1. The Secrets to a Happy Marriage, The Telegraph

Research among 2,000 happily married couples has identified the main ingredients for a successful union.

It shows that couples benefit from taking a short break away together twice a year and eating out in restaurants at least three times a month. And it pays to be affectionate, as wedded folk tend to share a lingering kiss six times a week, have sex twice a week and say “I love you” up to nine times a fortnight. But it doesn’t need to be sweetness and light the whole time – as the average happy couple has at least one healthy argument a week.

2. 78% Rate Marriage As Important to U.S. Society, Rasmussen Reports

Seventy-eight percent (78%) of American Adults rate the institution of marriage as at least somewhat important to U.S. society, and that includes 60% who consider it Very Important. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that only 17% don’t believe marriage is a very important institution, with three percent (3%) who say it’s Not At All Important.

3. The New American Divide, The Wall Street Journal

When Americans used to brag about “the American way of life”—a phrase still in common use in 1960—they were talking about a civic culture that swept an extremely large proportion of Americans of all classes into its embrace. It was a culture encompassing shared experiences of daily life and shared assumptions about central American values involving marriage, honesty, hard work and religiosity.

Over the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled. We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America’s core cultural institutions.

4. The College Premium vs. the Marriage Premium: A Case of Double Standards, Library of Economics and Liberty

For males, the college premium and the marriage premium are roughly equal.  In the NLSY, for example, you earn 34% more if you’re a college grad, and 44% more if you’re a married male.

When people – economists and non-economists alike – look at the size of that college premium, they usually conclude that more people should go to college.  On a personal level, they urge individuals to enroll.  On a policy level, they don’t just favor all the existing measures that encourage college attendance; they want government to redouble its efforts.

Funny thing, though.  When people – economists and non-economists alike – look at the size of the male marriage premium, they barely respond. . . I could be missing something; if you think so, let me know.  My considered judgment, though, is that the double standard is all too real.  People should push both education and marriage – or neither.

5. Meet the Marriage Killer, The Wall Street Journal

Nagging can become a prime contributor to divorce when couples start fighting about the nagging rather than talking about the issue at the root of the nagging, says Howard Markman, professor of psychology at the University of Denver and co-director of the Center for Marital and Family Studies. . . The good news: Couples can learn to stop nagging. . .

The first step in curbing the nagging cycle, experts say, is to admit that you are stuck in a bad pattern. You are fighting about fighting. You need to work to understand what makes the other person tick. Rather than lazy and unloving, is your husband overworked and tired? Is your wife really suggesting she doesn’t trust you? Or is she just trying to keep track of too many chores?

6. The Leading Edge: HHS Department Releases Report on Relationship Education, American Association of School Administrators

School of Thought: Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education Matters to Our Youth is a report by the US Department of Health and Human Services that looks at relationship education for our nation’s students. Despite the geographic and organizational diversity of these programs, five common themes emerged from their demonstration projects:

• Youth desire information about healthy relationships.
• Young people need facilitators they can relate to and trust.
• Participants are able to develop a vision about what a healthy relationship is, and what it is not.
• Relationship education can be a powerful change agent within youth relationships.
• Young people are receptive to positive money management/budgeting strategies.

7. How to Commit to the End, Simple Marriage

January 14th is my 40th wedding anniversary. I was 17 and pregnant when I got married. I was mom to four little girls by age 22 (my third pregnancy was twins). The odds were stacked against us. The first 10 years were filled with drama and insanity. We talked about going our separate ways. Deep down we knew we never would. We knew there had to be a better way. . .

We were ready for change, we let go of blame, excuses and took responsibility. We were willing to look at the good, the bad, and the ugly. Our therapist would give us homework. We never missed a lesson. The secret to a loving relationship is to do the work it takes to grow lovingly and peacefully into the future.

For more, see this site.

Supporters of same-sex marriage (SSM) are sometimes challenged to identify this core of marriage, since it is us (supporters of SSM, that is) who argue that marriage is something that two people of the same sex can have.

