If ‘gay is good’, is opposing it bad?

by Michael Cook   TUESDAY, 12 MAY 2015

Many people with a religious outlook on life feel threatened by the advance of same-sex marriage. The Coalition for Marriage, a British lobby group, has just published a pamphlet listing 30 instances in which persons of faith were penalized for opposing same-sex marriage. Its claim is that:

“Redefining marriage is sold as a permissive measure, but it will quickly become coercive. In fact, it already has. Too many people have already been punished for expressing their sincere beliefs about marriage. Wherever marriage is redefined, people are punished for their beliefs.”
It’s important to place this in perspective. The jails of England or of Massachusetts are not overflowing with dissidents from a same-sex marriage ideology. But the list is still worrying. The cases range from hate mail to being fired to being forced out of business.

Supporters of same-sex marriage pooh-pooh these as tempests in a tea pot and say that people with a traditional view of marriage have nothing to worry about. However, the clear-headed vision of a commissioner on the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency which enforces legislation against workplace discrimination, Chai Feldblum, should be taken into account. Her views are to be reckoned with.

Before her appointment by President Obama in 2010, while Feldblum was a professor at Georgetown University Law School, she wrote two prescient articles about gay and lesbian equality which set out an agenda for activists.

Agenda? What agenda? A pink fifth column? Next you’ll be talking about gays under the beds. There is no gay agenda, most activists will say.

However, in her 2005 article in the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, “Gay is Good: the Moral Case for Same-Sex Marriage and More”, Ms Feldblum begs to differ. Surprisingly, she agreed with Justice Scalia’s scathing dissent in Lawrence v. Texas. He had complained that the Supreme Court had signed on to “the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct.”

This guy is right on the money, says Feldblum. “Justice Scalia's formulation correctly articulates, to my mind, what should be one of the top priorities on the ‘gay agenda’.”

After all, she points out rather colourfully, “granting a marriage license to a same-sex couple signals no more approval by the state of gay sex or gay couples than granting a marriage license to a convicted rapist signals approval by the state of rape or rapists”. The problem with placing marriage as the terminus of gay activism is that gays and lesbians will get only the right to do their bad stuff within a bourgeois institution. The real struggle is not over until society acknowledges that they are doing something positively good. We must convince “the general public of the moral equivalence of gay and heterosexual sex,” she argues. The real goal must be a society in which homosexuality is regarded as a positive force for moral good.

Moving on, in 2006 she wrote an article for the Brooklyn Law Review which has been widely cited. In this one she unpacked the legal consequences of “gay is good” for other goods, notably religious liberty.

In a sense, Feldblum has a deeply moral approach. She acknowledges that the law is a teacher. And since “gay is good”, it ought to teach that homosexuality is morally upright, even virtuous.

How does she defend this? She distinguishes three types of liberty which the state ought to protect: bodily liberty, identity liberty and belief liberty. The first is easiest to understand: the state should not imprison or harm us without good reason.

Identity liberty is a relatively new idea, but it has been repeatedly endorsed by the US Supreme Court in recent years. In the words of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in 1992, the Court stated:

 “These matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State.”

Being gay is such a belief. It is “the core of a person's identity”. It is self-definition which gives a person dignity because it is the fullest expression of his autonomy. And, significantly, it is a belief which is not received from someone else, such as the State.

Or a religion.

This is the key to understanding why Feldblum (and so many others) ranks “belief liberty” below “identity liberty”. In her mind, religious freedom is protected by the American Constitution as a “belief liberty”, but not as an “identity liberty”.

“If these beliefs are an integral part of the person's sense of self, my argument is that they are protected by belief liberty. The particular source of the individual's beliefs is not the barometer of their importance for due process purposes. For belief liberty, the source of the beliefs, be it faith in God, belief in spiritual energy, or a conviction of the rational five senses has no relevance. A belief derived from a religious faith should be accorded no more weight and no less weight than a belief derived from a non-religious source.”

In this sense, therefore, religious belief is inferior to a gay identity because the former is imposed from outside, while the latter wells up from within.

Feldblum sympathises with the dilemmas that people with religious convictions face in a society which has legalized same-sex marriage. After all, she is the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi; she studied religion at Barnard College; and she once dreamed of becoming a Talmudic scholar.

