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ADF attorneys filed friend-of-the-court briefs in August explaining to R.I. high court that divorce is not legally possible for non-marital relationships

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — In a case involving two women seeking to “divorce” one another, the Supreme Court of Rhode Island ruled Friday that the term “marriage,” according to state law, means a union between one man and one woman.  Therefore, the lower state court did not have the authority to consider a petition for a same-sex “divorce.”

“Marriage has always been one man and one woman in Rhode Island.  Everything else is counterfeit.  The Supreme Court of Rhode Island ruled correctly,” said Alliance Defense Fund Senior Legal Counsel Austin R. Nimocks.  In August, ADF attorneys filed three friend-of-the-court briefs explaining that divorce is not legally possible for non-marital relationships (www.telladf.org/news/story.aspx?cid=4197).

The two women in the case, Margaret Chambers and Cassandra Ormiston, both residents of Rhode Island, traveled across the state to Massachusetts in May 2004 and obtained a “marriage” license there.  The couple subsequently petitioned the Rhode Island courts for a “divorce.”

The Supreme Court of Rhode Island expressed in its ruling, “The role of the judicial branch is not to make policy, but simply to determine the legislative intent as expressed in the statues enacted by the General Assembly.”

“Not only is today’s ruling a victory for marriage, it’s also a tremendous step forward against judicial activism,” said Nimocks.  “Rhode Island’s highest court acknowledged that it is the role of the legislature, and not the judiciary, to establish public policy.”

A full copy of the ruling issued by the Supreme Court of Rhode Island in the case Chambers v. Ormiston can be read at www.telladf.org/UserDocs/ChambersRuling.pdf.

ADF is a legal alliance defending the right to hear and speak the Truth through strategy, training, funding, and litigation.

www.telladf.org              www.domawatch.org

By Jim Kouri

"I shudder to think how millions of California children will be led astray, how marriage will be destroyed, and how immorality will step on the neck of morality if Arnold Schwarzenegger signs five anti-family bills into law. The ‘Terminator’ has less than two weeks to sign or veto very bad bills!" said Randy Thomasson, president of Campaign for Children and Families.

Thomasson is disappointed with California’s Christian pastors and elders. In the last five days, many individuals and several businesses have responded to CCF’s action alert. However, to date, only one church has faxed in veto letters to the liberal Schwarzenegger’s office in Sacramento.

"This is not right, since the majority of pastors in California oppose sexual indoctrination of schoolchildren (SB 777 and AB 394), oppose demeaning marriage (AB 43 and AB 102), and oppose forcing the homosexual-bisexual-transsexual agenda on businesses, organizations, and churches (AB 14)," said Thomasson.

"Distracted drivers cause car accidents; distracted pastors may accidentally assist anti-family bills to be signed into law. The Governor will notice our loud voice or our relative silence. The choice is [ours]," he added.

California’s leading pro-family organizations are urging Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to veto five bills they believe will harm children, marriage, and religious freedom that are on his desk. And the Governor is taking notice — he’s listed the five bills as among a dozen pieces of legislation upon which telephone callers to his State Capitol office can "vote."

Campaign for Children and Families (CCF), Capitol Resource Institute, California Family Council, and Traditional Values Coalition are all urging vetoes of two school sexual indoctrination bills (SB 777 and AB 394), two marriage-demeaning bills (AB 102 and AB 43), and a bill that forces homosexuality, bisexuality, and transsexuality upon businesses, churches, and nonprofit member organizations such as the Boy Scouts (AB 14).

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by Thomas E. Brewton

Why is preservation of traditional marriage, between a man and a woman, vital to preservation of a good political society?

Malachi, a prophet who probably ministered in the 60 years after the first groups of Israelites returned to Jerusalem from Babylon, gives us God's Word on the subject.

Having endured the Babylonian captivity for 70 sears, few of the returning Israelites had ever experienced the proper religious life of the pre-captivity period. Moreover, the Jerusalem to which they returned was a desolate ruin that had been destroyed and plundered by Judah's enemies.

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Washington, D.C. - Family Research Council (FRC) President Tony Perkins released the following statement in response to a ruling by the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts which found that the Massachusetts legislature violated the state constitution by refusing a vote on a constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union between one man and one woman:

"The court is hypocritical in this decision. Three years ago, the court created this conflict by imposing same-sex marriage. It's time the people were given a voice now that both the court and the legislature has trampled upon 5000 years of human history and the nation's oldest state constitution.

"In Massachusetts, we have lawmakers who are so under the sway of the homosexual activists that they refuse to carry out their duty under the state constitution. It is not going too far to conclude that the citizens of Massachusetts no longer live in a democracy; rather they live in an oligarchy where their elected representatives flaunt the constitution at will.