Why I view this challenge as problematic is because I contend that it is inaccurate to speak of marriage as though it has, or should have, one “core” that is universally-accepted by all in a society, much less across all societies that have ever existed. For one, it is a demonstrable statement of fact that people have differing beliefs as to what constitutes the, or even a, core of marriage. To some, the core of marriage is “one man and one woman.” To some, it is “two adults in a romantic and mutually-supportive relationship.” To some, it is “one man and one woman (and this same man and another woman, and this same man and possibly another woman).” To some, it is “a group of people who are all married to each other.” Further variations exist.

Two, a related point, marriage is a human construct and, as such, is given meaning by the humans who utilize it, recognize it, and speak of it.

Sure, some argue that marriage is not a human construct and that it instead comes from, say, God or is just a fact of nature. But, that argument is unconvincing. How does one prove that marriage comes from God? How does one recognize a marriage in nature, in the way that, say, we would recognize a tree or a flower?

Most of us understand how babies are made but, in nature, absent the existence of a marriage license, how do we know that a marriage exists? Is it every man-woman pair that engages in sexual intercourse? Is it only the ones who say they’re married? Is it any man-woman pair that has children, even if they don’t plan on staying together for life?

My point with these rhetorical questions is that marriage is not a universal, readily-recognizable entity in the way that tangible, natural phenomena are.

Abstractions aside, what matters to many same-sex couples isn’t where marriage supposedly comes from or what its “One True Core” is. Many do not view this conversation as an esoteric debating exercise. What matters are the rights, benefits, obligations, and privileges that flow from a state which grants some partnerships the legal status of marriage.

In legal terms, in the US, marriage has multiple meanings or “cores.” In New Hampshire, for instance, “[m]arriage is the legally recognized union of 2 people. Any person who otherwise meets the eligibility requirements of this chapter may marry any other eligible person regardless of gender.” The core of marriage is two people, of any gender, who meet certain requirements.
But, in Nevada, the state’s Constitution reads, “[o]nly a marriage between a male and female person shall be recognized and given effect in this state.” There, the core of marriage is between two people, one of the male sex and the other of the female sex, who meet certain requirements.

From a religious standpoint, Catholicism defines marriage as a “covenant by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life and which is ordered by its nature to the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring. [It] has been raised by Christ the Lord to the dignity of a sacrament between the baptised.”

Other religious groups, such as the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC), Unitarian Universalists, and some rabbis in the Reconstructionist and Reform Judaism movements view both mixed-sex and same-sex couples as capable of comprising the core of marriage.

In light of this definitional diversity, perhaps marriage doesn’t have to mean the same thing for everyone across all secular, societal, and religious contexts. Perhaps it is an institution that never can mean the same thing to all in a society. Certainly not in a society that is increasingly accepting of the equal dignity of non-heteronormative relationships and their needs to protect their families via the legal system.

If it involves consenting adults, I generally support the right of private organizations and individuals to define marriage as they deem fit. The Catholic Church doesn’t want to perform same-sex weddings? Fine. I don’t want a wedding in a Catholic Church anyway. (I recognize that some people might want that who cannot have it, but I would support that progressive change to come from within the church, rather than through the state forcing the church to solemnize same-sex marriages).

To me, those who make arguments about what marriage supposedly is are refusing to participate in the more relevant debate that needs to take place in a democratic society. When very real benefits, rights, obligations, and privileges are accorded to those who possess the status “married,” the only debate is what should the core of marriage, from a civil, legal standpoint, be?

Under Equal Protection doctrine in the US, we generally strive to treat “likes alike” and “unalikes unalike.” To continue being very general, it is okay for the state to discriminate, but it must have good enough reasons to do so. That is, those being discriminated against must be different in a manner that is relevant to why they are being discriminated against.

To get out of the realm of abstractions, I will note a core of marriage as articulated by Elizabeth Marquardt,at Family Scholars Blog:

“Rather, a core purpose of marriage is to channel the reality that heterosexual sex quite often makes babies into a stable (most likely to be found in a marital) union of the baby’s own mother and father, for the sake of the babies and the mothers and father.”

