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News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyMay 15th, 2008
Maggie Gallagher, President of the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy and Board Member of the Marriage Law Foundation, likes to present herself as thoughtful and reasoned. She likes to dance along the edge of deception, implying rather than declaring that which is not accurate.
But the decision of the California Supreme Court seems to have thrown her enough that her innate dishonesty has shown through. Gallagher released a statement saying the following:
“California’s supreme court has just ruled that the 62 percent of Californians who voted for marriage as the union of husband and wife are just bigots. But thanks to the 1.1 million Californians who signed petitions to get a constitutional amendment on the ballot this November, activist judges will not have the last word in California, California voters will,” said Maggie Gallagher, President of the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy.
The problem is that the court said nothing of the sort.
Many of those Californians who voted in favor of Proposition 22 did not do so out of anti-gay animus. We have long acknowledged that there are reasons other than bigotry for persons to be uncomfortable with marriage equality. All the court said was that such reasons are not a compelling state interest for purposes of the equal protection clause.
Further, Gallagher knows full well that the California Supreme Court is not a collection of “activist judges“. The court would be best described as cautiously conservative.
Why then would Gallagher say these untruthful things?
I believe it is because she has invested so much time and energy in opposing equal rights for gay citizens that she would rather try and sway public opinion than tell the truth. It is sad that many of those, including Gallaher, who most loudly claim the authority of morality, have so little personal integrity.
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a. mcewen
May 15th, 2008
I’m not saying this to say “I told you so,” but on the last post regarding Gallagher, I did say that the same argument she dredged up about the ruling in California exists in all of her writings regarding marriage equality:
“Judges and politicians like that imply that the 60 percent of black Americans and 60 percent of white Americans in a November Pew poll who say they oppose gay marriage must be motivated by ‘animus.’ Translation? You’re a bigot.â€
Bruce Garrett
May 15th, 2008
Why then would Gallagher say these untruthful things?
Hate. Hold it in your heart long enough, and eventually it eats everything in it that was ever you. The Enemy is all there is, and the war all that ever was. The world is that which is with you, and that which is against you. No weapon is too contemptible, no virtue more noble. You become the weapon, and the only morality a weapon has is whatever the hand that holds it has. Hate. Hate.
I expect we’ll be seeing a lot of it in the coming weeks.
Phil
May 21st, 2008
Well, Maggie brought the word “bigot” into it, by saying that the people who opposed mixed-race marriages in the early half of the century were bigots (because their moral beliefs were wrong) and Maggie and her ilk are not bigots (because their moral beliefs are right.)
She doesn’t really provide a way to distinguish bigots from non-bigots, except to repeat two fallacies:
1.) The majority of a population cannot be bigoted.
and
2.) People motivated by religious beliefs cannot be bigoted.
It’s true that she likes to present herself as thoughtful and reasoned. I felt she lost all credibility when it was discovered that she had been covertly paid to promote the Bush administration’s marriage agenda, a fact which she did not immediately disclose in the many columns she wrote on the subject.
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