Tag Archives: Gay Marriage

News

If Ron Paul were President, 16 to 28 states would keep abortion legal

7 Comments
Which states would Ron Paul allow to legalize abortion?
Which states would Ron Paul allow to legalize abortion?

From the Weekly Standard. (H/T Triablogue)

Excerpt:

“[Ron Paul] has an outstanding chance of winning in Iowa,” according to Bob Vander Plaats, who served as Mike Huckabee’s 2008 state campaign chairman. “There’s a lot about Ron Paul that people like,” Vander Plaats says, pointing to Paul’s “almost prophetic” vision of our economic problems and his commitment to do away with “politics as usual.”

But Paul could face trouble with values voters in Iowa, where 60 percent of GOP caucusgoers are evangelical Christians. Vander Plaats says his socially conservative umbrella organization, the Family Leader, has ruled out endorsing Paul because “sometimes [Paul’s] libertarian views trump his moral compass.”

“On abortion, [Paul] believes that’s a states’ rights issue, we believe that’s a morality issue,” says Vander Plaats. In a post-Roe v. Wade world, “We don’t believe abortion should be legal in Maine and illegal in Iowa.” (Paul voted for the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act in 2003, but expressed deep reservations about voting for a federal law on abortion.)

“We’re very concerned” about Paul’s position that the government shouldn’t recognize civil marriage, Vander Plaats continues. The group also balks at some of Paul’s foreign policy views. ”Even though we may agree with him that we’re not called to be the policeman of the world, we do believe we’re called to stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel,” says Vander Plaats. “And we do believe [a nuclear-armed] Iran is a definite threat not only to Israel, but to our freedom as well.”

[…]Vander Plaats says he doesn’t think very many Iowa voters are aware that Paul thinks it should be up to states to decide whether or not to protect human life. But now that Paul leading in the Iowa polls, his positions may come under greater scrutiny.

Here’s a 2006 USA Today article listing the states that would make abortion legal under Ron Paul’s plan.

Excerpt:

•Twenty-two state legislatures are likely to impose significant new restrictions on abortion. They include nearly every state in the South and a swath of big states across the industrial Rust Belt, from Pennsylvania to Ohio and Michigan. These states have enacted most of the abortion restrictions now allowed.

•Sixteen state legislatures are likely to continue current access to abortion. They include every state on the West Coast and almost every state in the Northeast. A half-dozen already have passed laws that specifically protect abortion rights. Most of the states in this group have enacted fewer than half of the abortion restrictions now available to states.

•Twelve states fall into a middle ground between those two categories. About half are in the Midwest, the rest scattered from Arizona to Rhode Island.

[…]The 22 states likely to enact new restrictions include 50% of the U.S. population and accounted for 37% of the abortions performed in 2000, the latest year for which complete data were available.

The 16 states likely to protect access to abortion include 35% of the U.S. population and accounted for 48% of the abortions performed.

So Ron Paul, far from being pro-life, would allow abortion on demand in 16 to 28 states, many of them the most populous states in the union – like California and New York. I understand that he calls allowing abortion in 16 to 28 states “pro-life”, but voters have to think and decide – is that really pro-life? Is it really pro-life when the number of abortions per year will drop from 1.1 million to 550,000? Is that pro-life? (Assuming that the people in the pro-life states don’t just cross the border to get an abortion elsewhere – which is false, of course). Paul’s position is that he is personally pro-life, but he thinks that other people should be allowed to decide if an unborn baby can be killed or not, at the state level. Isn’t that pro-choice though?

Similarly, Paul would allow states to redefine marriage to be anything they want it to be, since he thinks that the definition of marriage is an issue that states should decide. That’s his view. Is that pro-marriage? Does that position take seriously the need for children to be raised by a mother and a father?

Podcasts

William Lane Craig discusses recent challenges to religious liberty

3 Comments

Listening to William Lane Craig talk about current events and its relevance to theological and ethical concerns makes me very happy. I have 3 of his commentaries below, but if you have been following my blog, you know about all three of them already. Still, it’s great to hear a philosopher and theologian way in on practical issues. I like it as much as when Wayne Grudem does it. I never, ever get tired of hearing Christian pastors and scholars talk about practical things.

