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After same-sex marriage, then what?

March 29 marked the first anniversary of the legal same-sex marriage in England and Wales. Look around, say the twitterati – no plagues of locusts and frogs have blighted the land; no fire and brimstone have rained down upon Westminster; no earthquake has swallowed up Sir Elton. All is well.
Well, actually not.
In an article in The Conversation, an academic at the University of Kent, Dr Mike Thomas, reported on how happy gay couples in the UK, the United States and Canada feel after tying the knot. He found that most of them welcomed the benefits that legal recognition of their relationship gave them.
But this was not matched by social recognition. Even though the majesty of the law shone upon them, relatives often shunned them and snubbed them.
For many couples, the wedding or civil partnership ceremony was a more bittersweet occasion, bringing difficult family relationships to a head – and reminding same-sex couples that despite their new legal status, they could not necessarily expect to be treated as equals.
Relatives often had few qualms about refusing to attend a ceremony; one couple’s same-sex wedding was boycotted by the entire family. The idea of a same-sex relationship may have been just about tolerable in some families, but being asked to turn up at the town hall and look like they were enjoying themselves was often too much to stomach.

A very positive milestone in a new couple’s life often turned out to be surrounded by bitterness and rejection. “Negative reactions were a surprisingly regular feature of the research interviews, giving rise to complex emotions, including anger, resentment and a sense of despair about the prospects for achieving equality,” Dr Thomas reports.
This complaint is ominous for those who have watched the juggernaut of same-sex marriage roll across its opponents. What is the ultimate purpose of same-sex marriage? Supporters of “marriage equality” contend that it is simply access to the same rights as other married couples, without any discrimination. Equality means equality of opportunity in parenting, employment, in exercising civil rights and before the law.
But the implication of Dr Thomas’s research is that many gays and lesbians believe that legal same-sex marriage ought to confer a right to be welcomed and cherished. He concludes that “Legal reform only takes us so far; it’s usually one of the first steps towards real equality, but it’s certainly not the final one. So one year on, we should raise a glass to same-sex marriage, but not lose sight of the challenges that lie ahead in delivering meaningful, day-to-day equality.”
What is implied by this “meaningful, day-to-day equality”? That relatives, neighbours and colleagues must extend warm congratulations and shower gay and lesbian couples with best wishes and toothy smiles?
Dr Thomas’s research is a bit unsettling if it suggests that gays and lesbians are expecting even more than the legalization of same-sex marriage.
Law in a democracy has limits. It is not a remedy for lack of self-esteem. It cannot force your relatives to attend your wedding or your neighbours to invite you over for a barbeque. It cannot make people like you; it cannot stop people from scowling at you. Only in North Korea does the law compel you to love the Dear Leader and to laugh at his jokes.
Same-sex marriage is controversial enough. But a debate over enforcing “meaningful, day-to-day equality” after same-sex marriage is legalized could be even more traumatic.
Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet.
- See more at: http://www.mercatornet.com/conjugality/view/15908#sthash.RS2E4HgO.dpuf

Thoughts of Donor-conceived Children of Gay Parents in Their Own Words

Now we have entered the Brave New World of third-party reproduction. Now we just make it more sanitary for children to experience loss. We simply manufacture them with the express intent to deny them a relationship with one natural parent! None of that messy relationship stuff required. The social scientists are going to have decades of job security as the children from such origins come of age.

It can be easy to sympathize with the parents who have often chosen this method of creating a family because they are single or have entered into a non-reproductive relationship. The adults will talk about how desperately they want children. “Won’t the children be so happy because they were wanted?”

Nope.

Turns out it’s not all sunshine and roses because when these children are free to speak honestly, and in the case of children of gay parents that means anonymously, it’s clear that their missing parent is critically important to them.

AnonymousUs is a place where donor-conceived persons can be completely blunt about how their origins have impacted their lives. A place where kids don’t have to worry about toeing the line or hurting their parent’s feelings. It’s anonymous and that makes for brutal honesty. Below you will find every entry, unedited, where donor-conceived children report having a gay parent.

Read ‘em. It’s raw and hard.

Then come on back and look me in the eye and tell me that children are not hurt when they are raised without their mother or father. Truth is, wanting your mother and father is one of the most universal human longings.

