Marriage & Family
Three high-profile bills go before their Rhode Island House of Representatives committees this week, 1) the bill, referred to the Labor Committee to be heard today, that would make the provisions of former Governor Carcieri’s executive order on illegal immigration into law, and 2 and 3) bills, referred to the Judiciary Committee to be heard…
It’s fascinating to hear people who wish to radically alter the law and culture by any means necessary and silence their opposition attempt to explain why the other side is the home of oppression and closed mindedness. One specimen of the genre, oddly not apparently online, comes courtesy David Adams Murphy. After introducing his subject…
A recent article (apparently not online) in The Rhode Island Catholic summarized same-sex marriage legislation introduced to the General Assembly as follows: Both Chafee and House Speaker Gordon Fox support allowing same-sex couples to marry. Last Thursday, Rep. Arthur Handy and Sen. Rhoda Perry filed bills that would recognize “civil marriage” between same gender individuals,…
Pankaj Ahire, of Charlestown, uses extremely condemnatory language, laying the potential death of his same-sex partner at the foot of RI Roman Catholic Bishop Thomas Tobin: The lack of marriage equality implies that my excellent health and dental insurance does not cover my partner. Unfortunately, my partner has had health issues, and could not go…
One of the more amorphous aspects of the Catholic Church that persuades me of the wisdom of its approach to conceptualizing life is that it eschews easy answers to thorny problems. (That doesn’t mean, of course, that individual Catholics or even broad movements of them don’t from time to time slip into human habits.) Bishop…
Jonah Goldberg makes an interesting point about the particular victories of America’s homosexual movement: … Watch ABC’s Modern Family. The sitcom is supposed to be “subversive” in part because it features a gay couple with an adopted daughter from Asia. And you can see why both liberal proponents and conservative opponents of gay marriage see…
Advocates or same-sex marriage do everything they can to paint supporters of traditional marriage as motivated by animus and hatred. They strive to obscure the very basic difference between biological pairs that, by their nature, can create children and those that cannot. It’s all too easy, under that fire, to back into a small range…
A comment that Mangeek left to a recent post on marriage and polygamy merits thought and response: I’m having a really hard time seeing what’s so bad about polygamy that it needs to be prohibited. I’m guessing that even if gay marriage and polygamy were allowed, the vast majority of people will still choose the…
What’s the famous H.L. Menken quotation? “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” I suspect that’s going to be the unofficial slogan of the Linc Chafee years in Rhode Island. It came to mind when the Department of Revenue found that Chafee’s…
This entry to a recent First Things “While We’re at It” column contains a familiar intellectual construction: … The British Columbia Supreme Court will consider the legality of the province’s laws after two members of a Mormon community in Bountiful, British Columbia, were charged with polygamy. The case will center primarily on religious freedom, but…