I think that all of you who are suspicious of my efforts to link Christianity to other issues should listen to these podcasts.

Here’s the MP3 file from the first lecture on religious liberty, dated January 22, 2012. (14 MB | 6:17 min)

Topics:

  • The issue is whether churches should be allowed to be exempt from hiring restrictions
  • The Supreme Court ruling saying that the state cannot intervene in church hiring decisions
  • The Obama administration tried to erase the religious liberty protections for churches
  • The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Texas sonogram law
  • The importance of an incremental pro-life approach

Here’s the MP3 file from the second lecture, dated January 29th, 2012. Get MP3 (21 MB | 9:10 min)

Topics:

  • The issue is whether Catholic organizations should be forced to cover abortion drugs
  • The state is attempting to mandate what religious organizations must pay for
  • The mandate would force churches to pay for abortion drugs: Ella and Plan “B”
  • The issue is not contraception, which some Christians may support
  • The issue is an issue of religious liberty and government control

Here’s the MP3 file from the third lecture, dated February 10th, 2012. (43 MB | 18:59 min)

Topics:

  • Obama’s “compromise”: making the insurance companies pay for abortion drugs
  • Does the compromise really resolve the religious liberty issue?
  • Many Catholic institutions have Catholic insurance companies
  • Many faith-based organizations self-insure by pooling employee resources
  • The compromise would require these groups to cover abortion drugs
  • Another issue is the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling against Prop 8
  • Did Prop 8 really take rights away from gays and lesbians?
  • No – Prop 8 defined heterosexual marriage as valid or recognized
  • Prop 8 doesn’t even mention gays and lesbians
  • Prop 8 says straights and gays have the same right to marry someone of the opposite sex
  • Prop 8 says nothing about a person’s sexual orientation
  • This attempt to push for same-sex marriage is an attempt to deconstruct marriage
  • It is important to think of issues like this before voting
  • Christians should care about politics and follow politics
  • Christians who don’t know politics are “naive” and “have their head in the sand”
  • The two judges in this decision were appointed by Democrats: Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton

I think this is good because I’m sure that a bunch of you think that Bill only ever talks about apologetics. But actually, he is very good about being practical about his faith. He does try to think through how current events, laws and policies affect the theological and moral positions of the Christian faith. I just recently e-mailed him about Rick Santorum’s comments about how the Catholic church supported Obamacare, and then how it later caused problems for their religious liberty. So there is a case where top-down control of the private sector created a situation where religious liberty was negatively impacted… exactly as predicted by F.A. Hayek in “The Road to Serfdom”.

News

Liberal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rules traditional marriage unconstitutional

Leave a comment

Here’s the news from Big Government.

Excerpt:

Today, the 9th Circuit upheld the absurd ruling of Judge Vaughn Walker of the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California, striking down Proposition 8, the voter-approved constitutional amendment that would uphold traditional marriage in the state. The ruling itself was highly political and in no way legally oriented. “Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians,” wrote the Court, “and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior… the Constitution simply does not allow for ‘laws of this sort.’”

National Review assesses the decision to overrule the will of the people with the feelings and intuitions of two judges.

Excerpt:

2. For [Judge] Reinhardt, “‘marriage’ is the name that society gives to the relationship that matters most between two adults.” (P. 37.) The right to marry that the state supreme court conferred on same-sex couples “symbolize[d] state legitimization and social recognition of their committed relationships.” (P. 5.)

Notice what’s missing from Reinhardt’s description? Any recognition that the very institution of marriage arose and exists in order to encourage responsible procreation and childrearing.