Children conceived via third party reproduction and placed with their same-sex parent at the time of birth are marketed as the “gold standard” when it comes to samples for studies on gay parenting. They haven’t had to suffer the distress of divorce, death, or abandonment so, obviously they are unscathed. Not traumatized. There are no “other” parents hanging around to disrupt the gay family. These children have only ever known their “two moms” or “two dads.” If love really does make a family, then these kids shouldn’t be bothered by missing their mother or father as long as they are wanted and loved, right?

Not according to these kids. Not even close.

What Opposition to Religious Freedom Really Means

March 30, 2015   Russell Moore

The public debate over Indiana’s new religious freedom law is (almost) enough to drive this Baptist to drink. The conversation has been the most uninformed and ignorant I’ve seen in years. This culminated in a panel on one of the Sunday talk shows suggesting that the law would return us to the days when signs would hang in stores detailing who would not be welcome to do business there.

The law, of course, does nothing of the sort. Indiana merely passed a state version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), the law that passed with an overwhelming bipartisan majority in 1993 and was signed into law by President Bill Clinton. The act was supported by a coalition spanning from the far Left to the far Right.

RFRA, of course, does not grant anyone the right to “discriminate” or deny service to anyone else. All the law does is articulate that religious freedom is a factor to be weighed in making court decisions about the common good, that the government must show good cause in restricting someone’s free exercise of religion.

So where does all the ignorance come from in this case?

Many of those leading the discussion of religious freedom have little or no understanding of what motivates religious people. This shows up in almost all of these conversations, whether over the Little Sisters of the Poor fight not to be compelled to purchase contraception insurance coverage or the legislative attempts to codify RFRA. If one cannot empathize with why defying conscience on a matter of religious exercise is a life-or-death concern, then one is free to impute all sorts of evil motives. Why doesn’t the employee at Abercrombie and Fitch just ditch the head scarf to work there? After all, that’s just fashion. Why won’t the Amish just drive in cars down the road like “regular people” do?

When secularized or nominally religious people don’t understand religious motivation, then they are going to assume that, behind a concern for religious exercise, is some sinister agenda: usually one involving power or money. That sort of ignorance is not just naive. It leads to a breakdown of pluralism and liberal democracy. I shouldn’t have the power to mandate that a Jain caterer provide wild game for some Baptist church’s Duck Dynasty-themed “Beast Feast,” just because I don’t understand their non-violent tenets toward all living creatures. I shouldn’t be allowed to require Catholic churches to use grape juice instead of wine just because I don’t understand transubstantiation.

This is particularly problematic when widespread ignorance of religious motivation is joined with a zealotry that can only be called religious: for the stamping out of all dissent against the sexual revolution. The sexual revolutionaries are, by all accounts, winning the public debate in American life on matters of sexual freedom, right down to the redefinition of marriage and family. But that’s not enough. Many of them want not only to win, but to stamp out dissent with all the relish of a Massachusetts Bay Puritan.

Gay Marriage

Excerpts from: http://askthebigot.com/gay-marriage/

Surely a parent’s right to be in a direct, custodial relationship with his/her offspring lies not within the realm of property law, as if the child were something owned. Rather, this right is a natural one that is universal and self-evident. The child’s right to be in a direct, nurturing relationship with his/her parents is its reciprocal. Children “belong” to their parents only to the extent that parents “belong” to their children.

 ....
When marriage policy and cultural narrative deviates from the reality that one man plus one woman makes a baby, we end up with scenarios such as the one described by author Andrew Soloman:
When I met John, who is now my husband, he told me that he had had some friends, Tammy and Laura, for whom he had been a sperm donor, and that they had a son named Oliver, of whom he was the biological father. A few years later, they asked him to be a sperm donor again, and they produced a daughter, Lucy. A good friend of mine from college had gone through a divorce and said that she really longed to be a mother, and I said how much I would love to be the father of her child. And so we decided to produce a child through an IVF process. John and I then wanted to have a child who would live with us all the time, and we decided to use an egg donor, and Laura, the lesbian who had carried Oliver and Lucy, offered to be our surrogate as a way of thanking John for providing her with a family. So the shorthand is: five parents of four children in three states.

