Kentucky County Clerk Jailed for Dissenting from New Marriage Orthodoxy

Really?

Really, guys?  You’re going to start putting people in jail for disagreeing with you?

As both Fox News and the liberal Washington Post are reporting:

“Kentucky clerk ordered to jail for refusing to issue gay marriage license”

(WP headline)

U.S. District Judge David Bunning said he had no choice but to jail Kim Davis for contempt after she insisted that her “conscience will not allow” her to follow federal court rulings on gay marriage.

U.S. Supreme Court Considers Not Outlawing Traditional Marriage after All

From what I hear (Professor John Eastman’s excellent summary of today’s oral arguments), the good guys did surprisingly well at the Supreme Court today, and right out of the gate, swing-vote Kennedy came out swinging (audio here):

JUSTICE GINSBURG: What do you do with the Windsor case where the court stressed the Federal government’s historic deference to States when it comes to matters of domestic relations?

‘Woman raised by two lesbian parents speaks out: I missed my Dad’

Via Wintery Knight (whence title above), a great short piece at the Federalist by Heather Barwick: “Dear Gay Community: Your Kids Are Hurting”

Do you remember that book, “Heather Has Two Mommies”? That was my life. My mom, her partner, and I lived in a cozy little house in the ‘burbs of a very liberal and open-minded area. Her partner treated me as if I was her own daughter. . . .

New York State Fines Christian Farmers, Conscripts Them in Forced Re-education, Forces Them Out of Wedding Business

No, this is not a parody or a prediction; it’s already here.  Via Political Realities, the Daily Signal reports,

In 2012, Melissa Erwin and Jennie McCarthy contacted the Giffords to rent the family’s barn for their same-sex wedding ceremony and reception. Cynthia Gifford responded that she and her husband would have to decline their request as they felt they could not in good conscience host a same-sex wedding ceremony at their home. The Giffords live on the second and third floor of the barn and, when they host weddings on the first floor, they open part of the second floor as a bridal suite.

Comparison to Interracial Marriage a Terrible Argument

People love to compare those who want to maintain the traditional legal definition of marriage (one man and one woman) to those who supported laws against interracial marriage in the American South in the first half of the twentieth century.

It’s a terrible argument, but people keep making it, even (most recently) a federal appeals-court judge.

More Bullying from the ‘Anti-bullying’ ‘Liberal’ Culture

Jonah Goldberg has an interesting discussion in the Corner about Niall Ferguson and John Maynard Keynes.  Apparently the trend toward more and more militant “acceptance” of homosexuality has made at least one previously mainstream academic discussion now a potentially career-ending third rail.

Incidentally, did you know that Keynes was homosexual?

. . . [Keynes] himself described the Bloomsbury mindset as a rejection of all standards:

Marriage

I think this video strikes a reasonably good balance:  It tries to present a lot of the (pretty abstract) arguments for the traditional definition of marriage; at the same time, it tries to be brief and engaging for a general audience.

Associated Press Opts Out of Smearing Conservatives as ‘Homophobic’

From National Review Online’s Charles Cooke I learn that the Associated Press will no longer use the term “homophobia”:

Homophobia especially — it’s just off the mark. It’s ascribing a mental disability to someone . . . .

Rick Santorum

(Warning: This entry talks about some pretty gross stuff.  If you don’t want to be exposed to it, you may be better off just skipping this whole entry.)

A number of people are currently running to be the Republican nominee for president in 2012.  One of them is former senator Rick Santorum.

Santorum is a fiscal conservative and a foreign-policy conservative, but what’s really “politically incorrect” nowadays is that he’s also a social conservative.  He is strongly against homosexuality, for example.