3. On pages 56-63, Reinhardt does confront the argument that Prop 8 advances California’s interest in procreation and childrearing, but his analysis is badly flawed:

a. Reinhardt first undertakes to address the argument that “children are better off when raised by two biological parents and that society can increase the likelihood of that family structure by allowing only potential biological parents—one man and one woman—to marry.” But he somehow finds it dispositive that Prop 8 “had absolutely no effect on the ability of same-sex couples to become parents or the manner in which children are raised in California.” What he utterly ignores is that it is eminently reasonable to believe that the less marriage is centered around the concerns of responsible procreation and child-raising, the less well marriage will serve those goals. That’s an elementary lesson about mission confusion.

The redefinition of marriage to encompass same-sex couples fatally severs the link between marriage and procreation. That’s why Reinhardt has to misdescribe marriage (see point 2).

Over at Caffeinated Thoughts, Shane has the reactions from the two social conservatives still running in the Republican primary.

Excerpt:

Rick Santorum while campaigning in Missouri today said:

Today’s decision by the 9th Circuit is another in a long line of radical activist rulings by this rogue circuit – and it is precisely why I have called for that circuit to be abolished and split up. Marriage is defined and has always been defined as ‘one man and one woman.’ We simply cannot allow 50 different definitions of marriage.

The people of California spoke clearly at the ballot box that they wanted marriage defined in the traditional manner of one man and one woman. And for a court, any court, to usurp the power and will of the people in this manner on an issue this fundamental to the foundation of our society is wrong.

We need to have a Judicial Branch that acts within its Constitutional bounds. We need to have a President that is willing to stand up to the Judiciary. We need to have a President who will fight to protect marriage once and for all with a federal marriage amendment. I am committed to being that President.

Newt Gingrich blasted today’s decision as well:

With today’s decision on marriage by the Ninth Circuit, and the likely appeal to the Supreme Court, more and more Americans are being exposed to the radical overreach of federal judges and their continued assault on the Judeo-Christian foundations of the United States.

I was drawn back into public life by the Ninth Circuit’s 2002 decision that held that the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance were unconstitutional. Today’s decision is one more example that the American people cannot rest until we restore the proper rule of the judicial branch and bring judges and the Courts back under the Constitution.

The Constitution of the United States begins with “We the People”; it does not begin with “We the Judges”. Federal judges need to take heed of that fact.

Federal judges are substituting their own political views for the constitutional right of the people to make judgments about the definition of marriage.

Ben Shapiro thinks that defending marriage will be a winning issue in the general election for Republicans.

Excerpt:

President Obama has been able to elude the question of same-sex marriage overall. His slippery rhetoric indicates that he’s pro-civil unions but anti-same sex marriage but is “evolving.” This ruling will force him to take a side. He will likely attempt to suggest that this is a decision best left to the courts, but he’s never taken that position before – see, for example, campaign finance reform. It’s unlikely that the gay community or the religious community will allow him to get away with that.

If Obama is forced to answer for his position on same-sex marriage, he will be in serious trouble come election time. He is already suffering from low approval ratings among religious groups, and just this week he alienated Catholics with the Health and Human Services announcement that birth control coverage would be required from Catholic employers. Minority voters, especially Latinos and blacks, are anti-same sex marriage as a rule (which is why Prop. 8 passed in the first place – many blacks showed up to vote for Obama in California and voted in favor of traditional marriage at the same time).

While the press likes to complain about the right wing on social issues, the fact remains that same-sex marriage is not a popular movement in key states for Obama. In Florida, for example, 53% believe that same-sex marriage should not be legal, as compared to 37% who believe it should be; in Ohio, that split is 53% to 33%; in Pennsylvania, it’s 51% to 38%. Overall, Americans are moving in the direction of same-sex marriage (a Pew poll showed that Americans now approve same-sex marriage by a 46-44 margin), but older people and nonwhites are particularly against it (just 39% of nonwhites support same-sex marriage). In short, this is not a winning issue for Obama.

I think Rick Santorum is more persuasive than Newt Gingrich on the marriage issue, because marriage is Santorum’s core. He forms his economic policy around marriage and parenting. Mitt Romney actually has a record of opposition to traditional marriage. Ron Paul has a record of opposition to traditional marriage. Neither of them could be counted on to defend traditional marriage at the federal level.

My secular case against same-sex marriage is here, in case you find yourself debating the issue.