My Dear Friends,

The fight is on!

In California, two judges on a divided Ninth Circuit panel just decided to take away the right of 7 million California voters to determine their own state's constitution, correct an out-of-control state supreme court, and restore the public meaning of marriage as the union of one man and one woman.

What is the evidence these judges offer that Prop 8 violates our beloved federal Constitution?

In a decision that NOM co-founder Maggie Gallagher rightly called "ill-natured and illogical," the Ninth Circuit actually said that the evidence that the 7 million Californians who voted for marriage are irrational bigots who hate gay people is: Prop 8 didn't take away any practical benefits from same-sex couples.

That's right, because Californians decided to focus on protecting the idea and the ideal of marriage, without restricting gay people from doing things like seeing one another in the hospital—that is the proof that they were motivated by unreasoning hatred towards homosexuals.

Ill-natured, illogical, and, I, would add: totally illicit. These were two judges with no empathy for those who disagree with their own liberal values, with a predetermined agenda they wanted to enact, with no respect for the original text or meaning of the Constitution.

The 14th Amendment, put in place to correct the serious evil of slavery, is not a license to import into the federal Constitution any vision of "equality" invented by Harvard faculty and do an end run about basic principles of democracy.

As for the idea that marriage is and always has been a union of male and female for a reason—that these unions are different than any other kind because they make new life and connect children to their mother and father—what did the Ninth Circuit say about that?

These two biased judges rudely dismissed these core concerns by claiming no rational person could imagine that publicly redefining marriage could affect the public meaning of marriage, or the way the next generation thinks about marriage:

"Because under California statutory law, same-sex couples had all the rights of opposite-sex couples, regardless of their marital status, all parties agree that Proposition 8 had one effect only. It stripped same-sex couples of the ability they previously possessed to obtain from the State, or any other authorized party, an important right—the right to obtain and use the designation of 'marriage' to describe their relationships. Nothing more, nothing less.

"Proposition 8 therefore could not have been enacted to advance California's interests in childrearing or responsible procreation, for it had no effect on the rights of same sex couples to raise children or on the procreative practices of other couples. Nor did Proposition 8 have any effect on religious freedom or on parents' rights to control their children's education; it could not have been enacted to safeguard these liberties."

Really?

Courts threaten to take away the roadmap to marriage. Rewrite the institution's public meaning. Brand traditional ideas about marriage as uniting male and female in love so children can have mothers and fathers as irrational bigotry. The public schools will teach the government's newly redefined marriage ideas to your children and grandchildren.

Gee, how could any reasonable person committed to our marriage tradition believe such a radical redefinition of marriage could matter?

The Ninth Circuit's opinion striking down Prop 8 is government of the judges, by the judges, for the judges, and I promise you it will not stand.

Here I am debating one of the leading architects of the campaign to impose gay marriage by judicial tyranny, Evan Wolfson, on ABC 7 News:

Thanks to the hundreds of you who responded to our "money bomb" request to raise $100,000 for the defense of Prop 8. We helped get Prop 8 on the ballot. We helped form and fund the winning coalition that passed Prop 8. And we are going to see this fight through to the sweet victory at the end!

If you haven't yet had the chance, click here to help defend marriage, democracy and the rule of law!

Between now and the Supreme Court decision that will (or will not) impose gay marriage on all 50 states, there is an important election for president of the United States.

Three GOP candidates have not only responded to NOM's Marriage Pledge, they quickly spoke out against federal courts redefining marriage, and taking away the sovereignty of We the People:

Newt Gingrich said on Twitter, "Court of Appeals overturning CA's Prop 8 another example of an out of control judiciary. Let's end judicial supremacy."

Mitt Romney: "Today, unelected judges cast aside the will of the people of California who voted to protect traditional marriage. I believe marriage is between a man and a woman and, as president, I will protect traditional marriage and appoint judges who interpret the Constitution as it is written and not according to their own politics and prejudices."

And Rick Santorum on Facebook: "Today, activist judges in the 9th Circuit stripped away the rights of 7 million California voters by striking down Proposition 8. These judges inserted a right into our Constitution that isn't a right at all, but a privilege. The radical actions of the 9th Circuit underscore the need for a constitutional amendment which would define 'marriage' as between one man-one woman. Study after study shows that traditional marriage, as it has always been defined—one man and one woman—creates the best possible environment for our children. And strong families are a key part of a strong America.

"This issue is far too important to allow for 50 different definitions of marriage at the state level. And this issue should certainly not be decided by a few activist judges..."

(In our press release we also noted that Rick Santorum has been an early and staunch supporter of the National Organization for Marriage, signing fundraising letters for us, among other good deeds.)

We are very proud that the three leading candidates for the GOP nomination are all willing to speak up for marriage.