Here, an important core of marriage, according to Elizabeth, is for children to know and be raised by both of their biological parents. Thus, using this core of marriage, it would be acceptable to not allow same-sex couples to marry because they do not fulfill this core. There would be, it seems, no point to their marriage if marriage is about a man and a woman creating children together and then raising those children together.

And yet, we can easily think of other couples, couples who are allowed to marry, who similarly fail to fulfill this core of marriage:

1. A childless, post-menopausal woman who marries a man
2. A man and a woman who are fertile with other partners, but not with one another*
3. A man who lacks testicles who marries a woman
4. A woman who has had a hysterectomy who marries a man

I could continue.

These examples are not “gotchas.” I want to be very clear about that.

See, the only thing our legal system cares about in asking whether whether state discrimination is the acceptable kind of discrimination is whether a legitimate enough reason exists for that discrimination. And, on that front, if the purpose of marriage is to channel heterosexual sex into procreation that results in children being raised by their biological parents, couples 1-4 are just like same-sex couples: Any children they raise will not be both of their biological offspring.

And so, from an Equal Protection standpoint, the legal system should be treating likes alike. But, in most US states, it’s not. Most states grant marital status to some mixed-sex couples who haven’t “earned” it via reproduction and child-rearing, while denying that status to same-sex couples precisely because they haven’t “earned” it in that way.

Why observing this reality isn’t a “gotcha” is because I contend that, if the “core” of marriage is what Elizabeth says it is, then it degrades that core of marriage and confuses people about what that core is, when we allow couples 1-4 into marriage. Allowing such couples into marriage is to grant them a special privilege that is denied to those with whom they are similarly-situated.

Indeed, to many LGBT people and allies, it looks like couples 1-4 are granted marriage licenses not so they can fulfill the core purpose of marriage, indeed they cannot, but to give them a nod, a wink, and a pass because they look a lot like members of the Super Special Heterosexual Procreators’ Club. (And that’s before we even start looking at possible anti-gay/bigotry-related motivations that some harbor).

So, when we start thinking about whether or not discrimination against same-sex couples is the acceptable kind of discrimination in light of what marriage is purportedly all about, it begins looking less and less acceptable due to the overbroad nature of many marriage laws.

Now, I am not, of course, actually arguing that couples who cannot procreate degrade the institution of marriage. But, rather, that we seem to have a societal incoherence in talking about marriage, with those on all sides of the issue claiming that they alone possess its one true definition. (And here it is worth noting that Elizabeth said that she was stating “a” core of marriage, which suggests one of many possible cores, rather than “the” core of marriage).

Our overbroad (or is it underinclusive?) marriage laws are reflective not only of this incoherence, but of the reality that marriage simply means different things to different people.

Maybe we need to do a better job of becoming okay with that.

*In about 10% of infertility cases, a couple’s infertility arises from a combination of both of their individuals make-ups. They may be fertile with other people, but they cannot conceive with one another. Such a couple is a particularly apt comparison to same-sex couples.

Since they are failing to fulfill the purported core of marriage, I wonder, if marriage rights were denied to them on that basis, would people tell them they could simply choose to marry other people? Or would that be readily-recognized as cruel?

A study found that in polygamous cultures, levels of rape, kidnap, murder and robbery increase as the dissatsified men left on the shelf go on the rampage. Researchers from the University of British Columbia say that monogamous marriage has replaced polygamy because it has lower levels of inherent social problems…

“When I was younger, so much younger than today,
I never needed anybody’s help in anyway.
But now these days are gone, I’m not so self assured,
Now I find I’ve changed my mind, I’ve opened up the doors.

