two American states: Massachusetts and.... Can you guess? No, I'm not thinking of California, although mayor Gavin Newsom's defiance of the law could easily bring court imposed gay marriage there. Nor am I thinking of New Jersey, although a Goodridgecopycat case is working its way through the liberal New Jersey courts. Surprisingly, New Mexico could be the next state to recognize gay marriage. I'll explain why in a moment. First let's trace the big picture. THE ROAD TO NATIONALIZATION When gay marriage comes to Massachusetts in May, immense complications will follow. David Frum...

The Nordic track COVER STORY: State approval of homosexual marriage in Scandinavia contributed to the virtual disappearance of real marriage By Gene Edward Veith No matter what happens in the homosexual-marriage/civil-union controversies, marriage as an institution isn't going away, is it? Yes, it is. Marriage has already all but disappeared in Scandinavia. Other Europeans are heading down that Nordic track. And, if gay marriage is legalized, so will we. That is the conclusion of Stanley Kurtz, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, whose article "The End of Marriage in Scandinavia" was published in The Weekly Standard. Sweden was the...

In 2000, the people of the state of California voted by a margin of 61 percent to 39 percent to pass Proposition 22, which defined marriage as the union of a man and a woman. Having openly defied the overwhelming opinion of the voters of California, the city of San Francisco will now sue to overturn Proposition 22 on the grounds of the equal-protection and due-process provisions of the California State constitution. Does anyone believe that the framers of California's constitution intended these provisions to have this effect? Could there possibly be a more blatant effort to override democratically expressed...

The issue of same-sex "marriage" and the Federal Marriage Amendment will come to the fore in American political debate this year -- and, I believe, soon. Congressional leaders are strategizing right now. But there's one objection to our position that many of us have had to face, and we don't often have a good answer. Our opponents say, "What's the big deal? So what if gays and lesbians want to marry? This doesn't do anything to your marriage." Well, our answer has always been that it would weaken marriage. Why? Because it would take away the unique status and benefits...

The "conservative case" for same-sex marriage collapses. MARRIAGE IS SLOWLY DYING IN SCANDINAVIA. A majority of children in Sweden and Norway are born out of wedlock. Sixty percent of first-born children in Denmark have unmarried parents. Not coincidentally, these countries have had something close to full gay marriage for a decade or more. Same-sex marriage has locked in and reinforced an existing Scandinavian trend toward the separation of marriage and parenthood. The Nordic family pattern--including gay marriage--is spreading across Europe. And by looking closely at it we can answer the key empirical question underlying the gay marriage debate. Will same-sex...

Want to get rid of affirmative action? There's a lot you can do to help. But didn't we lose that battle? Didn't the Supreme Court's decisions in the University of Michigan cases hand the universities victory? Not really. The Michigan decisions were a classic attempt by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor to drag a polarizing cultural issue onto muddy middle ground. They simply set the terms for our ongoing battle over preferences. We opponents of affirmative action have only lost that battle if we think we've lost. Look closely at the Michigan decisions and you'll see any number of ways in...

AFTER GAY MARRIAGE, what will become of marriage itself? Will same-sex matrimony extend marriage's stabilizing effects to homosexuals? Will gay marriage undermine family life? A lot is riding on the answers to these questions. But the media's reflexive labeling of doubts about gay marriage as homophobia has made it almost impossible to debate the social effects of this reform. Now with the Supreme Court's ringing affirmation of sexual liberty in Lawrence v. Texas, that debate is unavoidable. Among the likeliest effects of gay marriage is to take us down a slippery slope to legalized polygamy and "polyamory" (group marriage). Marriage...

If you've followed the war on terror with any degree of care, you know that Daniel Pipes has been a major player in our debates over what to do about militant Islam. To his great credit, Pipes was one of the very few scholars who warned the country, well before September 11, of the potential terrorist threat stemming from militant Islam. Pipes is both a serious scholar of contemporary Islam and a tireless advocate for a policy that takes the threat of militant Islam seriously — while still encouraging the forces of liberalism within Islam. I don't always agree with...

The U.S. Congress broke with a 45-year tradition last week: It permitted a dissident to critique the federal funding for the study of foreign language and cultures - to suggest that the program often serves the very opposite of academia's goals or the nation's interests. The topic impinges on core questions of how Americans see the outside world and themselves. It also has major implications for U.S. policy. Federal funding of international studies (known in govermentese as "Title VI fellowships") is relatively new, going back to 1959, when Cold War tensions prompted a sense of American vulnerability. The goal was...

Last Thursday, June 19, I testified at a contentious hearing of the House Subcommittee on Select Education. The hearing was convened to examine charges of bias leveled against programs of international education funded under Title VI of the Higher Education Act. Title VI-funded programs support the academic study of the Middle East, and other areas of the world. (You can read my testimony here and you can view the hearings on video by going here. Note that the first two of the five witnesses were not involved in the controversy. You can safely skip their testimony, if desired.) Having laid...