NOM is a cosponsor at CPAC (the Conservative Political Action Conference) this year, serving as a proud voice for marriage within the conservative movement as well as outside. Maggie is moderating a panel on the importance of uniting social and economic conservatives and NOM's new Chairman of the Board Prof. John Eastman will be speaking there too.

The battles continue: Washington state just passed a gay marriage law, weeks before they found the time to close a humongous budget gap. It will take a tough fight to get a referendum to the people. In New Jersey and Maryland, liberal legislators promise to impose gay marriage without a vote of the people.

In two states this year, the people will have a chance to pass state marriage amendments defining marriage as one man and one woman.

In New Hampshire, a vote to repeal same-sex marriage takes place soon.

The fight continues. The rewards for fighting the good fight are not supposed to be felt in this world.

But the chance to be your voice for your values is the benefit I most cherish in earthly terms—the chance to put my shoulder to the wheel, to work and to fight and to link arms with loving, decent, law-abiding Americans of every creed and color on behalf of something so important, and so good, as marriage. That's what no one can ever take away.

Thank you.

There's a profile of NOM's co-founder Maggie Gallagher in Salon by a New York Times columnist who favors same-sex marriage. He tries, but he can't make head or tail of Maggie's principled defense of marriage—or yours either!

At the end he reports being befuddled by Maggie Gallagher's strong and idealistic belief that gay marriage is not the future:

"I have no doubts who will win in the end," Gallagher says. "One hundred years from now the globe will not be full of societies that endorse same-sex unions as marriages. What happens between now and then is going to be less certain and full of struggle. In the long struggle, I'll bet on human nature to overwhelm ideology. The thing about same-sex marriage is it's based on a fundamental untruth: same-sex unions are not the same as opposite sex unions. They are not marriages."

Thank you for making this fight possible, with your prayers, with your words, with your financial sacrifices, with your friendship.

God bless you,

Brian S. Brown
President
National Organization for Marriage

P.S. Remember that we are fighting for the future of marriage! We will win, but we need your help to do it. Can you pledge $100 or $150 today for marriage? Or can you make a monthly donation of just $15? Every dollar makes a difference as we work to secure marriage for you, for your children, and for your children's children.

...I have no idea what the Supreme Court might do in the Perry case. But my own sense is that Judges Walker and Reinhardt are not quite as clever as some people seem to think. Or, at the very least, the reasoning of their opinions don’t really matter very much. First, I think it’s unlikely that the particular reasoning of either opinion will have a substantial influence on the Justices. The issues in Perry are extremely important, and they’re the kind of issues that force the Justices to fall back on first principles. The details of how the lower courts reached the results they reached matter a lot less in that kind of case than in an ordinary case. Consider how Judge Reinhardt dealt with Judge Walker’s extensive factual findings: He basically ignored them.

Second, to the extent the reasoning of the lower court decisions matter — which, as I said, I tend to doubt — the fact that both opinions are widely understood as advocacy briefs to Justice Kennedy from judges who are same-sex marriage supporters probably hurts the same-sex marriage cause more than helps it. The Justices aren’t dumb: They get it. And when they get the sense that the lower courts were crafting their opinions to try to maneuver a single Justice into a desired result in such a high profile case, that kind of heavy handedness runs a risk of backfiring. It creates a sort of patina of unreliability. I think a more clever strategy would have been to be more subtle: Create more of a sense of the opinions as routine legal opinions and less as advocacy briefs. And if you’re Reinhardt, make the opinion “per curiam” so it doesn’t come to the Court with your name on it.

..In short, Judge Reinhardt has cooked a dish intended to appeal especially to Justice Kennedy, the author of Romer. Since that decision, its six-justice majority has probably declined to just five, with the replacement of Sandra Day O’Connor by Samuel Alito. Kennedy’s own vote for same-sex marriage is therefore indispensable to the success of Reinhardt’s perfectly transparent agenda.

It is worth noting that Reinhardt says as little as possible about Lawrence v.Texas in 2003, a 5–4 ruling also authored by Justice Kennedy, which held on due process grounds that a state cannot prohibit homosexual sodomy. That is no doubt because Kennedy had flatly denied in Lawrence that a constitutional right to same-sex marriage was implied by the Court’s holding in that case. “No, Justice Kennedy,” Judge Reinhardt seems to say, “don’t look over there at Lawrence, look over here at Romer!”

Perhaps Judge Reinhardt thinks Justice Kennedy is a slightly addled puppet, who can be made to dance as one wishes if only the right string is pulled. But Justice Kennedy should find all this obvious targeting of himself to be deeply offensive. For Reinhardt’s assimilation of Perry to Romer is ably rebutted by the dissent of Judge N. Randy Smith, who notes that California’s Prop 8 has a much narrower reach than did Colorado’s Amendment 2.