But ultimately gay identity must trump religious beliefs. As she once told Maggie Gallagher in the Weekly Standard, "Sexual liberty should win in most cases. There can be a conflict between religious liberty and sexual liberty, but in almost all cases the sexual liberty should win because that's the only way that the dignity of gay people can be affirmed in any realistic manner."

So this is the way forward: a legal framework in which gay is good, so good that affirming this is the touchstone of a just society.

It’s important for opponents of same-sex marriage to understand this. Too often they treat it as something so utterly preposterous that they can only respond with derision and insults. But there is an Alice in Wonderland logic to same-sex marriage, as Chai Feldblum demonstrates. Only by understanding that logic will we be able to map out a route ahead.-

See more at: http://www.mercatornet.com/conjugality/view/if-gay-is-good-is-opposing-it-bad1/16142#sthash.ZaIDV580.dpuf

Johns Hopkins Psychiatrist: Transgender is ‘Mental Disorder;' Sex Change ‘Biologically Impossible’

By Michael W. Chapman | June 2, 2015 | 

(CNSNews.com) -- Dr. Paul R. McHugh, the former psychiatrist-in-chief for Johns Hopkins Hospital and its current Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry, said that transgenderism is a “mental disorder” that merits treatment, that sex change is “biologically impossible,” and that people who promote sexual reassignment surgery are collaborating with and promoting a mental disorder.

Dr. McHugh, the author of six books and at least 125 peer-reviewed medical articles, made his remarks in a recent commentary in theWall Street Journal, where he explained that transgender surgery is not the solution for people who suffer a “disorder of ‘assumption’” – the notion that their maleness or femaleness is different than what nature assigned to them biologically.

He also reported on a new study showing that the suicide rate among transgendered people who had reassignment surgery is 20 times higher than the suicide rate among non-transgender people. Dr. McHugh further noted studies from Vanderbilt University and London’s Portman Clinic of children who had expressed transgender feelings but for whom, over time, 70%-80% “spontaneously lost those feelings.”

While the Obama administration, Hollywood, and major media such as Time magazine promote transgenderism as normal, said Dr. McHugh, these “policy makers and the media are doing no favors either to the public or the transgendered by treating their confusions as a right in need of defending rather than as a mental disorder that deserves understanding, treatment and prevention.”


Time magazine, June 9, 2014,
cover story, The Transgender Tipping Point:
America's Next Civil Rights Frontier. (Photo: AP)

“This intensely felt sense of being transgendered constitutes a mental disorder in two respects. The first is that the idea of sex misalignment is simply mistaken – it does not correspond with physical reality. The second is that it can lead to grim psychological outcomes.”

The transgendered person’s disorder, said Dr. McHugh, is in the person’s “assumption” that they are different than the physical reality of their body, their maleness or femaleness, as assigned by nature. It is a disorder similar to a “dangerously thin” person suffering anorexia who looks in the mirror and thinks they are “overweight,” said McHugh.

This assumption, that one’s gender is only in the mind regardless of anatomical reality, has led some transgendered people to push for social acceptance and affirmation of their own subjective “personal truth,” said Dr. McHugh. As a result, some states – California, New Jersey, and Massachusetts – have passed laws barring psychiatrists, “even with parental permission, from striving to restore natural gender feelings to a transgender minor,” he said.

The pro-transgender advocates do not want to know, said McHugh, that studies show between 70% and 80% of children who express transgender feelings “spontaneously lose those feelings” over time. Also, for those who had sexual reassignment surgery, most said they were “satisfied” with the operation “but their subsequent psycho-social adjustments were no better than those who didn’t have the surgery.”


Pro-transgender activists. The
Obama administration announced
in May that Medicare will
now cover transgender surgical
procedures. (AP)

“And so at Hopkins we stopped doing sex-reassignment surgery, since producing a ‘satisfied’ but still troubled patient seemed an inadequate reason for surgically amputating normal organs,” said Dr. McHugh.

The former Johns Hopkins chief of psychiatry also warned against enabling or encouraging certain subgroups of the transgendered, such as young people “susceptible to suggestion from ‘everything is normal’ sex education,” and the schools’ “diversity counselors” who, like “cult leaders,” may “encourage these young people to distance themselves from their families and offer advice on rebutting arguments against having transgender surgery.”