Now that the initial wave of reactions to the controversial government-funded day-care study has run its course, time to take a step back. Why is day care a problem in this country? Why has this study ruffled so many feathers? Is it possible to speak truthfully about what's at stake in the day-care dispute? And what are the prospects for a solution? To answer these questions, we need to recognize that the greatest threat to day care is love. I know that sounds like old news — and totally smarmy to boot. But the challenge posed to day care by...

Congress Weighs Anti-U.S. Biases At Key Colleges: Columbia, NYU Cited in Testimony New York Sun, June 20-22, 2003 (Front page) By Timothy Starks - Staff Reporter of the Sun WASHINGTON -A House subcommittee yesterday held a public hearing to investigate whether anti-American views pervade federally funded international-studies programs on college campuses -- including Columbia and New York University -- and to get ideas for what, if anything, should be done about it. . The hearing came as Congress moves to renew the Higher Education Act, and as a key group of Senate Republicans considers whether Congress should intervene in an...

For some time now, I have criticized scholars who study the Middle East (and other areas of the world) for abusing Title VI of the Higher Education Act. Title VI-funded programs in Middle Eastern studies (and other area studies) tend to purvey extreme and one-sided criticisms of American foreign policy. ANNOUNCING A HEARING It is my pleasure to announce that Congress has decided to investigate the charges of political bias that have been leveled against Title VI programs by critics like Martin Kramer, Daniel Pipes, and myself. This Thursday, June 19, at 1:00 P.M. in room 2175 of the Rayburn...

May 20, 2003, 9:00 a.m. All the News that's Fit to Print… …for the whole world to read. here is no doubt that the Jayson Blair outrage has created a crisis at the New York Times. And since the scandal caps a long series of complaints about the paper's leftward bias, the Blair affair's power to hurt the Times has become more than the sum of its parts. Yet those who believe that the New York Times is on the ropes are fooling themselves. Beneath the well-publicized controversies over the Times' ideological bias lie a couple of lesser known and...

There is no doubt that the Jayson Blair outrage has created a crisis at the New York Times. And since the scandal caps a long series of complaints about the paper's leftward bias, the Blair affair's power to hurt the Times has become more than the sum of its parts. Yet those who believe that the New York Times is on the ropes are fooling themselves. Beneath the well-publicized controversies over the Times' ideological bias lie a couple of lesser known and intertwined stories: the tale of Times owner, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and of the business strategy that he and...

The Jayson Blair story points to a serious problem alright, but not to a solution. I think I have a solution. It's no secret that a great many of us no longer trust the New York Times. The paper has always had a liberal flavor, of course. Yet in the past, the Times's news coverage maintained sufficient balance and integrity that it could justly be deemed the "newspaper of record." That is no longer true. In many ways, the New York Times remains an excellent paper, yet I deeply mistrust what I read there. I know the paper has a...

There is a mystery at the heart of the gay-marriage debate. I call it the "libertarian question." The libertarian question (really a series of questions) goes like this: Why should any form of adult consensual sex be illegal? What rational or compelling interest does the state have in regulating consensual adult sex? More specifically, how does the marriage of two gay men undermine my marriage? Will the fact that two married gay men live next door make me leave my wife? Hardly. So how, then, does gay marriage undermine heterosexual marriage? Why not get the state out of such matters...

The Democrats think they understand the political implications of the Santorum flap. They do not. The conventional wisdom of the Democrats on the Santorum affair is set forth in places like The New Republic's &c. blog and in a recent column by Eleanor Clift.As the Democrat's see it, the Santorum affair will do substantial damage to the Republican party for some time. That's because, on social issues generally, and on homosexuality in particular, the public is divided into roughly three camps — social conservatives, social liberals, and social moderates. Social conservatives, who see homosexuality as immoral, form a large...

    April 24, 2003, 8:45 a.m. Defending Senator Santorum The Pennsylvania Republican has been subject to shameful treatment. come to the question of homosexuality and public policy from a different perspective than U.S. Senator Rick Santorum. I would like to see sodomy laws abolished, and have said so publicly. I should also note that I am not religious, and do not see homosexuality as sinful. Nonetheless, I am convinced that Sen. Santorum's recent remarks on homosexuality have been badly distorted by both the Democratic party and the mainstream press. The shameful public response to Sen. Santorum's statements is a...

Last month, in "Heather Has 3 Parents," I wrote about a Canadian law suit that clearly reveals the slippery slope on which we shall surely be set by legalized same-sex marriage. A court in London, Ontario has been asked to declare three people the legal parents of a single child (the biological mother and father, and the lesbian partner of the natural mother). Since conception, the sexual relationship appears to have been confined to the lesbian partners, both of whom live with the child. Yet the biological father, a close friend of the biological mother and her partner, frequently visits...