A year after gay couples gained the option of civil unions in Illinois, some lawmakers are beginning a push to authorize same-sex marriages.

Three legislators filed what they call the “Religious Freedom and Marriage Fairness Act” on Wednesday. It would eliminate the part of state law that now explicitly prohibits gay marriages and would offer same-sex couples the marriage rights now exclusively available to heterosexual couples.

... Lawmakers might be hesitant to support the legislation in an election year, and the measure is likely to trigger strong opposition from conservative groups.

... The gay rights group Equality Illinois said that legalizing civil unions were a step forward, but remain a poor substitute for same-sex marriage.

“Separate is not equal,” said the group's CEO, Bernard Cherkasov. -- Chicago Tribune

Liberals sometimes feel that it is narrow-minded to favor traditional marriage. Over time, my reporting on poverty has led me to disagree: Solid marriages have a huge beneficial impact on the lives of the poor (more so than in the lives of the middle class, who have more cushion when things go wrong).

One study of low-income delinquent young men in Boston found that one of the factors that had the greatest impact in turning them away from crime was marrying women they cared about. As Steven Pinker notes in his recent book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature”: “The idea that young men are civilized by women and marriage may seem as corny as Kansas in August, but it has become a commonplace of modern criminology.” -- The New York Times

Mitt Romney made the following statement regarding the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision striking down Proposition 8 as unconstitutional:

“Today, unelected judges cast aside the will of the people of California who voted to protect traditional marriage. This decision does not end this fight, and I expect it to go to the Supreme Court. That prospect underscores the vital importance of this election and the movement to preserve our values. I believe marriage is between a man and a woman and, as president, I will protect traditional marriage and appoint judges who interpret the Constitution as it is written and not according to their own politics and prejudices.”

Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich ripped into a panel of federal judges that decided on Tuesday in a 2-1 decision on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that Proposition 8 -- a measure approved by California votes to recognize only traditional marriage in the Golden State -- was unconstitutional.

“With today’s decision on marriage by the 9th Circuit, and the likely appeal to the Supreme Court, more and more Americans are being exposed to the radical overreach of federal judges and their continued assault on the Judeo-Christian foundations of the United States,” Gingrich said in a statement released on Tuesday. “I was drawn back into public life by the 9th Circuit’s 2002 decision that held that the words ‘under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance were unconstitutional. Today’s decision is one more example that the American people cannot rest until we restore the proper rule of the judicial branch and bring judges and the courts back under the Constitution.

“The Constitution of the United States begins with ‘We the People’; it does not begin with ‘We the Judges.’ Federal judges need to take heed of that fact,” Gingrich continued. “Federal judges are substituting their own political views for the constitutional right of the people to make judgments about the definition of marriage."

Gingrich went on to compare the decision to the Dred Scott decision and to Roe v. Wade.

Republican Presidential candidate Rick Santorum made the following statement in response to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' ruling on Proposition 8 - the 2008 ballot initiative codifying the traditional definition of marriage as one-man and one-woman.

Rick Santorum said: "Today's decision by the 9th Circuit is another in a long line of radical activist rulings by this rogue circuit - and it is precisely why I have called for that circuit to be abolished and split up. Marriage is defined and has always been defined as 'one man and one woman.' We simply cannot allow 50 different definitions of marriage.

The people of California spoke clearly at the ballot box that they wanted marriage defined in the traditional manner of one man and one woman. And for a court, any court, to usurp the power and will of the people in this manner on an issue this fundamental to the foundation of our society is wrong.

We need to have a Judicial Branch that acts within its Constitutional bounds. We need to have a President that is willing to stand up to the Judiciary. We need to have a President who will fight to protect marriage once and for all with a federal marriage amendment. I am committed to being that President."

Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, joins the bishops of California in denouncing the February 7 decision of a federal court rejecting the constitutionality of Proposition 8, a voter-approvedinitiative in California that recognizes marriage as the union of one man and one woman.

“Today’s court ruling is a grave injustice, ignoring the reality that marriage is the union of one man and one woman,” Cardinal-designate Dolan said. “The Constitution of the United States most assuredly does not forbid the protection of the perennial meaning of marriage, one of the cornerstones of society. The people of California deserve better. Our nation deserves better. Marriage deserves better.”

...“Our society does not operate in an amoral or value-less vacuum,” said Bishop Salvatore Cordileone of Oakland, chairman of the Subcommittee for the Promotion and Defense of Marriage. “To flourish, it must be infused with moral direction that is grounded in the truth. Of course, the true meaning of marriage, like the gift of human life, is ultimately not subject to a vote or court ruling. But in California, as in every other state where marriage has been put to a vote, the people justly upheld the truth of marriage. How tragic for California, for the nation, and especially for children, that this correctly-informed judgment has now been set aside.”

