The Question of Discrimination in Same-Sex Marriage

by Maggie Datiles, J.D., Associate Fellow

In CultureofLifeFoundation

On January 18^th, the U.S. Supreme Court announced its decision not to hear a same-sex marriage case brought by traditional marriage supporters. The case challenged the District of Columbia’s refusal to allow a voter referendum on the definition of marriage. The Supreme Court's rejection of the case has closed the door of judicial appeal for D.C. traditional marriage supporters. The debate will now shift to the legislative arena. This essay summarizes the efforts made in the District of Columbia to protect the institution of marriage, and discusses the issue of discrimination in the same-sex marriage context.

In 2009, the D.C. Council enacted two same-sex marriage laws. The first provided for the recognition of same-sex marriages performed outside of D.C., and the second allowed same-sex marriages to be performed in the District. (Bills banning same-sex marriages in D.C. were introduced but failed to make it to the House floor.) Before the two new laws went into effect, Bishop Harry Jackson, the leader of traditional marriage efforts in D.C., initiated a D.C. ballot measure defining marriage as between one man and one woman. Later, an emergency appeal was made to the Supreme Court to delay the enforcement of the new same-sex marriage laws. Chief Justice Roberts denied the emergency appeal because “it has been the practice of the Court to defer to the decisions of the courts of the District of Columbia on matters of exclusively local concern.”

The District of Columbia Board of Elections and Ethics refused to put Bishop Jackson’s measure on the ballot, stating that a ban on same-sex marriage would violate the D.C. Human Rights Act prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation. In response, Bishop Jackson and the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) led a lawsuit challenging the Board’s decision. They argued that, according to the District of Columbia Charter, all legislative issues except appropriations may be voted on through public ballot initiatives. However, the D.C. Court of Appeals ultimately upheld D.C. Board of Elections’ refusal to put the issue to a vote, stating that a voter-based gay marriage ban would “have the effect of authorizing” discrimination.

Traditional marriage proponents appealed this decision to the Supreme Court, but on January 18, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case. Although the Supreme Court provided no comment on its rejection of the case, we can assume that it was rejected because, as Chief Justice Roberts said, the Supreme Court’s policy is to defer to the decisions of local courts in matters of exclusively local concern.

Importantly, the Supreme Court did not reject the same-sex marriage case based on its merits. This leads us to question the constitutional merits of the case: Is a same-sex marriage ban discriminatory under the constitution?

The case of Loving v. Virginia (1967) is considered to be the most important marriage law case in American history. In that case, the Supreme Court held that laws prohibiting bi-racial marriages are discriminatory and violations of Equal Protection and Due Process under the U.S. Constitution. The Court concluded that prohibiting the marriage of a man and a woman based solely on race constitutes discrimination and violates the right to marry. This right to marry, the Court declared, “is fundamental to our very existence and survival.” Here, the Supreme Court stated that marriage is between one man and one woman, and that the generation of children is inherent in the nature of marriage. This corresponds with traditional Christian views on the definition and purpose of marriage.

In Loving, the Supreme Court drew a distinction between the substance of marriage and the accidental qualities of a marriage. A marriage of a black man and a white woman, the Court declared, is a valid marriage because it has the substance of a marriage – a man and a woman. The races of the spouses are accidental in quality, and therefore have no bearing on the validity of the marriage.

This is why analogies between race and homosexuality in the marriage context do not work. In a homosexual marriage, the substance of the marriage is changed, whereas in an interracial marriage, the substance of the marriage is still the same. In short, the comparison between same-sex marriage and interracial marriage constitutes an erroneous analogy because a change of substance is fundamentally different from a change in accident.

An analogy to merit-based school scholarships is better. If a qualified black student is denied a merit-based scholarship solely based on his or her race, the denial of the scholarship constitutes unjust discrimination. But if an unqualified black student is denied a merit-based scholarship, the denial of the scholarship is valid. Similarly, if a law does not allow homosexuals to marry based on the mere fact that they are homosexual, such a law would be unjustly discriminatory. However, laws prohibiting same-sex marriage are not based solely on the fact that the parties seeking marriage are homosexual. Rather, the law prohibits homosexuals couples from marrying because the union of homosexuals is not in fact a marriage. Homosexual couples do not possess the necessary criteria for marriage, as they are incapable of doing what married couples do.

In addition, the Supreme Court held in Baker v. Nelson (1972) that laws defining marriage as between one man and one woman are constitutional and do not violate the Equal Protection Clause, Due Process Clause and the right to privacy under the 14^th Amendment. Unlike race or gender, sexual orientation is not a “suspect class” that “triggers” a constitutional discrimination analysis. This ruling is binding on lower courts, and has been cited and followed by state and federal lawsuits brought by gays against marriage laws.(1) In fact, the gay couple in Baker tried to file their case two additional times (in 1976 and 2006), but the courts declined to hear the case again because of the binding authority of the Supreme Court decision in Baker.