Help me if you can, I’m feeling down
And I do appreciate you being ’round.
Help me get my feet back on the ground,
Won’t you please, please help me?”  Beatles, “Help”

In today’s Dear Prudence column we read this question:

Prudie answers by supporting her to move on.  She cites the recent Washington Post article about Robert Melton and his wife who divorced him in order to remarry, while remaining the primary caregiver for her debilitated ex-husband.  In that piece, the wife genuinely wrestles with breaking her vow of “in sickness and in health” to her first husband, and overall, she and the author of the piece say that they are reinterpreting the vow and giving that vow new meaning.

Again, let me first say, I err on the side of compassion.  If either of these women were my friend, I would whole-heartedly want to support them in both honoring their vows to their debilitated spouse but also wanting them to be happy.  Having a spouse who changes physically, mentally and emotionally in ways that are irreversible is not something I have experienced, but through many years in hospice have observed to be gut-wrenching and full of sacrifices.  Change is not easy.  Vows are not easy.

And so I come back to some core questions:

Why do we make vows in the first place?  And why do we make them to mortals who inevitably change or as Shakespeare un-romantically says, “rot?”

How do we balance personal happiness or fulfillment with commitment?

I ask, because if you are in a committed relationship, rest assured that you and he/she will AGE!  At some point, either you or he/she will be caring for the other or being cared for.  In 2011, the National Family Caregivers Association’s Caregiving Statistics, reported that more than 65 million people, 29% of the U.S. population, provided care for a chronically ill or disabled person.  Most of those were spouses caring for spouses.  The average time span of care giving is 5 plus years.

At some point, we may all look at our spouses and think, “This is not the guy or gal I married!”  (and of course vice versa!)  What then?  Since I started with the Beatles, might as well end there…

“Will you still need me?  Will you still feed me, when I’m 64 (or 74 or 84 or 94!?”

1. Family Fact of the Week: Marriage’s Sobering Effects, Heritage Foundation

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a new report last week showing that. . . one in six U.S. adults binge drinks about 4 times a month—that’s more than 38 million people. Fortunately, marriage appears to have a positive effect on both men’s and women’s relationships to alcohol, with a decline in alcohol problems among couples who have tied the knot. . . The instance of binge drinking declines by 11 percent among recently married men, and marriage seems to also reduce the number of women who report binge drinking by 20 percent.

2. Are You with the Right Mate?, Psychology Today

What to do when the initial attraction sours? “I call it the first day of your real marriage,” Real says. It’s not a sign that you’ve chosen the wrong partner. It is the signal to grow as an individual—to take responsibility for your own frustrations. Invariably, we yearn for perfection but are stuck with an imperfect human being. We all fall in love with people we think will deliver us from life’s wounds but who wind up knowing how to rub against us.

3. Marriage: Saying ‘I don’t’, Los Angeles Times

As of 2010, according to a recent report from the Pew Research Center, married couples had fallen to barely 51% of U.S. households, with a full 5% drop in new marriages between 2009 and 2010 alone. The data for 2011 aren’t in yet, but if that decline continued last year, less than half of American adults are in a legal marriage now. Is marriage going the way of the electric typewriter and the VHS tape? Not exactly.

4. Blair: Marriage Without Meaning, The Dartmouth

I just want to focus now on the reason legislation about marriage is appropriate to pursue even in our time of fiscal crisis. The state does not create marriage – it recognizes it. It recognizes it because of the terrible importance marriage possesses for the health of a country. The decline in a healthy marriage culture, which started in the ‘60s and ‘70s in our country, has been linked again and again to higher crime rates, higher poverty rates, poorer education and lower levels of psychological health in children, among other things.

5. Relationship Help, Huffington Post

However couples therapy is only part of the answer to the question of how to increase relationship health. The most important answer is in one word: Education.

Relationship education includes classes, workshops, and online learning where partners can learn the skills and principles that over 30 years of research has shown to be associated with relationship happiness. In controlled clinical trials, couples who complete a relationship education program communicate better, handle conflicts and negative emotions more constructively, have lower risk of divorce and higher levels of relationship happiness. My message to couples: Don’t wait until things get really nasty or until you have lost that loving feeling.

