National impact expected from New York gay marriage law: experts
When New York became the sixth and by far the largest state to legalize same-sex marriage, following a grueling overtime session in the state legislature, it immediately transformed the national debate over the issue, legal experts said.
With a population over 19 million — more than the combined population of the five states that currently allow gay marriage, plus the District of Columbia, where it is also legal — New York is poised to provide the most complete picture yet of the legal, social and economic consequences of gay marriage.
“I think that having same-sex marriage in New York will have tremendous moral and political force for the rest of the country — in part because New York is a large state, and in part because it hasn’t come easily,” said Suzanne Goldberg, a professor at Columbia Law School.
The New York Assembly passed same-sex marriage legislation twice before, in 2007 and 2009, but in both cases it stalled in the state Senate, as it nearly did again this week. The bill passed late on Friday after legislators agreed on language allowing religious organizations to refuse to perform services or lend space for same-sex weddings.
The new law’s impact can be measured in part by the numbers at play: New York is home to more than 42,000 same-sex couples, according to an analysis of U.S. census data conducted by the Williams Institute. This means, among other things, that the number of same-sex couples living in states allowing same-sex marriage has more than doubled overnight.
Read the full story by Jessica Dye here.
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Gay marriage law in Argentina signals waning Catholic power in Latin America
The Catholic Church’s failure to derail a gay marriage law in Argentina shows once powerful clergymen losing their influence in Latin America, where pressure is growing for more liberal social legislation.
The law, which lets gay couples marry and adopt children, was approved last week to the cheers of hundreds of gay couples gathered outside Congress despite opposition from churchmen, who called gay families “perverse.”
“We shouldn’t be naive: this isn’t just a political struggle, it’s a strategy to destroy God’s plan,” Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, the head of the Church in Argentina, said in a letter before the vote, urging lawmakers to reject the bill. Mexico City and Uruguay upset the conservative Catholic hierarchy by passing similar legislation last year, and more liberal laws on social issues are likely in the region.
Chilean President Sebastian Pinera has vowed to give more rights to same-sex couples, and Dilma Rousseff, a leading candidate in Brazil’s presidential race, has said she favours the legalization of abortion in a country that has the world’s largest Catholic population.
“People are still Catholic and they still believe in the fundamentals … but they no longer agree with what (the Church) says regarding morality,” said Ana Maria Bidegain, a religious studies professor at Florida International University.
Among other reasons, she said that churchmen have seen their influence ebbing because the vast majority of Latin Americans live now in urban areas where people have “their own personal ways” to live Catholicism, and also due to highly publicized sex abuse scandals among priests worldwide.
Karl Rove says did not ask for gay marriage fight
Karl Rove, the political operative widely credited with the electoral successes of former U.S. President George W. Bush, says in his new book that he did not choose gay marriage as a wedge issue but that circumstances thrust it his way.
Conventional wisdom, at least in some circles, has it that Rove masterminded gay marriage as an issue in the 2004 White House race in a bid to get conservative evangelicals — a key base for the Republican Party, especially during the Bush years – to the polls. There were ballot initiatives in about a dozen states that year to ban gay marriage (or, supporters of such measures would argue, to defend traditional marriage). Many political commentators have said such tactics are in keeping with the “Rovian” strategy of ginning up the base to clinch narrow victories.
Rove, in “Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight,” says the ballot initiatives made little difference to the outcome that year and that they were not his idea anyway.
“Gay marriage was an ugly fight we had not asked for but could win if we handled with care. Done right, our response to gay marriage could show it was possible to bring a courteous and caring tone to a divisive issue. The issue also revealed the nuttiness of the Left, which never saw how persistent America’s traditionalism really was. Instead, the Left seemed convinced that Bush and I engineered the issue’s emergence to drive Bush partisans to the polls. But, of course, it was a liberal supreme court that brought the issue to the fore,” he writes.
He was referring to a November 2003, Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision that legalized gay marriage in that state. Rove said that development sparked the ballot initiatives and he maintains their impact in the election battle against Democrat John Kerry has been greatly exaggerated. What did matter in his view was that state court decision.
“In the end, whether a state had a marriage ballot measure didn’t affect Bush’s share of the vote: he increased his portion of the vote between 2000 and 2004 by an average of 2.7 points in the states without referenda and by an average of 2.5 points in the eleven states with defense-of-marriage initiatives on the November ballot, a statistically insignificant difference … But the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision did affect the 2004 election by motivating culturally conservative Democrats and independents who might otherwise have voted Democratic to abandon Kerry over his wobbly views on marriage.”