Similar to the holdings of Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court precedent established in Baker corresponds with traditional Christian views on marriage. Although lower courts have generally followed these Supreme Court precedents in the past, the continuing stability of these precedents is questionable. For example, in August 2010, in the case Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the Ninth Circuit departed from the established Supreme Court precedent by ruling that California’s same-sex marriage ban, Proposition 8, is unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause and Due Process Clause. As a major challenge to existing precedent, this case is anticipated to reach the Supreme Court in the near future.

In short, the definition of marriage as between one man and one woman has, in the past, been generally held by the courts (with rare exceptions) as non-discriminatory towards homosexuals. However, with the Perry case making its way to the Supreme Court and six U.S. jurisdictions recognizing same-sex marriages, this could change. If Perry is upheld in the Supreme Court, it will overturn current Supreme Court precedent and completely change the constitutional landscape of legal marriage. This possibility underscores the urgent need to continue to defend the legal and cultural definition of marriage as between one man and one woman.

[1] See, e.g., Citizens for Equal Protection v. Bruning (U.S. Court of Appeals, 8^th Circuit, 2006), Wilson v. AkeMorrison v. Sandler (Indiana Court of Appeals, 2005), and Hernandez v. Robles (New York Court of Appeals, 2004). (U.S. District Court, 2005),

Estas e as próximas eleições

1. Segundo noticia a comunicação social Cavaco Silva foi eleito com menos meio milhão de votos (números redondos, de facto são mais) do que no primeiro mandato. Esta diminuição muito significativa do seu eleitorado mostrou claramente a vontade de uma punição ao seu comportamento ético irresponsável ao promulgar leis iníquas e injustas. Esta multidão de pessoas, ao que sabemos em virtude de múltiplos contactos, ou votaram nulo, ou em branco ou em candidatos que sabiam que não seriam eleitos (assim se explicam as percentagens de votos de Fernando Nobre e de José Manuel Coelho) ou pura e simplesmente abstiveram-se.

Era da maior importância que este sinal de indignação e descontentamento fosse dado – só é pena que não fosse ainda mais extenso. Ele constitui uma força que, se bem aproveitada, poderá servir de freio para o mal e de incentivo para o bem àqueles dois partidos políticos que ainda têm uns resquícios de respeito pela vida nascitura, pela família natural, pela liberdade de ensino e de educação, pela liberdade religiosa, pela salvaguarda da inocência de crianças e jovens.

Por isso, proponho que, desde já, se elabore uma Declaração, para ser assinada pelo maior número possível de pessoas, na qual se diga com toda a firmeza que o respeito e a defesa dos absolutos morais, isto é, dos princípios e valores inegociáveis será a condição essencial para votar nesses partidos. De facto, nenhum destes estará em condições de desprezar algumas centenas de milhares de votos.

Todos os cidadãos, crentes ou não crentes, fiéis leigos ou membros da hierarquia deverão participar e ajudar neste esforço que não é somente educativo e evangelizador mas do qual dependerá, em grandíssima parte, o futuro do país e do cristianismo em Portugal.

2. Desde o 25 de Abril que me tenho preocupado com uma coisa a que muitos parecem alheios. Em todas as eleições os partidos de matriz anticristã são sempre muito mais numerosos do que aqueles que se podem, ou podiam!?, reclamar-se de inspiração cristã. Um dos funestos resultados deste estado de coisas - em virtude de uma maior presença na comunicação social, tempos de antena, comícios, etc. -, é o de ter influído “catequeticamente”, o de ter permeado, uma mentalidade avessa à Lei Moral Natural e ao Cristianismo na generalidade dos fiéis e crentes e do povo em geral, mesmo quando pertencem a outros partidos.

Nuno Serras Pereira

26. 01. 2011

Marching on the Right Side of History

by Jennifer Roback Morse

The Public Discourse

January 24, 2011

Defenders of marriage should draw hope and courage from the pro-life movement’s success.

As an advocate of conjugal marriage, I am often told that I am on the “wrong side of History.” The justice of “marriage equality” is overwhelming; the younger generation favors it; same sex marriage is inevitable. But this analysis is false. Indeed, there is ample reason to think that the March of History storyline will be proven incorrect. The reason? We were told all these same things about abortion.

“You need to accept Roe v. Wade. The unlimited abortion license is nothing but simple justice for women. Besides, the next generation will completely accept abortion. They will grow up knowing nothing else. They will not have all your hang-ups about sex and your squeamishness about scraping a bit of tissue out of a woman’s body. Reproductive freedom is the wave of the future. You are on the Wrong Side of History.”

