As MOJ readers know, the Republican Party has stood proudly in opposition to same-sex marriage--more precisely, in opposition to admitting same-sex couples to civil marriage. So this development, reported in today's NYT, is quite interesting:
When the Rhode Island State Senate tallied up the votes against a same-sex marriage bill passed there on Wednesday, something was missing: Republicans.
All five of the chamber’s Republican lawmakers had voted for the bill,
stunning opponents and sending the measure to the governor’s desk and
almost-certain victory next week.
The vote reflected not only the rapidly shifting tides of public opinion
on same-sex marriage, but also the influence of a new Republican
advocacy group called the American Unity Fund, which spent weeks helping
the state’s gay rights organization cultivate Republican senators.
Now the group is preparing a major push in Washington and in state capitals intended to reshape the Republican Party,
by building support for same-sex marriage and bolstering its acceptance
among candidates and party activists around the country.
Founded and financed by some of the country’s leading Republican
fund-raisers and strategists, the fund expects to raise up to $7 million
this year, officials said. The fund’s organizers include Paul E. Singer
and Clifford S. Asness, libertarian-leaning New York investors; David
Herro, a prominent Chicago money manager; and Seth Klarman, a
billionaire Boston philanthropist and hedge fund manager.
“The concept of gay unions fits very well within our framework of
individual liberty and our belief that strong families make for a
stronger society,” Mr. Singer said in an e-mail. “The institution of
marriage is in very bad shape in this country, yet gay and lesbian
couples want very much to be a part of it, to live as committed husbands
and wives with their children in traditional family units. This should
be what we want as conservatives, for people to cherish and respect this
model and to want it for themselves.”
The fund is one of several advocacy organizations backed by wealthy
Republicans and business leaders to shift their party’s stance in recent
months on issues like immigration
and same-sex marriage. And the new effort traces a rift between
Republican elites and grass-roots voters over a handful of hot-button
social issues that one group views as handcuffing the party and the
other sees as essential to its identity.
You can read the rest here. Of course, and as the article reports, this development is not without its critics, of whom there are many--including, no doubt, some of you.
Another veteran Vatican figure has signaled openness to civil
recognition of same-sex unions in the wake of similar comments in early
February from the Vatican's top official on the family. It's a position
also once reportedly seen with favor by the future pope while he was
still Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
The latest expression of support for civil recognition as an
alternative to gay marriage comes from Archbishop Piero Marini, who
served for 18 years as Pope John Paul II's liturgical master of
ceremonies.
"There are many couples that suffer because their civil rights aren't recognized," Marini said.
Marini, now 71, is currently the president of the Pontifical
Committee for International Eucharistic Congresses. He spoke in an
interview with the newspaper La Nación in Costa Rica, where the local church wrapped up a Eucharistic congress Sunday.
No journalist's coverage of the Vatican is better than--indeed, none is as good as, I think--John Allen's superb coverage. Allen has a wonderfully informative and throughtful article here. Many MOJ readers will be quite interested.
University of St. Thomas law professor Charles Reid has a thoughtful commentary on the phenomenon at ReligiousLeftLaw, here. I think many MOJ readers will be interested.
... and Gerry Bradley, in a 1995 debate with Stephen Macedo. Long time MOJ readers will remember that Eduardo, formerly a Cornell law prof, now a University of Chicago law prof, was a MOJ blogger. Here is Eduardo's comment, at dotCommonweal.
Northwestern law prof Andy Koppelman reviews, in the new issue of Commonweal, the book What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense, by Sherif Girgis, Ryan Anderson, and Robert P. George. The book is the basis of an amicus curiae brief that Robert George et al. have submitted to SCOTUS in the two "gay marriage" cases being argued before SCOTUS this week. Read Andy's review and see whether you agree with his evaluation of the book, which ends with this:
"That claim’s most fundamental difficulty is
the short distance from premise to conclusion. The union of the married
heterosexual couple is uniquely good because...well, because the union
of the married heterosexual couple is uniquely good. This raw intuition
comes decorated with a complex theoretical apparatus, but that apparatus
does no work. It’s like one of those old trick math problems, which at
first glance seems to require complex computations:
7 + 8,398.14 × B ÷ √55 - 8,398.14 × √55 ÷ B = ?
Look again, and it’s clear that all the complexity cancels itself out, and that you end up right back where you began.
The publication of What Is Marriage?
is a public service. It advances understanding of a perspective that
many (though fewer and fewer) Americans share, but it is unlikely to
persuade anyone who doesn’t already agree with its claims. It is a lucid
window into a disappearing worldview."
The current issue of The New York Review of Books reports:
"Before he died on February 14, Ronald Dworkin sent to The New York Review a text of his new book, Religion Without God, to be published by Harvard University Press later this year. We publish here an excerpt from the first chapter. —The Editors"
I just noticed that the two legal scholars who are arguably the two greatest--at the very least, two of the greatest--constitutional scholars of religious liberty of their generation both did their undergraduate work at Michigan State and both received their law degrees from the University of Chicago. A mere coincidence? (At least there is this difference: one is an evangelical Christian, the other, a nonbeliever.)
