A debate about what marriage is, hosted by the Federalist Society at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, featuring Ryan T. Anderson and Alastair Gamble.
The debate took place at the law school at Arizona State University.
Ryan T. Anderson:
Ryan T. Anderson researches and writes about marriage and religious liberty as the William E. Simon senior research fellow in American principles and public policy at The Heritage Foundation.
Anderson is the author of the “Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom.” He is the co-author with Princeton’s Robert P. George and Sherif Girgis of the book “What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense.”
Anderson received his bachelor’s degree from Princeton University, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude. He holds a doctoral degree in political philosophy from the University of Notre Dame. His dissertation was titled: “Neither Liberal nor Libertarian: A Natural Law Approach to Social Justice and Economic Rights.” He also holds a master’s degree from Notre Dame.
Alastair Gamble:
Alastair Gamble is an attorney in the firm’s Litigation group and focuses his practice on Labor and Employment at both the trial and appellate level.
From 2008 – 2012, Mr. Gamble practiced in Los Angeles, California, where he focused on Labor and Employment and Securities litigation. Before that, he served as a law clerk to Hon. Andrew Hurwitz of the Arizona Supreme Court and as a judicial extern to Hon. Michael Daly Hawkins of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Mr. Gamble holds the J.D., Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University and the B.A., History, Emory University, 2000.
The video is 70 minutes:
The format is 15 minute opening speeches, 5 minute rebuttals, then Q&A.
Hillary Clinton and her ally, the Human Rights Campaign
Right now, social liberals are having great success pushing through their agenda. Social conservatives seemed to be getting coerced and/or punished so effectively that many are wondering whether the tide can be turned at all.
Ben Shapiro, who writes at the Daily Wire, explains what’s been happening lately:
Leftists, the most tolerant people in America, are now demonstrating their tolerance by boycotting entire states that do not govern in accordance with leftist social policy. On Tuesday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that he would bar non-essential state-funded travel to Mississippi after the state passed a bill re-enshrining First Amendment protections for freedom of religion and association. Cuomo, who termed the law “sad, hateful,” isn’t the only big government leftist to utilize the power of taxpayer-funded nastiness: the mayor of San Francisco, Ed Lee, did the same.
Lee and Cuomo also announced travel bans to North Carolina, where the governor recently signed a bill that mandates that local governments may not allow people to use single-sex bathrooms based on subjective gender identity rather than biological sex; that bill also makes state anti-discrimination law supreme and exclusive over local anti-discrimination laws that would compel businesses to hire people regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.
It’s not just government, either. Icons like the wildly overrated Bruce Springsteen are cancelling concerts in North Carolina; businesses like PayPal, which do business in countries like Saudi Arabia and Malaysia, which actually prosecute homosexuality. States like Virginia and Georgia have vetoed similar legislation out of fear of corporate and governmental blowback from companies ranging from Apple to Disney.
The left has ratcheted up their pressure on states to crack down on Americans who don’t want their daughters peeing next to grown men, to prosecute businessowners who don’t want to cater same-sex weddings. They’ve utilized their economic power to punish private actors who may or may not even agree with the left in an attempt to coax those actors into putting indirect pressure on their representatives.
Maggie Gallagher, a pro-marriage activists who has written some great books on marriage that I really liked, has some practical advice for social conservatives in National Review.
She has five points – here are four and five:
4) Social conservatives aren’t doing politics.
Before I explain what I mean, let me ask you to answer a simple question: What is the national organization that fights for religious-liberty protections by spending money in federal elections? Currently, there is none. There are many good nonprofits who issue voter guides or get pastors together. There are public-interest law firms galore. These are all good things to have — but there is a hole in the center of our movement.
How big is the hole? For my own amusement, I tried to figure out how much money social conservatives (excluding pro-life groups) spent in national elections in 2014 compared to what they spend on 501(c)3 and other nonprofit strategies. I looked for every organization I could find that has marriage or religious liberty in its mission statement and then compared it with election expenditures by either c(4)s or political-action committees (PACs). Then I asked around to major social-conservative donors I know to see if I had overlooked any major organization.
How big is the hole in the center of our movement?
In 2014 pro-family social conservatives invested $251,633,730 in tax-deductible 501(c)3 efforts (excluding pro-life efforts).
How much was spent on direct political engagement, counting both state and federal organizations? $2,484,359.
That 100-to-one ratio of doing politics by indirect versus direct means explains a lot about the relative powerlessness of social conservatism.
Social conservatives can’t get much out of politics because we aren’t in politics. We just talk like we are on television, when the Left allows us to get on television. Meanwhile, we don’t build political institutions that matter.