A funny thing happened on the way to History: the people did not perform as promised. Last year, I took a group of Ruth Institute students up to the West Coast Walk for Life in San Francisco. Official estimates place the attendance at over 35,000. But I wasn’t counting. I was looking at the faces. I saw what anyone can see, if they care to look: the pro-life movement is a youth movement.

The average age of the walkers at the West Coast Walk for Life was probably around late twenties, and even lower if you count babies in strollers. Toward the front of the parade were the Berkeley Students for Life (yes, there is such a thing) and the Stanford pro-life club, (yes, they exist as well), their long-standing cross-Bay rivalry set aside for the day. Busloads of high school students, college students road-tripping in from all over the West Coast, whole church youth groups, families with small children, babies in arms, backpacks and strollers. The next generation is not going along quietly with the Inexorable March of History.

And why should they?

The pro-abortion forces did not correctly predict how the young would react to the Abortion Regime. Simple demographics favor a pro-life next generation: advocates of life have more children on average than their opponents. But beyond that, every person under the age of 38 is in some sense a survivor of the abortion regime. Any of them could have been killed. And some of them realize that.

Many of them have seen friends have abortions to save relationships with boyfriends, only to have the boyfriend end the relationship anyway. Some of them have learned from experience that recreational sex is not as fun as they imagined. The coarsening of sexual relationships, the pressure on women to perform sexually, the easy escape for men from responsibility for their unborn children: some of the Millennials have put two and two together and figured out that the abortion regime enables all this.

Katelyn Sills, President of Berkeley Students for Life, attended the 2011 Walk on Saturday. She reports that the pro-life initiative comes from the young people themselves, not from their parents or other authority figures. When high school students form a pro-life club, it isn’t to pad their resumes: that particular extra-curricular activity won’t impress most college admissions offices. Students form pro-life clubs because they see the injustice of abortion: they identify with the child.

It is the interests of children that the Abortion Regime set aside in order to accommodate the desires of adults. And it is the interests of children that the redefinition of marriage is in the process of setting aside as well. Remember the old pro-abortion slogan, “every child a wanted child?” Who can take that seriously today? “Kids just need two adults who love them” will come to sound every bit as hollow.

Same-sex civil marriage tacitly but surely asserts that kids don’t really need mothers and fathers, and that mothers and fathers are interchangeable. The next generation will grow up with the consequences of institutionalizing this belief throughout society. Same-sex civil marriage is turning the drift toward artificial reproductive technology for infertile married couples into a tidal wave of entitlement for anyone married or single, straight or gay, of any age, to manufacture children for any reason. Redefining marriage will come to mean that there is no particular reason to insist on two parents. Some in the next generation will have three or four parents.

Advocates of redefining marriage assure us that all will be well. Children will do fine, whatever the loving adults in their lives decide to do. IVF children will be so wanted by their legal parents that the lifetime separation from their natural parents will not trouble them. And children of unconventional family structures will have more adults to love them. Divorce, separation, complex custody quarrels, kids shuttling between four households with their sleeping bags and backpacks: that’s just anti-equality hysteria and will never happen.

As time goes on, it will become more obvious that “marriage equality” requires us, men, women and children alike, to ignore biology. Some women who have children with female partners will find that sharing the care of her child with another woman, is not the same as sharing the care of her child with the child’s father. Some men who agree to be sperm donors as “friends” will find that they want more of a relationship with their own children than they had anticipated. And some children are going to have feelings about their absent parents, uncomfortable questions about their origins, and complex emotions about being partially purchased.

Advocates of same sex marriage typically respond, “That’s just biology,” as if biology were nothing. These advocates are asking people to set aside the natural attachment of parents to their own children, the natural difficulties of treating another person’s child as if they were your own, the natural desires of children to know who they are and where they came from. And these advocates are asking the whole of society to ignore sexual differentiation in parenthood: no mothers, no fathers, just generic parents. These enemies of the human body seem to forget that there are no generic people, just men and women.

As acceptance of gender-neutral marriage spreads throughout society, some same sex couples will not be “gay:” they will be forming same sex unions of convenience. And even among the gays and lesbians who marry, not all of them will be the most committed ideologues. Some will just want to live the ordinary lives that advocates of same sex marriage have been promising them. But biology will assert itself.

Children with father-hunger will start to speak up. Young people will start to notice that some of the differences between men and women actually matter. Mothers in same sex unions will start to notice that raising sons without fathers is harder than they had been led to believe. Suppressing all these feelings in all these people will simply not be possible indefinitely. Not everyone will remain silent. Abortion advocates never anticipated the Silent No More campaign, wherein women suffering the after-effects of their abortions began to speak up. As time marches on, the brutality of the marriage “equality” regime will become just as obvious as the brutality of the abortion regime is today.