This is truly human trafficking. Manipulating children into existence to satisfy the desires of adults. In Andrew Solomon’s “post-nuclear” family, as he calls it, the four children living in three states were conceived with the intent to separate them from one of their biological parents.  The desires of the five adults were satisfied.  The rights of the four children- to be known and raised by their biological parents were not. The UN gets this one exactly right. Article 7 in their Convention on the Rights of the Child states, “The child shall be registered immediately after birth and shall have the right from birth to a name, the right to acquire a nationality and as far as possible, the right to know and be cared for by his or her parents.” The right to something that you cannot produce yourself is no right at all. As soon as a homosexual couple can produce a child without any assistance from others, then they absolutely have a right to have a child and the right to marry
......
I am not so naïve as to say that gay marriage is the biggest or only threat to children having access to their mother and father. Pre-marital sex, cohabitation and divorce are statistically a greater risk to children. But please note that there are no wide-spread efforts to institutionalize, glamorize and legally incentivize those family arrangements. Frankly, if there were? I would oppose them too.

.....
For much of my adult life I was content to keep my opinions on the subject of marriage to myself. I was (and still am) sickened by the accusation that I was bigoted and anti-gay for my belief in natural marriage. For many years those tactics kept me quiet. I didn’t seek a venue where I could share my views. But I have come to realize that my silence, and the silence of others, has allowed for the conversation to be dominated by those who claim that only animus, ignorance, or indoctrination could lead one to oppose “marriage equality.”


Sorry Gays, You Don’t Have The Right To Be Free From Discrimination

This week, Indiana became the latest state to sign a religious freedom bill into law. The legislation protects a private citizen’s or private business owner’s right to act according to their religious beliefs when deciding with whom to associate and do business.
Gay activists are incensed at this move, not because it targets them, but because it doesn’t. Indeed, there is no language in the bill stipulating anything one way or another in regards to gay people; it simply affirms the rights of private individuals and companies. Gay tyrants have only turned it into an “attack” on them because they demand, as per usual, special treatment and exemptions.
Despite everything they’ve ever claimed, they aren’t looking to be treated like everyone else. They want their rights enshrined in a special place, above, beyond, and transcending those of normal folk.
Usually, they get their way. Not in Indiana, though. And this fact has, of course, sparked the usual round of protests, boycotts, mewling, and whining, this time coming everywhere from the NCAA to a popular video game convention, to some “Christian” churches to all of these people. The mayor of San Francisco also announced a boycott of the state, and the  CEO of SalesForce.com has canceled all company travel into the accursed region.

When My Father Told Me He Wanted to Be a Woman

by      within Marriage   March 27th, 2015
When I was nine years old, my father told me he wanted to become a woman. I know I speak for others who have undergone similarly tragic childhoods when I say that I pray the Supreme Court will seriously consider the six amicus briefs submitted by the children of LGBT parents.
What was your biggest concern when you were nine years old? Was it trying to memorize your multiplication tables? Was it that the school cafeteria might serve your least favorite vegetable at lunch? Perhaps it was something more serious; perhaps your parents were talking of getting divorced. My biggest concern at age nine was how to keep my daddy’s secret, the one he revealed to me as we sat alone on a hill near our home. In a sense, I lost my dad that day, when he told me he wanted to become a woman.
As I tried to process that revelation, he blindsided me with another. He told me he never wanted to have children. To him, my siblings and I were mistakes, because we did not align with his desires.
His confessions left me confused and hurt. After all, I just wanted a dad who would love and cherish me, who would make me feel special as a daughter. I felt rejected and abandoned by my own father. By the time I was eleven, my dad had begun to abuse me emotionally and sexually. Even so, I continued to keep my dad’s secret locked away, deep down in my heart.

Psychological Association Delivers 'Snake Oil' Sociology In Latest Brief on Marriage

BY KEN BLACKWELL , CP OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
March 27, 2015|10:22 am
  • Ken Blackwell
    Ken Blackwell is the Senior Fellow for Family Empowerment at the Family Research Council, and the Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow for Public Policy at the Buckeye Institute in Columbus, Ohio
The American Psychological Association (APA) and the American Sociological Association (ASA) submitted friend of the Court briefs in the Windsor case. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled portions of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) unconstitutional. If the Windsor Court majority relied on those briefs, it was reliant on snake oil, not science.
The APA and the ASA should be the guardians of good science. Instead, they have joined the ranks of the pink panzers of political correctness. Most studies we have seen that claim that children raised by same-sex parents suffer no disadvantages are so seriously flawed that in any other context, the ASA and APA would be the first to point out those methodological flaws
Some of the studies cited in amicus briefs to the Supreme Court in support of same-sex parenting have serious methodological flaws, which are not small but so basic they violate "Stats 101". The most notable of these is the use of something called an opportunity sample. That error would be committed, for example, if you went to the magazine American Rifleman to ask questions about proposed gun control legislation. American Rifleman is a publication of the National Rifle Association. The results of a reader survey would suffer from volunteer bias. Another flaw is what we call the snowball sample. That would occur if NRA members were invited to enlist friends and family members to be part of the sample and respond to a questionnaire. That only compounds the methodological problem.
Read the entire story at: http://www.christianpost.com/news/psychological-association-delivers-snake-oil-sociology-in-latest-brief-on-marriage-136479/