"There is only one day left in the legislature's session this year. No legislator in Massachusetts can pretend that they are not constitutionally obligated to vote on this provision - the court's decision made that clear."

by Carey Roberts

I wish I had a dime in my pocket for every time I heard a Republican politician stand up and proclaim his support for "family values."

When we survey the current state of the family, we see that Americans are half as likely to wed compared to a generation ago, mostly due to a growing shortage of marriage-minded men. [www.therealitycheck.org/StaffWriter/croberts112906.htm]

How did all this happen?

Over the past 40 years, the Sisters of Spinsterhood have cranked out the message that men are not needed or wanted. That message was eventually translated into a broad range of anti-family laws and policies.

First, Great Society programs forced poor women to choose between a husband and a handout. Then divorce courts routinely took children away from their fathers. No-fault divorce laws meant mom could dispose of dad and claim the kids as ransom money.

Next came the 1994 Violence Against Women Act that became a nightmare of false allegations and household evictions. The final blow was draconian enforcement by child support programs that began to stick low-income fathers in debtor’s prisons if they couldn’t pay.

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by Carey Roberts

Am I the only one who is worried about the collapse of the traditional American family right before our very eyes?

Census Bureau bureaucrats are not in the habit of making apocalyptic pronouncements, but last year Mark Mather reported that the "dramatic decline" in the married population is "one of the biggest demographic stories of the past several decades." Now, married couples now account for a minority 49.7% to be exact – of all U.S. households.

The cause of this extraordinary demographic shift is two-fold. First, Americans are getting married only half as often as we used to. Second since 1960, the share of divorced Americans rose from 2% to 10%.

African-American communities have been especially hard-hit. In 1960 four-fifths of all Black families had fathers and mothers at home. Three decades later, that number had plummeted to 38%.

As a result of the decline of marriage, illegitimacy is on the upswing. Just last week the National Center for Health Statistics announced that almost four in 10 babies were born out-of-wedlock in 2005.

All this is very bad news for kids, since children raised only by mothers are more likely to be poor, suffer from a host of behavioral and academic problems, and get in trouble with the law.

For sure, the great majority of young women say they plan to get married and have kids some day. So why has Cosmo replaced Bride magazine in the supermarket check-out lines?

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by Robert E. Meyer

We had a Marriage Amendment referendum in Wisconsin this November, as they did in several other states. I have to admit that for a while I was pretty concerned that the outcome of the vote was in doubt.

Last spring, I was having breakfast with a man who has been very influential in my life over the past several years. I complained to him about the indifference and complacency that I noticed on the marriage issue. At that time, I saw Letters to the Editor every week arguing for voting "no" on the amendment referendum. I saw very few rebuttals. It would be more than generous to say the arguments against the amendment were very specious, but they were cleverly presented to appeal to the emotions, and dupe anyone who was not doing their own independent research.

In Wisconsin, as well as seven of the eight states with binding referendums on marriage, the amendments passed, taking the question of the legal composition of marriage out of the hands of judges.

After the vote, editorial sections of regional newspapers I read, were teeming with sour-grape diatribes by those who had voted against the Marriage Amendment. They spent their editorial capital either ridiculing the ethic, or trying to shame the "backward majority" who had voted for the amendment.

One such letter was composed by a man in his late twenties, who took a futuristic approach in his effort to scold "narrow-minded" readers.

He imagined that it was the year 2056, and that he was an incontinent senior citizen, who was trying to get someone to change his soiled diaper. He reminded the current generation alive then, that though the state of Wisconsin had passed an amendment legally sanctioning only traditional marriage, he was one of the "enlightened" progressives who didn't vote with the rest of the ignorant yokels.

I responded to him in my own Letter to the Editor as such…

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“The recent shootings in schools across the nation should be a major wake-up call for educators and parents,” says Finn Laursen, Executive Director of Christian Educators Association International (CEAI).

“The latest killings of the young girls in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where a gunman held students hostage and later killed them execution style, reinforces that our children are not totally safe anywhere,” says Laursen.

“This outrageous attack on innocent children did not take place in the inner city or in an affluent suburban community, but in a setting most of us considered safe: within the non-violent, isolated Amish community that separates its children from the modern world, in what was believed to be a totally safe one room Amish school house.

The Amish community has responded to an evil, ungodly act in a Godly fashion. They offered forgiveness at the onset and asked the rest of the nation for valued support in prayer."

“Through our national network of Christian educators, most of who are in public schools, I am encouraging CEAI members and friends to do the same, to pray for all those touched by this latest tragedy,” says Laursen.