The children themselves will eventually have something to say about all this. Today, the energy and enthusiasm of the young is on the side of life. And in spite of everything we hear today, the same will be true of natural marriage. Conjugal marriage is the Right Side of History.

Os cortesãos cegos - João César das Neves

João César das Neves

In DN - 24. 01. 2011

Vivemos numa sociedade oficialmente livre-pensadora, sem tabus, preconceitos ou dogmas. Estão criadas as condições para os tabus mais acéfalos, preconceitos mais avassaladores, dogmas mais totalitários, por não existir sequer a disposição para reconhecer essa possibilidade.

Um dos contos mais geniais da literatura revela onde pode chegar a cegueira ideológica. Publicado na colectânea medieval espanhola El Conde de Lucanor de 1335 (Enxemplo XXXII - de lo que contesció a un Rey con los burladores que ficieron el paño), foi vulgarizado por Hans Christian Andersen como As Roupas Novas do Imperador (Kejserens nye Klæder) em 1837. Os cortesãos, a quem foi dito que o tecido do traje do imperador é invisível a quem não é filho de seu pai, estão dispostos a exaltar a beleza das vestes, sem conseguirem admitir que o rei vai nu. Sintomaticamente, na versão de Andersen, quem não vê as roupas é estúpido ou incompetente, mas na Idade Média interessava mais a família que a competência.

Não faltam exemplos desta cegueira. Há anos assistiu-se à derrocada do glorioso paraíso colectivista da União Soviética que tantos louvaram acefalamente durante décadas. Antes desfizera-se o mito da supremacia da raça ariana. Mas a sociedade sem tabus tinha de ter uma obsessão ainda mais infantil. O nosso dogma é a equivalência entre os estilos de vida.

Todas as civilizações e culturas sempre souberam que a família, onde as gerações se unem e sucedem, amando-se, educando-se, sustentando-se, perdoando-se, constitui a base da sociedade. Sempre houve alternativas, avaliadas de forma diferente nas várias culturas, mas nenhuma as viu como semelhantes à célula vital. A cultura ocidental contemporânea é a primeira que tenta negar a evidência.

Começa logo por não ser possível sequer falar de família. Agora é "família tradicional", porque alegadamente há várias. E aqui o adjectivo é pejorativo. Depois um portentoso aparato mediático, filmes, televisão, revistas, livros, jornais, lança-se numa campanha de propaganda massiva a favor das alternativas, adultério, divórcio, promiscuidade, concubinato, perversão, deboche, etc. É tudo excelente.

A origem desta tese aberrante é compreensível. As gerações anteriores, defendendo ferozmente a família, costumavam desprezar quem vivia nessas alternativas. Isso é inaceitável, porque todos devem ser respeitados, qualquer que seja a sua opção. Mas uma coisa é respeitar as pessoas, outra é respeitar as opções. Aí surgiu o erro que gerou o actual tabu. Todos respeitamos e cuidamos dos doentes, mas ninguém acha que a doença é igual à saúde. Aliás, precisamente por estarem a sofrer, os doentes são ainda mais acarinhados que os demais, por viverem pior. As disfunções familiares são doenças sociais. Sem desprezar ou censurar os que as sofrem, deveriam ser acudidos e respeitados, trazendo-os à condição saudável.

Em vez disso assistimos a um delírio de argumentação que, partindo de um conceito distorcido de autonomia pessoal, exalta aquilo que traz infelicidade, miséria, desgraça. Porque, vale a pena lembrar, até em termos agregados são já visíveis os resultados desta atitude. Todos reconhecem que, naturalmente, a sociedade ocidental se encontra em decadência demográfica, política, social e moral. Porque defender a família é considerado conservador, e o contrário de conservador é destruidor.

Apesar disso as luminárias contemporâneas estão dispostos aos maiores malabarismos para sustentar o axioma de equivalência contra qualquer evidência. Trata--se de um tabu absoluto e indiscutível: cada um vive como quer e ninguém tem nada com isso. Hoje, discute-se e critica-se tudo, a todos os níveis, menos aquilo que na nossa vida é mais influente sobre todos.

Quando surgem as tragédias, inevitáveis em estilos de vida desviantes, aparecem logo alcateias de comentadores para assegurar que o sucedido nada tem a ver com a perversão ou a opção de género, porque coisas dessas acontecem em todo o lado. Como os cortesãos de Andersen, nem se dão conta do seu ridículo.

naohaalmocosgratis@fcee.ucp.pt