Dr. McHugh also reported that there are “misguided doctors” who, working with very young children who seem to imitate the opposite sex, will administer “puberty-delaying hormones to render later sex-change surgeries less onerous – even though the drugs stunt the children’s growth and risk causing sterility.”

Such action comes “close to child abuse,” said Dr. McHugh, given that close to 80% of those kids will “abandon their confusion and grow naturally into adult life if untreated ….”

“’Sex change’ is biologically impossible,” said McHugh. “People who undergo sex-reassignment surgery do not change from men to women or vice versa. Rather, they become feminized men or masculinized women. Claiming that this is civil-rights matter and encouraging surgical intervention is in reality to collaborate with and promote a mental disorder.”

Modest Conscience Protections in Louisiana Elicit Hysteria

by Adam J. MacLeod within Marriage May 13th, 2015    THE WITHERSPOON INSTITUTE

In Louisiana, a new bill has been proposed to protect those who have suffered unjust government discrimination. Opponents are demonizing the bill’s supporters and calling them names, misrepresenting the contents of the proposal, using scare tactics, and generally acting with fundamentalist zeal instead of dispassionate deliberation and rational discourse. They would deny to an entire class of Louisiana citizens legal protection from discriminatory acts, simply because members of that class do not share their own moral views.

Naturally, those zealous opponents are supporters of redefining marriage to include same-sex couples.

The bill is known as the Louisiana Marriage and Conscience Act. As its name suggests, it is designed to codify legal protections for those who have moral and religious convictions about the nature of marriage and whose convictions are out of favor with cultural elites and powerful political actors. Specifically, it would protect those who perceive that marriage is the union of one man and one woman. The bill is timely, necessary, and well-justified.

The Supreme Court of the United States appears poised to impose on all fifty states a radically new and ill-considered definition of marriage that finds no support in our nation’s history or traditions. Many Americans remain skeptical of that social experiment and believe, for reasons of moral and religious conscience, that they have a duty not to participate in it. The Louisiana Marriage and Conscience Act would protect those people from government discrimination and preserve the state of Louisiana’s commitment to freedoms of conscience, religion, and expression.

The Price of Citizenship?

Protections for such convictions are eroding quickly, and powerful actors want to undermine them more. Indeed, proponents of marriage revision and sexual-identity rights are not making much effort to conceal their designs to drive people of conscience out of the public square.

This was illustrated vividly during the recent Supreme Court oral arguments inObergefell v. Hodges, when the Solicitor General of the United States admitted that “it’s certainly going to be an issue” whether religious educational institutions will be permitted to retain their tax-exempt status if they define marriage as the union of a man and a woman in their policies. The fact that religious institutions are likely to face discrimination in the new regime of marriage revisionism surprised no one who has paid attention to the debateover marriage these last several years. But that the Solicitor General felt comfortable acknowledging the fact surprised many lawyers. Conventional wisdom is that a lawyer arguing for a change in the law should stand on the narrowest possible legal ground and should ameliorate any concerns that a court might have about the implications of his position. It seems that the Solicitor General views the loss of religious freedom not as a cause for concern but rather as an uncontroversial fact entailed in the redefinition of marriage.

In this environment, the need for the Louisiana Marriage and Conscience Act is manifest. The First Amendment, federal RFRA, RLUIPA, state RFRAs, and other legal protections for our first freedom do not establish conclusive rightsto act or refrain from acting on the basis of one’s conviction that marriage has a particular nature. Conscience protection depends on the discretion of lawyers and judges, who define the interests implicated in any dispute between a conscience claim and a sexual-identity claim and balance those interests against each other.

In recent months, that balance has come out against conscience claimants in nearly all cases. More and more religious observers are finding themselves in the position of an earlier casualty of the sexual-identity revolution, the owners of Elane Photography, whose owners were, in the words of a judge of the New Mexico Supreme Court, “compelled by law to compromise the very religious beliefs that inspire their lives” as the “price of citizenship.”

Very Narrow Protections

The Louisiana bill is considerably less ambitious than what is reasonably necessary to meet this developing threat to religious liberty and much narrower in scope than what longstanding law would justify. Since before the founding of our nation, Americans have always enjoyed the liberty to act in the public square on the basis of their moral and religious convictions that marriage is the union of a man and a woman. This freedom of conscience and action has always extended to all aspects of public life.

