Posted on Log Cabin Republicans website as of Mar 6, 2007:

Republican Wyoming State Rep. Takes Courageous Stand for Basic Fairness

Republican Wyoming State Rep. Dan Zwonitzer (R-Cheyenne) urged his colleagues to vote against a discriminatory bill that would have banned recognition of marriages for same-sex couples performed in other states, saying

“I believe this is the civil rights struggle of my generation…If standing up for equal rights costs me my seat, so be it. I will let history be my judge—the overall theme is fairness, and you know it. I hope you will all let history be your judge with this vote.”

Read the full text of Rep. Zwonitzer’s remarks.

From Broken Promise in the Promised Land, published Feb 1, 2007, by CWA:

Israel records homosexual “marriage” for first time

For the first time in history, Jerusalem has recorded the “marriage” of a homosexual couple. Two men who wish to be identified as “Binyamin and Avi Rose” were “married” in Canada over the summer of 2006 and moved back to Israel where their marital status is now being recorded through the Interior Ministry’s Population Registry. Israel’s highest Court ruled in November that same-sex “marriages” that have been legally performed in foreign countries will now be included in Israel’s records. Concerned Women for America (CWA) prays that the nation of Israel will embrace and defend the Biblical definition of one man, one woman marriage and not go down the slippery slope that seeks to destroy traditional marriage.

CWA’s Policy Director for Cultural Issues Matt Barber said,

“Christians, Jews and all people of faith from around the world will no doubt be saddened and shocked by this alarming development in Israel – as should anybody who recognizes the tremendous benefits conferred upon humanity by the institutions of legitimate marriage and family. It defies logic that the state of Israel would grant any official recognition to counterfeit ‘same-sex marriage.’

“God ‘made them male and female.’ The Biblical model irrefutably defines marriage as between one man and one woman. It provides that all sexual relations are to occur within the bounds of marriage.

“But this is not just a spiritual issue. Even within secular society, marriage has, by definition, joined male to female since time immemorial. Unless the Israeli government reverses course here, it has now inexplicably capitulated to the radical and destructive redefinition of marriage.”

A news release from American Family Association of Pennsylvania dated Mar 6, 2007:

With Stephen Glassman’s involvement with a homosexual rights Get Busy, Get Equal Conference on Saturday, the American Family Association of Pennsylvania (AFA of PA) once again questions his authority to speak in his official capacity as the Chairman of the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission (PHRC). The AFA of PA asks Governor Rendell to review Mr. Glassman’s involvement in not only this conference, but his meeting with those who opposed last year’s Marriage Protection Amendment and his efforts to get municipalities to add ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘gender identity’ to their human relations ordinances.

The PHRC has the responsibility of administering and enforcing the PA Human Relations Act (PHRA) and the PA Fair Educational Opportunities Act (PFEOA). These acts prohibit discrimination because of race, color, religion, ancestry, age (40 and above), sex, national origin, non-job related disability, known association with a disabled individual, possession of a diploma based on passing a general education development test and familial status.

“Stephen Glassman has a personal agenda and he has become more aggressive in recent years. He is continually pushing for the addition of ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘gender identity’ to human relations ordinances on the local level and beyond. Those terms are not part of the mission of the PHRC,” noted Diane Gramley, president of the AFA of PA, a statewide traditional values group.

Our good friend Dr. Rob Gagnon has posted a new article on his website entitled:

How Bad Is Homosexual Practice According to Scripture and Does Scripture’s View Apply to Committed Homosexual Unions?

A response to R. Milton Winter’s Perspectives article: “Presbyterians and Separatist Evangelicals”

It’s a response to a paper that appeared in a PCUSA publication so to that extent it is more relevant to Presbyterians.

However, the 11-page appendices at the end (pp. 12-23) deal, in a free-standing way, with the questions asked in the title and are relevant to anyone interested in these issues, whatever the denominational affiliation. It’s a good summary of

1. How seriously Scripture views the offense of homosexual practice and
2. Whether Scripture’s indictment of homosexual practice applies to committed homosexual unions.

Earlier parts of the article also address the question whether a denomination’s support of homosexual practice justifies departure from the denomination.

From HIV-Positive Rep Seeks Homosexual ‘Marriage’ in IL, by Jim Brown and Jody Brown, published Feb 28, 2007, by One News Now:

An Illinois pro-family group is voicing opposition to what it calls a “counterfeit” marriage bill in the state legislature that seeks to make Illinois “the Massachusetts of the Midwest.”

Illinois’ only openly homosexual representative, Democrat Greg Harris, has introduced HB 1615, which would repeal Illinois’ ban on same-sex “marriages.” Pete LaBarbera of the Chicago-based group Americans for Truth says Harris and other homosexual activists are hoping to wear down Illinois voters, and over time pass what he describes as “radical” legislation.