6. Twogether in Texas, East Texas Review

Twogether in Texas grew out of the federal Healthy Marriage Initiative and operates with funds from Texas Health and Human Services Commission. In just over three years, it has helped thousands of people nurture stronger marriages — and save a few bucks in the process.

“I originally came here today to get my $60 voucher,” one participant said after attending a workshop in Fort Worth. “However, I’m leaving with so much more. I don’t even care about the money I saved because the knowledge I gained today is priceless.”

7. Your Marital Style May Predict Divorce, Houston Chronicle

After thirty years of divorce research, she came up with five basic marital styles. What is important to note are the ones that were most likely NOT to end up in divorce. The two that led to the longest, most content marriages are the cohesive marriage and the traditional marriage. Indentifying your style may be the first step in re-taping your communication and saving your marriage.

1. Cohesive Marriage. This marriage style is one in which the couple doesn’t spend every waking moment together, but they are tightly bonded. These couples often have their own interests, their own careers, but at the end of the day they want to be in each other’s arms. They draw their support and love from each other. They are the gold standard as they make marriage look real. Most people idealize this type of marriage.
2. Traditional Marriage. This is the marriage your parents may have had. The breadwinner is the guy, and the wife takes on the duties of the home, kids and running the couple’s social life. Although it led to the least divorces in Dr. Hetherington’s thirty-year research study, the individual people may not have been the happiest. This marriage works great if both partners enjoy and embrace their roles. If something changes, such as the wife begins working, this type of marriage may become unstable.

For more, see this site.

Marina Adshade, an economics professor with an interest in “sex and love,” writes:

Today we will take a few minutes to show a little appreciation for an important right in Western society – the right to divorce. [...]

Economists Justine Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson, in a 2006 paper, showed that these legal changes had significant impacts on the quality of life of women. Taking advantage of in state-by-state variations in the time in which these laws were put into place they found that freer access to divorce brought with it an 8 –16% decline in female suicide, a 30% decline in domestic violence and 10% decline in the murder rate of women.

You may argue that these benefits to unilateral divorce laws come at significant costs – hardship for children and female poverty, just to name two – but that would only be true if the change in divorce laws increased the rate of divorce and that has not been proven. In fact, the best evidence suggests a very small positive effect on divorce rates only in the ten years after divorces became easier to obtain. And even then, that effect was only among those who were married before the laws were put in place.

The explanation for why easier access to divorce has not increased divorce rates is simple – men and women enter into marriage more cautiously when they know that divorce is easier to obtain. This is because while the laws may have made divorce easier from a legal standpoint, they have not made marital dissolution emotionally or economically painless.

It is this fact that explains why women marry later in life when it is easier to divorce.

A second explanation, which also explains the fall in domestic violence and suicide in states that support unilateral divorce, is just knowing that your spouse can divorce you without your consent encourages married individuals to treat each other better.

In the article, Adshade also argue that the use of “covenant” marriage agreements doesn’t actually make people less likely to divorce, but they do make the divorces harder on the people involved (“Anecdotal evidence suggests that even when abuse has been proven judges strictly enforce separation periods of up to two years.”). Those costs fall disproportionately on women:

The purpose of a covenant marriage is to increase the cost of divorce, significantly, and as a result give parties an incentive to stay in a failing marriage. If women are lower wage earners than men, or are out of the workforce all together, then the imposition of these costs falls disproportionally on women making it difficult for them to leave a bad marriage. That part of the arrangement is significant since in the majority of divorces it is the wife who wants the marriage to end.

I pretty much agree with Adshade on all of this. Married life was not a paradise in the 1950s, and the people I know who got divorced did so only after a lot of anguish and thought. Contrary to what the marriage-rescuers seem to believe, most Americans take marriage very seriously; trying to make it even harder to divorce is punitive, it is anti-liberty, and it will not actually improve anything.

Washington’s Legislature has enough votes to legalize gay marriage with a statement from Democratic Senator Mary Margaret Haugen Monday who said she will support the measure, becoming the 25th vote needed to pass the bill out of the Senate. The House already has enough support, and Gov. Chris Gregoire has endorsed the plan. [...]