“I believe the unfathomable killing of innocent little girls in Lancaster is a wakeup call to which we in the Body of Christ need to respond proactively. Since over 50 million children reporting to schools across the nation daily are at risk of future acts of violence, we need to act now to protect our children."

“First, we have a responsibility to make sure our local schools have in place a well-developed and rehearsed Crisis Response Plan. Second, we need to make sure we cover our schools and school children with prayer on a daily basis. Our schools, both public and private, are just that, our schools. We Christians need to take an active role in both the physical and spiritual realm to assure our children’s safety,” says Laursen.

CEAI’s mission is to serve the educational community by encouraging, equipping and empowering Christian educators in public and private education. CEAI is committed to offer resources and support for those willing and called to take an active leadership role in their schooling community in such a time as this. Those resources and contact information are available on their website at http://www.ceai.org/.

How does gay marriage undermine the social function marriage serves?   The author of “The Real Danger of Same-Sex Marriage,” Stephen Baskerville, traces the answer to the destruction of heterosexual marriage.  The article appears in the latest edition of The Family in America (Volume 20, Issue 5/6), a monthly periodical edited by Allan Carlson and covering family issues since 1987.

Taking a fresh look at the gay-marriage debate, “The Real Danger of Same-Sex Marriage” concisely traces the destruction of marriage and parent-child relations through the history of American family law.  Revealing the dangerous intermingling of state and private affairs, the essay details numerous cases where government agencies have stripped children from the arms of loving parents under the guise of unsubstantiated child abuse allegations and involuntary divorce trials.  Consequently, parents’ once absolute right to parenthood is stripped from their hands and marriage is reduced to a formality.

Marriage’s primary purposes are for procreation and the rearing of children.  Due to the sterile nature of homosexual unions, the issue of gay adoption is closely tied to gay marriage.  This radical innovation shifts marriage’s focus from providing for the needs of children to securing the rights of adults to marry.  It also means creating families which must raise someone else’s children.  The author thus concludes, “It is parents—not gay parents, but parents generally—who are being besieged by an increasingly repressive state apparatus and denied basic due process protection.”  

Click to read more …

According to today’s Sacramento Bee, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has promised to veto SB 1437, one of three transsexual-bisexual-homosexual “education” bills in the California Legislature. 

The newspaper, which contacted Campaign for Children and Families for response late Wednesday, wrote in Thursday’s edition that, according to the Governor’s communications office, Arnold Schwarzenegger will veto SB 1437 if it reaches his desk.

“We’re very pleased that Schwarzenegger is listening to the concerns of parents,” said Randy Thomasson, president of Campaign for Children and Families (CCF), a leading California-based pro-family organization that strongly opposes SB 1437. “Now the Governor needs to pledge to veto the two remaining sexual indoctrination bills, AB 606 and AB 1056. Parents and grandparents are demanding it.”

All three bills rely upon the strange definition of “gender” in Penal Code, Section 422.56, reading: “Gender” means sex, and includes a person's gender identity and gender related appearance and behavior whether or not stereotypically associated with the person's assigned sex at birth. 

“This terrible trio of bills would promote cross-dressing and sex-change operations to children as young as kindergarten,” said Thomasson. “Schools should be about academics, not about promoting alternative sexual lifestyles to impressionable schoolchildren.”

SB 1437 would prohibit textbooks, instructional materials, and school-sponsored activities from “reflecting adversely” on trans-sexuality, bisexuality, or homosexuality; it requires positive portrayals of these sexual lifestyles in curriculum in all grades in all public schools. Consequently, schools would have to promote “same-sex marriages” and even sex-change procedures. STATUS: Assembly Education Committee, no hearing scheduled.

AB 606 would authorize the California Superintendent of Public Instruction to arbitrarily withhold state funds (around 2/3rds of a school district’s budget) from any district that does not adequately promote trans-sexuality, bisexuality, or homosexuality in its school policies. AB 606 repeals the current state law prohibiting transsexual, bisexual, and homosexual curriculum from being forced upon local schools, and authorizes the state Superintendent to develop new curriculum that affirms trans-sexuality, bisexuality, and homosexuality in all its forms. STATUS: June 21 hearing scheduled in the Senate Education Committee.

AB 1056 would spend $250,000 in taxpayer dollars to promote transsexual, bisexual, and homosexual lifestyles under the banner of “tolerance education." STATUS: On “suspense” file in Senate Education Committee.

For comprehensive analysis of SB 1437, AB 606 and AB 1056, visit http://www.savecalifornia.com.