Tag: gay marriage

A number of Republican presidential candidates are raising money for family policy councils, state-based religious-right groups affiliated with the Family Research Council, a group that the Southern Poverty Law Center says is an anti-gay hate group.

The White House announced this week that President Barack Obama was throwing his support behind legislation which would effectively kill the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

State establishment political progressives, including the staff at gay rights group OneColorado, seem cool on Aurora college student Mark Olmstead's plan to introduce a 2012 ballot initiative that would overturn the state's gay marriage ban. There's a sense that financial and human resources would be better spent pressing lawmakers to pass legislation securing equal rights for LGBT citizens here. Lone actor Olmstead's initiative, however, might force the issue, drawing on the energy of New York's big gay-marriage win this month and on the sea change shift among the U.S. population generally on the matter of gay equality.

Lambda Legal, a New York-based organization committed to winning gay civil rights through the courts, announced in a press release Tuesday that it would challenge New Jersey's 2006 same sex civil unions law for failing to bring full equality to gay residents of the state. Lambda, which is teaming with New Jersey LGBT group Garden State Equality, will refer to government studies and press investigations that document the way employers have failed to recognize couples entered into a civil union and how civil unions have been ignored or misunderstood by authorities, often in instances involving critical medical decisions.

Despite the National Organization for Marriage declaring preemptive victory Wednesday, the battle over legalizing same-sex marriage wages on in New York, with many indicators pointing to a vote any minute now. New York’s 2011 legislative session had been originally scheduled to end on Monday, but as The Washington Post reports, negotiations continue over the wording of religious exemptions within the bill.

At its June meeting last week, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops announced it was ramping up a campaign against same-sex marriage. Bishop Salvatore J. Cordileone of the Subcommittee for the Defense of Marriage said the Roman Catholic church would push back in the war of “language,” which he said same-sex marriage proponents were winning with words like “hate” and “equality.” The church is planning a video campaign in both English and Spanish, and its efforts have already been felt in states like Minnesota where the church was successful in getting an anti-gay marriage amendment on the ballot.

Republican New York Senator James Alesi told rally-goers at the New York State Capitol that he is committed to passing same-sex marriage into law this session. A bill being pushed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo to legalize gay marriage passed the New York assembly last week and awaits a vote in the Senate, where it currently needs to pick up one more vote before passing.

Faced with the prospect that New York lawmakers will make gay marriage the law there this week, Christian organizations are touting new polling data that runs counter to data brought out in waves by major nationally respected firms such as Gallup over the last two years showing fast-expanding support among the U.S. population in favor of extending marriage rights to the millions of gay Americans.

In New York state, the legislature is poised to pass same-sex marriage and would become the third state to do so legislatively, following Vermont and New Hampshire. Republican donors are backing the effort, and its up to GOP legislators to pass the bill; several Republicans have come out in support, though the vote remains close. Nationally, Republican support for gay marriage has been on the rise, made clear this year as various states grapple with efforts to ban gay marriage while others move to legalize it. In several states, GOP leaders’ votes made the difference on key LGBT equality measures.

Maggie Gallagher of the National Organization for Marriage was recently a guest on the radio program Religion, Politics, and the Culture to talk about her organization’s strategy to prevent states from legalizing same-sex marriage and to pass anti-gay marriage amendments in states that don’t already have them.