Social conservatives need to think like a minority and organize politically to protect our interests. Which leads me to Maggie’s fifth Big Truth of social-conservative politics:
5) The most important thing social conservatives could do in the 2016 cycle is to demonstrate to Democrats that extremism in pushing unisex showers on public schools or oppressing gay-marriage dissenters will cost them the White House.
In theory, this shouldn’t be hard to do: A July 2015 Associated Press–GFK poll showed that 59 percent of independents and 32 percent of Democrats agree that when gay rights and religious liberty conflict, religious liberty should have priority. Social conservatives should use the issue on offense — not just to gin up “the base,” but to persuade soft Democrats to abandon the party of anti-religious aggression. If intensive messaging to Democratic voters in a key swing state could move just 10 percent of them to switch their votes, the whole political dynamic of this issue would change.
But proving that would require raising a significant amount of money — say at least $2 million — and demonstrating in a key swing state, such as Ohio or Pennsylvania or Florida, that the Democrats’ anti-religion intolerance against gay-marriage dissenters could cost them something they care about: The White House. Power.
I see no signs yet that any such thing is happening among social conservatives.
But it could.
We should fill the hole in the center of the social-conservative movement by getting into politics for the first time in 50 years. It could happen.
This UK Daily Mail story was sent to me by Dina, and it shows what happens in countries where gay marriage and the gay rights agenda are a little more advanced than what we have here, under the Democrats. (Note that UK expressions like “sacked” and “struck off” mean termination of employment)
Excerpt:
A Christian judge has been struck off after claiming during a BBC interview that adopted children were better off with a man and a woman as parents than with a gay couple.
Magistrate Richard Page, 68, was sacked after 15 years at Maidstone and Sevenoaks courts, in Kent, after objecting to a gay couple adopting a child live on air.
The Judiciary Conduct Investigations Office confirmed that the father-of-three has been removed from the magistracy as a district judge.
They said that the grounds for his dismissal result from comments made on national television which a reasonable person would conclude he is bias against single sex adopters.
The interview came after Mr Page had spoken out against a child being adopted by a gay couple, and would be better placed ‘with a mother and father’ in 2014.
He was disciplined for his remarks, which were made in private to colleagues behind closed doors during an adoption case.
But during an interview, which aired in March 2015, Mr Page repeated his opinion.
He was recorded saying: ‘My responsibility as a magistrate, as I saw it, was to do what I considered best for the child, and my feeling was therefore that it would be better if it was a man and woman who were the adopted parents.’
Yeah, in the politically correct UK, that’s grounds for dismissal. Basically, this is the continuation of a long line of changes in marriage-related policy that were meant to privilege the rights of selfish adults over the rights of children.
It all started with no-fault divorce laws, which allowed spouses who were not “happy” in their life-long self-sacrificial commitments to easily get out of it by filing for divorce for any reason, or for no reason at all. This law was championed by trial lawyers and feminists, who think that marriage is about the needs, feelings and desires of selfish adults. They wanted to make it easier to get out of commitments that were entered into lightly, and they didn’t care about the children.
The next change to marriage policy was making cohabitation equivalent to marriage. Again, feminists and other liberals did not want to undertake a lifelong commitment that would be hard to get out of. They wanted the same tax benefits that marriage allows for temporary arrangements like living together. But living together temporarily is nowhere near as good for children as life-long, self-sacrificial married love.
The next change to marriage policy was redefining marriage to remove the complimentary genders norm, which further disenfranchised children to benefit self-centered adults. Instead of making the central purpose of marriage based on two complimentary sexes creating and nurturing new life, marriage is now about two people having intense emotional feelings of pleasure. Feelings which, by their very nature, cannot provide a stable, lasting environment for raising children.
And now we have gay adoption, which continues the privileging of selfish adults over the needs of vulnerable children. ALL of the social science evidence shows that male-female relationships are more stable over the long-term than same-sex relationships. There is less domestic violence, more monogamy, more fidelity and more stability. All of which are better for children. Children benefit from growing up in a home where a man loves a woman and is faithful to her, and where a woman respects a man, and is faithful to him.
And now we see how far the marriage redefiners on the secular left are willing to go to put the selfish desires of adults above the needs of children for stability. They are willing to terminate the employment of anyone who dares to speak out on behalf of children.
We really need Christians to be diligent in learning how to defend marriage, and to get married and stay married and model successful, loving, stable marriages to the culture as a whole. We need pro-marriage apologetics, and we need marriages that are focused on self-sacrificial love. We need marriages that focus on responsibilities, obligations and expectations, not on fun and thrills.
WINTERY KNIGHT 