By comparison, the Louisiana Marriage and Conscience Act would prohibit only state action “against a person, wholly or partially, on the basis that such person acts in accordance with a sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction that marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman.” It does not apply to rights and duties in private law. And it does not even apply to all state actions. It enumerates four discrete categories of action that are prohibited.

Under the bill, the State of Louisiana could not:

(1) Deny or revoke an exemption from taxation . . . of the person who is acting in accordance with the religious belief or moral conviction [that marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman].

(2) Disallow a deduction for state tax purposes of any charitable contribution made to or by such person.

(3) Deny or exclude such person from receiving any state grant, contract, cooperative agreement, loan, professional license, certification, accreditation, employment, or other similar position or status.

(4) Deny or withhold from such person any benefit under a state benefit program.

In light of how narrow the bill’s protections are, the rhetoric of the bill’s opponents seems divorced from reality. Take a look at a few of their responses:

Click here to read the entire article: http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2015/05/14987/

The Wrong Kind of Rights: Same-Sex Marriage, Third-Party Reproduction, and the Sexualization of Children

by Jean Lloyd within Bioethics, Marriage May 5th, 2015

In our culture, there is a chasm between two irreconcilable conceptions of the meaning and purpose of human sexuality and equality. For children most of all, the wrong kind of sexuality and equality has devastating effects.

“No sex! No sex was used to produce this child!” That was the proud proclamation made by one of the girl’s two “fathers” as she was hoisted up high and shown off to a group of us at the sexuality studies conference I was attending.

When I first heard declarations that “all children have a right to a mother and a father,” I admit that I was momentarily puzzled. Since every child necessarily has a mother and a father, what does it mean that they have a right to one?

Actually, children have been denied the right to be raised by their mother and father for decades through the implementation of laws and norms that make child abandonment easy, beginning with no-fault divorce. From there, the denial of this basic right has expanded in numerous ways. A poignant example of this is seen in the demands for same-sex marriage “rights” and marriage “equality.” Included in those demands is that equal access to acquiring children be provided to adults that are involved in romantic arrangements inherently incapable of producing offspring. The children’s rights are forgotten, buried, or ignored.

And in the midst of it all, I cannot forget that one child.

The Intentionally Motherless Child

It was many years ago, but I can still see clearly the tiny bundle of blankets being lifted up and hear her father’s voice. I do not know whether the man was biologically her father or only socially so. I do know that I watched and wondered how that baby girl, only a few months old, was faring without her mother. And as more and more research shows, the answer is overwhelmingly clear for both her infancy and growing up: not nearly as well, on average, as she would have fared in her mother’s arms. This is an uncontroversial statement to all but those with a personal or a political investment in the reordering of all things sexual and familial.

I myself am an adopted child, raised from infancy by a wonderful couple that stayed married and provided a loving, stable home with both a father and a mother. I am grateful for them beyond words. And yet I know well the strange tension of having love for an adoptive family that I would not trade, coupled with a lifelong grief for the biological family I lost.

As Katie Davis has put it, “Adoption is a redemptive response to tragedy that happens in this broken world.” It is a tragedy for any child to be separated from his or her biological family, the father and mother that are the source of that child’s being. Overall, adopted children have more difficulties than children raised by their biological families, even in married mother-father scenarios such as mine. Adoption serves to provide what was lost or not possible where there has sadly been a disruption of the natural family order.

But in cases like that of the “father” described above, the loss of a mother is not viewed as a tragedy at all. Rather, this motherlessness is deliberately sought; it is viewed as a triumph of technology to be celebrated. Who can deny that the child is being viewed only from the perspective of the adults’ wishes? No one considers the rights of the child who is deliberately deprived of the love of a mother.

A New Kind of “Children’s Rights”

Ironically, it was at that same conference on sexuality research that I began to hear about a different kind of “children’s rights.” No, there was no mention of a right to a mother and a father. Nor was there any discussion of rights such as those spelled out by the UN Declaration on the Rights of the Child, which asserts that children’s best interests must always be the foremost consideration in dealing with decisions that affect them.