Marriage, we have just learned, is a major cause of the growing great divide among American upper and lower classes.

Last week, in advance of National Marriage Week USA (Feb. 7-14), I took note of fresh news about marriage that should make every American stand up in alert attention.

In mid-January, the Pew Research Center told us 72% of all adults ages 18 and older were married in 1960; but today just 51% are—a record low.

... Research is overwhelming on the fact that this disadvantages children on an enormous scale—think increased teen pregnancies, increased prison populations, and children who grow up with no modeling for how to attain healthy marriage in the next generation.

So what can be done? New York Times columnist David Brooks, who cites “Coming Apart” as probably the most important book of the year, calls for a two-year mandatory national service program to teach responsible behaviors. (Murray cites a loss of the four core American values—marriage, honesty, industrious, and religion—as all contributing to the growing economic woes of the working class.)

Brad Wilcox, head of the National Marriage Project, calls for creators of film and television to promote the values by which the elite live, but because they are stuck in the grips of nonjudgmentalism, do not promote the values of marriage, hard work, obeying the law, and faith as the path to human flourishing.

In these economically challenging times, we must commit ourselves to lowering the high cost of retreat from marriage.

... This is why caring leaders are creating a new national observance designed to strengthen and support marriages, called National Marriage Week USA to be observed from February 7 to 14 each year.

If you are fortunate enough to be in a marriage, I encourage you to take care of it.

Whether you are married or not, Americans should be supportive of promoting marriage prior to childbearing and the strengthening of marriage at all socio-economic levels.

Nothing short of the future of our country, and our way of life, depends on it.

Adults nationwide overwhelmingly believe that it is important for children to grow up in a home with both parents and feel those children have an advantage over those who grow up in a single-parent home.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 95% say it is at least somewhat important for children to grow up in a home with both parents. This finding includes 73% who see this as Very Important.

Americans believe overwhelmingly in the importance of marriage, and a sizable number continue to feel it’s too easy to get a divorce in this country.

Seventy-eight percent (78%) of American Adults rate the institution of marriage as at least somewhat important to U.S. society, and that includes 60% who consider it Very Important. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that only 17% don’t believe marriage is a very important institution, with three percent (3%) who say it’s Not At All Important.

... This ruling [by the 9th Circuit] effectively says that any attempt by the people of California to check their state courts’ liberal activism violates the United States Constitution. That proposition is not only legally laughable but is constitutionally backwards and may be the most serious attack on self government since the era of poll taxes and literacy tests. They have not only disenfranchised those who are poor or Black, they have effectively disenfranchised an entire state’s citizenry.

Here’s how the one-way ratchet works in today’s opinion. Once a state has changed its law to allow same-sex marriage, then changing the law back becomes a “distinct constitutional violation” by “strip[ping] same-sex couples of the right to have their committed relationship recognized by the State with the designation of ‘marriage,’ which the state constitution had previously guaranteed them.” For the Ninth Circuit it didn’t matter whether same-sex marriage was the law in California for an hour, a day, or a year. It didn’t matter whether it was legalized via judicial fiat rather than legislatively or by a referendum of the people. It didn’t matter that the California Supreme Court acknowledged that the right itself was novel. Once there, it never can be eliminated. Not by the California Supreme Court reconsidering its own discovery of the right. Certainly not by the California legislature. And now not even by the people amending their own state constitution.

... In the bizarro world of the Ninth Circuit, marriage is at once nothing and everything. The unelected California Supreme Court can singlehandedly invent new constitutional rights, but the people cannot use the proper amendment procedures to amend that same constitution to restore its original meaning.

Washington state lawmakers voted to approve gay marriage Wednesday, setting the stage for the state to become the seventh in the nation to allow same-sex couples.

The action comes a day after a federal appeals court declared California's ban on gay marriage unconstitutional, saying it was a violation of the civil rights of gay and lesbian couples.

The Washington House passed the bill on a 55-43 vote. The state Senate approved the measure last week. And Democratic Gov. Chris Gregoire is expected to sign the measure into law next week.

Democratic Rep. Jamie Pedersen, a gay lawmaker from Seattle who has sponsored gay rights bills in the House for several years, said that while he and his partner are grateful for the rights that exist under the state's current domestic partnership law, "domestic partnership is a pale and inadequate substitute for marriage."

He says the question here is "The right of the people to decide for themselves a very fundamental policy question about whether we're going to continue to have an institution of marriage that is rooted in biology with a purpose of procreation as it always has been or whether we're going to allow the courts to mandate a dramatic altercation of that institution with potentially devastating consequences to society. So it's the right of the voters of the state of California to have their judgement about the basic policy in question here affirmed."