Washington would become the seventh state to legalize same-sex marriages, following New York, Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont. Washington state has had a domestic partnership law since 2007, and a “everything but marriage” law since 2009.

And from the Seattle Times a couple of days ago:

Once the hearings are over, the bills could move out of committee by Thursday in the Senate and by Jan. 30 in the House. The chairmen of both committees said they have the votes they need. The House bill is also expected to go through the House Ways and Means Committee. It’s not clear if the Senate’s measure will go through Senate Ways and Means.

Gay-marriage advocates say the earliest the bills could get floor votes would be the first part of February.

If the bill passes, according to a Fox news report, “gay and lesbian couples would be able to get married starting in June unless opponents file a referendum to challenge it at the ballot.” Of course, NOM and other opponents of marriage equality are already gearing up for just such a challenge.

But this time it might not be easy for them.

In October, a University of Washington poll found that an increasing number of people in the state support same-sex marriage. About 43 percent of respondents said they support gay marriage, up from 30 percent in the same poll five years earlier. Another 22 percent said they support giving identical rights to gay couples but just not calling it marriage.

When asked how they would vote if a referendum challenging a gay marriage law was on the ballot, 55 percent said they would vote yes to uphold the law, with 47 percent of them characterized as “strongly” yes, and 38 percent responded “no,” that they would vote to reject a gay marriage law.

Of course, it’s happened multiple times that marriage equality has done worse in the voting booth than polls indicated. But poll trends indicate that more voters favor equality with every passing year. So we’ll see.

The fight against marriage equality in Washington is led by Pasteur Ken Hutchingson, who says that people who favor same-sex marriage are like John Wilkes Booth, and “trying to put a bullet in the head of one of the greatest traditions that has ever existed,” and tells lawmakers who vote for marriage equality that they think “that you know better than God.” Oy.

Unlike some nonprofits, especially those centered around contentious social issues, SPLC publishes its Annual Report, audited financial statements, and Form 990 (which is a nonprofit’s “tax return”) on its website for public viewing.

Although SPLC engages in a wide variety of progressive activist, anti-racist, and social justice work, it is particularly notorious among those who oppose equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people for its monitoring and labeling of “active anti-gay groups” on its website.

The SPLC’s labeling of these organizations as “hate groups” used to be more prominently displayed and explicit on its website. This no longer seems to be the case.

However, in its Winter 2010 Intelligence Report, SPLC listed 13 groups as anti-LGBT hate groups, saying:

“Generally, the SPLC’s listings of these groups is based on their propagation of known falsehoods — claims about LGBT people that have been thoroughly discredited by scientific authorities — and repeated, groundless name-calling. Viewing homosexuality as unbiblical does not qualify organizations for listing as hate groups.”

That is, according to the SPLC, a belief that homosexuality is wrong or immoral, is not enough to warrant the “hate group” label. Nor is being a religious group that believes homosexuality is wrong enough. What the SPLC looks at, by its own definition, is a group’s pattern of spreading falsehoods about LGBT people that have been discredited and engaging in “repeated, groundless name-calling.”

Some of the more abhorrent examples the SPLC cites as messaging that contributes to the “hate group” label include:

Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association claiming, “[h]omosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and 6 million dead Jews.”

Steven Anderson, the pastor of Faithful Word Baptist Church, saying, “The biggest hypocrite in the world is the person who believes in the death penalty for murderers but not for homosexuals,” claimed that “sodomites” recruit through “rape” and “molestation,” and told an openly gay interviewer, “If you’re a homosexual, I hope you get brain cancer and die like Ted Kennedy.”

Several groups, including Peter LaBarbera’s Americans For Truth About Homosexuality (AFTAH), were included partly for the dissemination of the discredited work of Paul Cameron, who during his career has made many inflammatory and inaccurate claims about “homosexuals.” (Just for some “thought food” here, because some FSB readers and bloggers might not be aware of it, in 1986 the American Sociological Association “repudiated any claims that Paul Cameron is a sociologist and condemned his misrepresentation of sociological research” (PDF). Other professional organizations make similar complaints.)