Rather, it was a whole different conception of rights—rights for children that aligned with and paralleled the interests and research of those present in the room; namely, children, as sexual beings, who have rights to sexual agency and expression. Thus, one speaker highlighted a study on boys as young as age ten forming “consensual” sexual relationships with male adults (without the knowledge of or interference from their parents) and affirmed the boys’ “rights” to do so. To further the discussion, another researcher mentioned a situation where an entire school sports team of teenaged boys received fellatio from a group of twelve-year-old schoolgirls. According to the speakers, this was perfectly good and healthy, as long as neither the girls nor the boys were coerced but rather were exercising their own rights to sexual agency and fulfilling their sexual desires. The only real problem was how a buttoned-down society reacted to it.

Keep in mind that many of the conference attendees were from the medical health branches of sexual behavior research, a crowd that ought to be familiar with the real physical consequences of sexual action. One speaker mentionedNAMBLA (North American Man-Boy Love Association) and the difficulty with public perceptions about being associated with them. Several attendees and speakers agreed that such groups must be publicly disavowed but privately accepted. In their view, such groups of course have a place at the sexuality research table because “man-boy love,” “intergenerational intimacy,” and “age-discrepant sexual relations (ADSR)” are legitimate aspects of male homosexual history, culture, and desire.

Although this conference was my first introduction to such a conception of children’s sexual rights, such views have become increasingly common. Not surprisingly, the International Planned Parenthood Foundation has signed on to these kinds of rights for children wholeheartedly, in the name of Youth Rights and Equality.

The Great Divide

In my earlier years, back when I identified as a lesbian, I shared some aspects of the worldview present in the sexuality research of which I speak. But when I heard children’s rights discussed in this way, I felt the distance between my worldview and that of my colleagues cleave into a chasm, a divide that could never be bridged.

At the end of the conference, we were told that we, as sexuality researchers, were the hope of the future. Never mind that the human body was, and I quote, “simply not designed” for the immunological challenges that come from the introduction of bodily fluids from multiple partners. We were given the charge to find ways to overcome the “limitations” of our design so that people everywhere might enjoy the full range of sexual experiences available to us. We were also called to combat and stand against archaic institutions (read: Judeo-Christian organizations) that seek to limit our sexual freedoms or stigmatize our sexual expressions.

In that final address—and in the display of that beautiful baby girl, made in the image of God but produced by means the Creator never intended—I sawHumanae Vitae’s warnings play out in living color. Those researchers indeed spoke as if we had “unlimited dominion” over our own bodies and their functions.

Now, whenever I see the yellow and blue equal sign that has become the emblem of support for same-sex marriage, I think of that great divide—the divide between two irreconcilable worldviews about what human sexuality is and is for, two fundamentally incompatible visions of children, family, and equal rights. Certainly not all supporters of same-sex marriage advocate a sexualized version of children’s rights. I know I didn’t. But the quest for same-sex marriage “rights” privileges adult sexual desires over all else, appealing to emotion rather than to reason. Queer theory is simply more forthcoming about the logical ends of removing traditional boundaries around sex and redefining the family than is the mainstream. For children most of all, this is the wrong kind of equality.

In our brave new world, it seems that adults and children will have equal rights to the “freedom” of sexual agency and gender-identity expression. But any who would dissent from the glowing narrative of the new family order, includingthe children of LGBT families, will have only the right to remain silent.

For the sake of the children, now is the time to speak

This article is published at: http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2015/05/14810/    THE WITHERSPOON INSTITUTE   Public Discourse

Diversity: the New Weapon against Christian Belief

By Maurine Proctor · May 4, 2015

Diversity is a generous idea whose meaning has become distorted. Smart people with straight faces, missing the irony altogether, demand that you think precisely as they do—and they make that claim in the name of diversity. Today diversity too often demands conformity of world-view, a strait-jacketing of opinion, which would be bad enough, but if you don’t line up and agree with them in the sacred name of diversity—watch out.

Matt Holland, president of Utah Valley University, along with 100 scholars, recently signed an amicus brief supporting man-woman marriage in the case just heard before the Supreme Court. For this, he did not go unpunished by the diversity police. Well more than hundred faculty and staff at UVU signed a letter condemning his choice—though he did not sign in his capacity as university president.

The letter acknowledged: “As President Holland has always championed on campus, diversity and inclusion mean creating an environment of genuine respect and civility for all people in the exercise of strong and different beliefs, and from different backgrounds.” The letter acknowledges that this has been a core value of his administration.