Gay marriage was barely thrust upon him. Karl Rove’s a political pornographer in denial who never met a hot-button issue he didn’t embrace, fondle, milk for all it was worth, and then some.
Compelled to read his book? Please wash your hands, you can’t be sure he did.
U.S. religious conservatives and progressives profiled
The first ever comparative surveys of U.S. conservative and progressive (or liberal) religious activists has just been published by the Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron and Public Religion Research. Click here for a link to the survey.
Many findings of the study – based on a detailed survey answered by 1,866 progressive religious activists and 1,123 conservative ones — will come as no surprise to followers of the U.S. political scene. But they will no doubt be closely scrutinized by both Republican and Democratic strategists.
Republicans are sure to take note of the fact that religious conservatives are still preoccupied with the issues of abortion rights and gay marriage, which they staunchly oppose. The Democratic Party will note that progressive religious activists care deeply about poverty, health care and the environment.
The report’s findings come as activists from the Religious Right and the Religious Left are ginning up their supporters to oppose or support President Barack Obama’s drive to overhaul America’s healthcare system, which is his top domestic priority.
Among the report’s key findings:
Religious affiliation: conservative activists are almost exclusively Christian, whereas progressive activists are more diverse. Among conservative activists, 54 percent identify as evangelical Protestant, 35 percent as Roman Catholic, and 9 percent with Mainline Protestantism. Among progressive activists, 44 percent identify as Mainline Protestants; 17 percent as Roman Catholics; 10 percent as evangelical Protestants; 12 percent as interfaith, mixed faith, or Unitarian; 6 percent Jewish; and 8 percent who have no formal religious affiliation or identify as formerly affiliated.
I wonder if the study broke down into age grouping, since there are indications that the culture war divide is increasingly being bridged by the younger generation.
A number of secular observers have noted the irony of people being pro-abortion and anti-war, or anti-abortion and pro-war. The environment, gun control, the “welfare state” and a host of other issues has odd conundrums across the culture wars. Hopefully some of our younger generation will lead the rest of us through this theological muddle.
Pope in Nazareth restates Catholic family values
After several days when the location of a speech sometimes clashed with the message he wanted to send, Pope Benedict must have been relieved to visit Nazareth today. The town where Jesus grew up lies in Israel proper, in the north of the country, and not in the political minefield of the West Bank that Benedict visited yesterday to see Bethlehem. In the town of the Holy Family, he was able to defend traditional Catholic family values without having to consider issues such as Palestinian statehood or apologies for the Holocaust. As he put it:
“All of us need… to return to Nazareth, to contemplate ever anew the silence and love of the Holy Family, the model of all Christian family life. Here, in the example of Mary, Joseph and Jesus, we come to appreciate even more fully the sacredness of the family, which in God’s plan is based on the lifelong fidelity of a man and a woman consecrated by the marriage covenant and accepting of God’s gift of new life. How much the men and women of our time need to reappropriate this fundamental truth, which stands at the foundation of society, and how important is the witness of married couples for the formation of sound consciences and the building of a civilization of love!”
Of course, this is just as political as the other questions he’s dealt with on this visit, as the growing acceptance of gay marriage at the state level in the United States shows, but it’s on a different level. The issue isn’t the same in Israel, because the the Chief Rabbinate oversees marriages here and rules out gay marriage. The same goes for civil unions. But colleagues in our Jerusalem bureau tell me that times are changing here as well. Israeli social services now often recognise a long-standing gay relationship as similar to common law marriage and extend benefits to same-sex partners.
Where is the empirical evidence of traditional Catholic family values?
Have culture war issues returned to America?
America’s seemingly dormant culture wars reignited this week as the issue of gay marriage competed with the sour economy and volatile markets for media attention.
The emotive issue was thrust back onto center stage by Vermont lawmakers on Tuesday, who overode a veto from the governor by a wafer-thin margin, making the New England state the fourth in the United States where gays can wed. You can see some of our coverage from earlier this week here and here.
Known for picturesque foliage, quaint dairy farms and socially liberal politics, Vermont joins New England neighbors Connecticut and Massachusetts in allowing gay marriage. Iowa legalized gay marriage last week.
Vermont is the first to do so through legislative action instead of the courts. Social conservative critics of gay marriage often decry “judicial activism,” maintaining that unelected courts are forcing social change that most Americans do not want.
Courts briefly allowed gay marriage in California before voters banned at the polls.