So, it was with much aggravation and disappointment that I heard of this spin:

“Black pastors join pro-family groups to condemn Southern Poverty Law Center for ‘bigotry’”

This article (yes, at a conservative Christian news source) discusses a protest of the SPLC that several SPLC-labeled hate groups participated in on Martin Luther King, Jr’s birthday, such as the Illinois Family Institute, Mass Resistance, Abiding Truth Ministries, and AFTAH. It quotes Matt Barber, a figure prominent in the LGBT “culture wars,” as saying:

“The SPLC has moved from monitoring actual hate groups like the KKK and Neo Nazis to slandering mainstream Christian organizations with that very same ‘hate group’ label. By extension, the SPLC is smearing billions of Christians and Jews worldwide as ‘haters,’ simply because they embrace the traditional Judeo-Christian sexual ethic.”

He then accused the SPLC of engaging in “anti-Christian bigotry.”

The relevance of noting the race of the pastors involved in the protest is questionable. The implication seemed to be that (presumably heterosexual) African-American pastors possess moral authority to say what does and doesn’t constitute legitimate hatred and bigotry, even against minority groups that they may not be a part of. Yet, what some audiences (predominately anti-LGBT ones) might see as some sort of United Colors of Love, Tolerance, and Christianity, other audiences (predominately pro-LGBT ones) might see as an opportunistic alignment of bigotry.

For instance, one African-American pastor involved in the protest added his two cents:

“I think every African-American ought to be appalled, ought to be angry, and begin to wave their fist in the air and declare black power and say to the homosexual lobbyists, the homosexual groups, how dare you compare your wicked, deviant, immoral, self-destructive, anti-human sexual behavior to our beautiful skin color.”

Look. People.

We need to have a serious talk about what constitutes civility, hatred, and bigotry.

From my perspective, this protest was deflecting genuine criticism of the tactics some of these SPLC-labeled “hate groups” engage in and was mis-attributing the critiques as being evidence of “anti-Christian bigotry.” It is an absurd claim. Not only because SPLC has documented the actions and messaging that they believe constitute hateful behavior, but because if this were a case of bigotry against Christian groups and churches that “merely” oppose homosexuality, the list of “hate groups” would be far more numerous than 13.

Indeed, to those who oppose same-sex marriage, LGBT rights, and/or “the homosexual agenda,” look again at the accusations cited above that the SPLC-identified “hate groups” have made about LGBT people. Read the SPLC report for yourself.

Do you find the messaging of these groups to be in any way problematic?

Do you find the messaging to be evidence of hatred? Of ignorance? Of something else?

If a peaceful resolution of these “culture wars” is a goal, and given that the “hater” label can shut down dialogue, what do you think would be a more productive way for LGBT rights advocates to point out the problematic aspects of these accusations and misrepresentations that it call it hate?

Do you feel that some of these groups unfairly give the rest of those who oppose same-sex marriage “a bad name”? How might the fact that prominent opponents of same-sex marriage so rarely call out people on “their” side of bigotry, hatred, or misbehavior impact the perception that supporters of LGBT rights have of you? How might it impact the crusade to save marriage, if some people are giving “all of you” a bad name?

Finally, to all readers, is it “just as mean” or morally equivalent to call someone a hater or bigot who refers to homosexuality as “wicked, deviant, immoral, self-destructive, anti-human sexual behavior” as it is to make that reference in the first place?

Check out the NYT for a forum on the topic, featuring some familiar voices including FamilyScholars blogger Brad Wilcox.

And for my own two cents on poly arrangements and children, see One Parent or Five.

Claude Greff will meet January 25 the President of the Association of Mayors of
France to present the news. The “preparation kit to civil marriage” will be tested in cities volunteers before being distributed to the municipalities upon request. “Many mayors have expressed their interest,” promised Secretary of State.

The original article in French.