Gay ‘marriages’ ahead

For years, the issue of same-sex “marriage” in America has surfaced only occasionally, a topic of arcane conversation, and promptly slips away.

No longer. High court decisions in Canada and the United States and a pending lawsuit in Massachusetts will finally force “gay marriage” to the top of the nation’s legal and cultural agenda.

“Today’s decision has awakened a sleeping giant,” attorney Mathew D. Staver said after the June 26 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that a Texas ban on homosexual sodomy was an unconstitutional violation of privacy.

The ruling “will galvanize and reinvigorate the majority of Americans who believe in traditional marriage but have ignored the radical agenda of the same-sex marriage movement,” said Mr. Staver, president and general counsel of Liberty Counsel, the public-interest law firm in Florida that had filed a brief in behalf of Texas.

The high court ruling followed a June 10 decision by Canada’s Ontario Court of Appeal that restricting marriage to “a man and a woman” was unconstitutional.

From now on, the court said, “two people” can marry in Ontario.

The Canadian ruling was greeted with jubilation by homosexual activists, and hundreds of homosexual couples — including dozens from the United States — have gone to Ontario to marry. There has been no test of whether any of these marriages will be recognized in any of the 50 United States.

‘Mother of all cultural battles’

A more sweeping marriage-related decision could be handed down from the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court by tomorrow.

The court is considering a lawsuit titled Goodridge v. Massachusetts Department of Public Health, which is brought by seven homosexual couples who say they have been unconstitutionally denied state marriage licenses.

The Massachusetts high-court ruling, from which an appeal could be difficult, could tell the state to begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. If that happens, say lawyers specializing in domestic law, thousands of homosexual couples will marry in Massachusetts and file lawsuits in every other state seeking recognition of their marriages.

This ruling will lead to the “mother of all cultural battles,” in which “every public official in the country will be forced to take a stand on gay marriage,” predicts Hoover Institution scholar Stanley Kurtz, writing in National Review Online.

Same-sex “marriage” has many advocates on the left; liberal religious groups, law firms, child welfare leaders, educators and historians have all filed briefs in support of the Massachusetts plaintiffs.

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