Now comes the stinger. “As current and former members of the Utah Valley University faculty and staff, we find President Matthew Holland’s promotion of the spurious ideas expressed by the ‘100 scholars’ and the potential association of UVU with the Schaerr brief to be disappointing and harmful to the values at the core of our public university.”

“Disappointing and harmful”? It is not enough that same-sex marriage has swept the nation by judicial decree, wiping out the voice of the people. Now using the potent weapon called “diversity”, one of the reigning values in our society, the diversity police seek to stamp out public discussion and dissent.

Just to be diverse, they get the duct tape for your mouth. Don’t talk. Punishment will follow.

Read the entire article at: http://ldsmag.com/diversity-the-new-weapon-against-christian-belief/

"Sex Change" Surgery: What Bruce Jenner, Diane Sawyer, and You Should Know

by Walt Heyer within Culture       April 27th, 2015

The dark and troubling history of the contemporary transgender movement, with its enthusiastic approval of gender-reassignment surgery, has left a trail of misery in its wake.

Bruce Jenner and Diane Sawyer could benefit from a history lesson. I know, because I suffered through “sex change” surgery and lived as a woman for eight years. The surgery fixed nothing—it only masked and exacerbated deeper psychological problems.

The beginnings of the transgender movement have gotten lost today in the push for transgender rights, acceptance, and tolerance. If more people were aware of the dark and troubled history of sex-reassignment surgery, perhaps we wouldn’t be so quick to push people toward it.

The setting for the first transgender surgeries (mostly male-to-female) was in university-based clinics, starting in the 1950s and progressing through the 1960s and the 1970s. When the researchers tallied the results and found no objective proof that it was successful—and, in fact, evidence that it was harmful—the universities stopped offering sex-reassignment surgery.

Read the entire article at: http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2015/04/14905/

THE WITHERSPOON INSTITUTE / Public Discourse

Obama Administration Says Non-Profit Status ‘Going to Be an Issue’ for Religious Schools

Ryan T. Anderson   THE DAILY SIGNAL

Is the Obama administration about to wage war on religious schools?

One of the more startling portions of oral arguments today at the Supreme Court was the willingness of the Obama administration’s Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, to admit that religious schools that affirm marriage as the union of a man and a woman may lose their non-profit tax-exempt status if marriage is redefined.

Justice Samuel Alito asked Verrilli whether a religious school that believed marriage was the union of husband and wife would lose their non-profit tax status.

The solicitor general answered: “It’s certainly going to be an issue. I don’t deny that. I don’t deny that, Justice Alito. It is it is going to be an issue.”

This should not be an issue. Citizens and organizations that continue to believe the truth about marriage should not be penalized by the government.

Even if the Court says that all 50 states have to recognize a same-sex relationship as a marriage, there is no reason why the government should coerce or penalize institutions of civil society that simply ask to be free—without penalty—to continue to operate in accordance with the belief that marriage is a union of husband and wife.

This line of questioning between Alito and the solicitor general picked up on a theme that Justice Antonin Scalia had started with the lawyer representing the same-sex couples suing the states.

Scalia asked about the religious liberty concerns if the Supreme Court creates a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. When the lawyer replied that we hadn’t seen many religious liberty violations in the states that have democratically redefined marriage, Scalia pounced: that’s his point. Here’s how he explained it:

    "They are laws. They are not constitutional requirements. That was the whole point of 
      my question.  If you let the states do it, you can make an exception. … You can’t do that 
      once it is a constitutional proscription."

Scalia repeated himself, almost verbatim, mere minutes later: “That’s my whole my point. If it’s a state law, you can make those exceptions. But if it’s a constitutional requirement, I don’t see how you can.”

This highlights another reason why it would be wise for the Supreme Court to not disregard the constitutional authority of states to make marriage policy. Not only is there nothing in the Constitution that requires the redefinition of marriage, but a ruling saying that there was could create unimaginable religious liberty violations. These situations are best handled democratically.

Read this article at: http://dailysignal.com/2015/04/28/obama-administration-says-non-profit-status-going-to-be-an-issue-for-religious-schools/?mkt_tok=3RkMMJWWfF9wsRojvqjPZKXonjHpfsX67u0uUKK3gYkz2EFye%2BLIHETpodcMS8tmMq%2BTFAwTG5toziV8R7jHKM1t0sEQWBHm