Over the Rainbow: - Wrestling With Angels

marriage’s ‘customary forms’: marriage as between a man and a woman; marriage as between
two people; and marriage as connected to sexuality and procreation. Evan Wolfson, the
executive director of Freedom to Marry, a group advocating for gay marriage, argues for human
dignity and equality. He offers a definition of marriage as: “a loving union between two people
who enter into a relationship of emotional and financial commitment and interdependence.”
He calls the campaign for marriage “conservatively subversive” and involved in “the legal
freeing of individuals and society from marriage’s customary forms” Many intellectuals and
activists seek to deinstitutionalize marriage and weaken its public influence as an important
step to larger goals. Ellen Willis, a professor at New York University, foresees other changes.
“For starters, if homosexual marriage is OK, why not group marriage.” (Blankenhorn,2007:130-137).
BACKLASH to Same Sex Marriage
David Blankenhorn , a family scholar and researcher who focused his career on the
importance of fatherhood in society, is the founder and president of the Institute for
American Values, an academic think tank dealing with the importance of families. In his book
The Future of Marriage he challenges the movement toward gay marriage. He writes,
“marriage is fundamentally about the needs of children. And in thinking and writing about it for
nearly two decades, I have come to believe one thing with more certainty than anything else:
What children need most are mothers and fathers. Not caregivers. Not parent-like adults. Not
even ‘parents’. What a child wants and needs more than anything else are the mother and the
father who together made the child, who love the child, and who love each other…Redefining
marriage to include gay and lesbian couples would eliminate entirely in law, and weaken still
further in culture, the basic idea of a mother and a father for every child.” Once this proposed
reform became law, even to say the words out loud in public – “Every child needs a father and a
mother” – would probably be viewed as explicitly divisive and discriminatory, possibly even as
hate speech” (Blankenhorn, 2007;2-3).
In November of 2009 the National Organization for Marriage under the leadership of Rick
Santorum and Maggie Gallagher invited the American people to join the Two Million for
Marriage Campaign to tell Congress: “Enough, Don’t Mess With Marriage!” The concern
focused on a bill introduced by Congressman Jerrold Nadler to repeal the Defense of Marriage
Act (DOMA), the law protecting state laws defining marriage as the union of a husband and
wife. Santorum notes, ”If we don’t act today, President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and others in
Congress will succeed in their efforts to repeal DOMA, an effort which the White House has
already noted is one of its highest “civil rights” priorities.” … The overwhelming majority of
Americans, and even most courts have rejected that view. And just a few months ago, 70
percent of African Americans voted to protect marriage as one man and one woman in
Over the Rainbow: The Gay Battle for Social Reorganization of America. 2010
Dr. M. L. Coppock
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