Exodus membership director Randy Thomas planned to speak to Denver exgay ministry Where Grace Abounds on Sept. 1.
Thomas also was to meet with an unidentified friend in Colorado Springs, someone likely affiliated with Focus on the Family.
Earlier in August, Thomas worked with the antigay New Jersey Family Policy Council and other antigay groups on unidentified initiatives to undermine the rights of gay couples — obstructing marriage and monogamous partnership under the guise, of course, of emphasizing the “importance of marriage.”
Oh please Mike you’re being paranoid assuming this “friend” is someone affiliated with Focus.
I have an opinion I’m wrestling with and consulting with a lawyer advocate over the marriage issue.
There’s more to it than just the 14th Amendment, because the anti marriage folks keep insisting on pre Constitutional and cultural origins.
There’s this one note aspect to their protest. It has gotten down to ‘tradition’ as reason enough or that marriage isn’t a right.
Well, okay-easy for someone with the option to say.
How’s about these arguments?
1. If one doesn’t agree that marriage is a right, it’s definitely a freedom. And a ‘tradition’ has even less rights or freedom than a flesh and blood human being.
2. Having said that: human beings in our current laws do not have their marriages founded on intention, and competence: but situational status.
3. Marriage is a situation, not the substance of the individuals who are actually married. Marriage success or failure is not obligated, nor protected by a government, but individuals.
A government that interferes with the free access and protections of an institution ‘protected’ by the government cannot exclude a human individual otherwise meeting the legal situation based on their physical, mental or emotional aspect, if it’s not excluded legally from other people.
Which brings me back to the other point:
the government is not protecting or defending marriage or the substance of it.
Just the singular semantic meaning of the word
‘tradition’. Which has not been unmovable in the context of egality and practicality.
If I wanted to simplify the argument, could it be brought down to the terms of humanity and fairness as the reality and substance of gay couples and parents as obligated citizens dictates, not what traditions and theories have?
Is this more critical to the equality ethic?
The ethics of equality has precedent and legacy that can be reviewed.
Those trying to divorce the married gay couples in MA are finding less support to do it.
The novelty of those thousands of couples so visible at the beginning have faded.
The substance of marriage and it’s realities are revealed by common, every day folks in MA.
It’s already pretty heartless to not allow marriage between gay couples now…it’s even more so to divorce a couple involuntarily.