Gay marriage has emerged as a key battleground in America’s culture wars. Opponents, who are mostly religious conservatives (evangelicals, Catholics and Mormons) see it as a threat to the “traditional family” which they say is ordained by God and is the foundation of civilization. They also see same-sex acts as a biblical sin.
as the downfall of the educcational system in america continues, these culturual issues in society become more and more impportant to people. instead of worry about things like the economy, national secuirty, and education that affect a nation on a broad level, them media, government, and people choose to spend time debating these petty issues that really have no bearing on the over all well-being of the society.
African Americans top U.S. religious measures-Pew
An analysis by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life suggests that blacks are considerably more religious than the overall U.S. population. You can see the whole report here.
“While the U.S. is generally considered a highly religious nation, African-Americans are markedly more religious on a variety of measures than the U.S. population as a whole, including level of affiliation with a religion, attendance at religious services, frequency of prayer and religion’s importance in life,” the report says.
- Nearly eight in 10 blacks (79 percent) say religion is very important in their lives, compared with 56 percent among all U.S. adults.
- Blacks attend religious services and pray more frequently than the general population. While 39 percent of all Americans report attending religious services at least once a week, 53 percent of blacks report the same.
- Similarly, while 58 percent of all Americans report praying at least once a day, 76 percent of blacks report praying daily.
- The vast majority of blacks are Protestant (78 percent), compared with 51 percent of the U.S. adult population as a whole.
sorry ken, i was a none believer now i am a believer,have been for twenty years.my faith sustains me,it makes everything worthwhile ,not only have i only heard about the lord ,he lives within me.he is more tangible to me than any thing you could say.he is with me on this journey that i make through this life ,and some day i will stand before him,WELL DONE GOOD- AND FAITHFUL SERVANT.
from Tales from the Trail:
Obama inauguration pastor choice: war or peace?
President-elect Barack Obama is seeking peace at his inauguration, but gay and lesbians see his choice of pastor as a nakedly political continuation of war.
"It is important for America to come together, even though we may have disagreements on certain social issues," the prez-elect said, defending his choice of Saddleback Church Pastor Rick Warren -- a same-sex marriage opponent. Obama said he personally would continue be a fierce advocate for equality for gay and lesbian Americans.
Equality California chief Geoff Kors said the decision amounted to choosing someone who 'declared war on one minority community'.
Warren's evangelical ministry is known more for its focus on social issues than many other evangelical pastors seen as strong political conservatives.
He calls his grand plan PEACE: Promote reconciliation, Equip leaders, Assist the poor, Care for the sick, Educate the next generation.
So is it war or peace?
Obama says the expression of diverse views was the spirit of his campaign that he hopes to carry over to his administration, starting on Jan 20 with his inauguration, where others who disagree with Pastor Warren will also speak.
I think Rick Warren is a good choice although, after the cowardly “above my pay grade comment by Obama at the debate at Saddlebrook, I wonder if this is just another attempt to give an open minded face to a radical abortion and gay marriage agenda. Remember Obama opposes gay marriage and Prop 8 at the same time. That translates as let the Courts impose gay marriage and don’t let the public have a say.
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Resident FaithWorld Expert
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@Stephen1949,
Please don’t be ignorant and patronizing.
This may come as a shock to “progressive” circles in America, but all those “backwards” and “ethnic” immigrants actually couldn’t care less about same-sex marriage.
The vast majority of immigrants don’t give a damn about same-sex marriage -neither for nor against. Many may have an opinion on the matter, but the vast majority never vote on this issue (IF they even have the legal ability to vote), because it doesn’t affect them.
Of the Latinos in California that *did* vote (the vast majority of whom are American-born, not naturalized immigrants), their voting patterns on California’s prop 8 was equally divided.
If you’re looking for someone to blame for the fact that gay Americans cannot marry in California and most of the US, then look at your own nationality: native-born Americans are far more likely to vote based on social issues like abortion and same-sex marriage. Immigrants (like my parents) just don’t care about social issues (and my parents, BTW, are loyal Democrats, as are MOST IMMIGRANTS).
It was the African-American and WASP-Evangelical demographics that were most in favor or Proposition 8 to ban same-sex marriage, and the Prop 8 campaign received a massive amount of campaign money from native-born red-state WASP Americans through the Mormon Church.
So please stop scapegoating those “backwards” immigrants. They’re not as backwards as you think, and they don’t fall for the “God bless…” “I pray to God” “faith in God” rhetoric that AMERICAN politicians constantly spew.