We Are ‘Synthetic Children’ And We Agree With Dolce & Gabbana

One of the greatest tragedies of donor conception is the loss of belonging: to family, to a culture. Essentially, one becomes malleable like an infant. I crave a home. I see myself as I travel in many directions—doing anything in order to find one.
Through the storytelling of other donor-conceived individuals, and scientific research pertaining to third-party reproduction and genetics, I have discovered that my situation is by no means unique, and I now understand the scientific explanations as to why my social father and I—up to a certain point—were unable to bond. It is natural for me to desire my father, for evolution has blessed those that secure such a bond with better survival rates.
The lack of my biological father’s presence is a devastating reality, a burden I will likely bare my entire existence. And now, knowing the truth of my conception, when I remember my past I remember everything that was absent from it.
Team Elton is literally promoting the obliteration of mothers—not through vilification, but by pretending they don’t even exist.
Team Elton, and the media that surround them, seem to think that this discussion is about gay parents. Team Dolce and  Gabbana are instead trying to draw attention tomissing parents. And to what should be the horror of millions, Team Elton is literally promoting the obliteration of mothers—not through vilification, but by pretending they don’t even exist.

Hurting Kids Isn’t The Way To Make Gay People Happy

Gay couples need to realize that their desire to adopt children conflicts with what kids need most: opposite-sex parents.
The freedom homosexuals have found to live together without condemnation, to love whom they will without being called monsters, and to express themselves without fear has been long in coming and, in some ways, still incomplete. In many parts of the world, they are denied even basic human rights. In Iran, Mauritania, Qatar, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia, they are killed, according to sharia law. In Syria, members of the Islamic State threw a gay man from a seven-story building. After surviving the fall, he was stoned to death by a mob.
In Syria, members of the Islamic State threw a gay man from a seven-story building.
While homosexuals face none of these terrors in the United States, they still don’t have the same privileges others do. When one partner dies, the other is not always entitled to bereavement leave from work, to file wrongful death claims, to draw Social Security from the deceased partner, or to automatically inherit shared assets. They are often not considered next of kin for the purposes of hospital visitation and emergency medical decisions, and they can’t put their partner on their health plan without paying taxes on the coverage.
Many privileges and obligations should be extended to homosexuals through civil partnerships and unions. Their right to make contracts concerning property and healthcare should be recognized and considered valid by the government because doing so does nothing to threaten social stability. These unions, after all, are personal and should not be denied by the state. It’s no one else’s business who loves whom or what they do with their own property.

Marriage Is a Social Institution, Not Just a Personal One

While there are still many things that can be done to overcome prejudice against homosexuals, marriage is not one of them. Unlike civil partnerships that are personal in nature, marriage is social. It’s social because it involves the creation and nurture of children.
State recognition of marriage is fundamentally about preserving the rights of children—which, in turn, promotes the public good.
State recognition of marriage is fundamentally about preserving the rights of children—which, in turn, promotes the public good. Individuals don’t just spring into existence as if they slipped from gel-filled pods in the Matrix or were manufactured along an assembly line in a Brave New World. They are born to one man and one woman, who share their DNA and who are intrinsic to their own identity.
Their sense of self, their stability as a person, their wholeness and happiness are bound to their biological parents. Their development as individuals is nurtured in the arms of those who are most intimately and inextricably connected to them, which makes the family the fundamental unit of a stable and free society. It is the best place where children flourish, the civil society is stabilized, and government is limited. When children grow up under the authority of their parents and nurtured by their love, they are protected from the control of an intrusive state.

Brookings Institute Panel discussions of Utah's new bills - LGBT & LDS

View more details on Brookings.edu
Note:  This video feature two panel discussions - both focusing on the March 2015 non-discrimination legislation & religious freedom protection.  Each discussion features totally different panelists and each takes 1 hour.  The first panel includes Mike Levitt & the mayor of Salt Lake County as well as two others.
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