“Greg Harris is the new homosexual rep representing ‘Boystown,’ which is the homosexual neighborhood in Chicago. He replaces another homosexual,” says LaBarbera. “He is HIV positive and even put … on his resume, publicly, that he has AIDS.” The Americans for Truth spokesman says he finds that both sad and ironic. “He’s bearing a disease that is caused by this lifestyle,” he notes, “and now he wants to take this lifestyle and say that it merits being called ‘marriage.'”

According to LaBarbera, the bill introduced by Harris is “sneakily” called the “Religious Freedom and Marriage Fairness Act.” And homosexual activists like Harris, he notes, play long-term politics, whereas many in the pro-family movement play short-term politics.

“The long-term goal of the homosexual activists is to make Illinois ‘the Massachusetts of the Midwest,'” says the pro-family leader. “[T]hey would desperately love to get a state in the Midwest to go for so-called ‘homosexual marriage.'”

For that reason, LaBarbera is encouraging conservatives and people of faith likewise to think long-term. “We must retain the goal of repealing all ‘sexual orientation’ laws — in Illinois and across the nation — since they are incompatible with the basic American freedoms of religion, conscience, and association,” he says on his group’s website. “And we must act to protect marriage as between a man and a woman at the state and federal constitutional levels.”

Toward that end, LaBarbera says Americans for Truth will be working with other Illinois pro-family groups to push for another referendum calling on the state legislature to pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting homosexual “marriage.” One pro-traditional marriage referendum, HJRCA 1, he explains, has “languished” in the General Assembly for years. LaBarbera blames what he calls “Democrats’ subservience to the state’s powerful ‘gay’ lobby.”

From Legal Fictions, by Chuck Colson, published Feb 27, 2007, by Breakpoint:

Isabella Miller-Jenkins is only four years old, but she is at the center of one of the most important legal battles of our time. A judge will soon decide whether a woman with no biological or adoptive ties to Isabella can legally be declared her mother.

It sounds incredible, but it is the logical result of where our anything-goes society has been leading us all these years.

As the Washington Post reports, Isabella was conceived via artificial insemination while her mother, Lisa Miller, was in a same-sex civil union with Janet Jenkins. But later the civil union fell apart. Lisa took Isabella and left Vermont for Virginia. She also returned to the Christian faith of her childhood and became “determined to ‘leave the [lesbian] lifestyle’.” That meant that she no longer considered Janet to be Isabella’s parent.

But in our reckless pursuit of getting whatever we want at all costs, our nation has begun interpreting the law in a way that reinforces all the fictions that Lisa Miller no longer believes.

The subhead in the Post article says it all: “Janet Jenkins and Lisa Miller got hitched and had a baby together.” Together? Anybody who knows anything about biology knows that’s impossible. But that’s just how the courts are looking at it. As a judge in the case told Janet Jenkins’s lawyer, Janet (the lesbian partner) “without question is presumed to be the natural parent . . . by the basis of the civil union.” So in the court’s eyes, Isabella is the child of two women, something biologically impossible.

How is it possible that laws and court procedures could have become so dangerously fantasy-based? Actually, we should not be surprised. Many modern parents have unwittingly been collaborating with the process for years. The Washington Post tells us how Judge Cohen explained it: “Consider the situation of a heterosexual couple in which an infertile husband agrees for his wife to be artificially inseminated with donor sperm.” In such a case, the judge stated, the husband would be presumed to have parental rights even though someone else had actually fathered the child.

It all ties together. Heterosexual couples have tacitly approved this practice of including a silent third partner in a marriage to produce a child. And then it makes it very difficult to cry foul when homosexuals do the same thing.

Isabella’s plight shows us the tragic consequences of rejecting the biblical view of marriage, which provides for one man and one woman in the union to raise the child. Sure, there are extraordinary circumstances, and adoption is possible. But the norm is the norm, and the law has always recognized the natural moral order.

If Janet Jenkins wins her case—which may go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court — Isabella may be taken from her biological mother to live with a woman she barely remembers. And not only Isabella; many other children would also be threatened by this waving of the judicial magic wand to produce legal parents out of nowhere.

…We need to see how our attitude of “I can do anything I want, and it won’t hurt anybody” has led to a situation that could hurt families everywhere.

For additional resources, go to Breakpoint…

Words have meaning. To be a virgin is not just to abstain from sexual intercourse with a man, but to remain completely chaste and pure. It’s no more accurate to say that a sexually active lesbian is a virgin that it was for Bill Clinton to say “I did not have sex with that woman” — and furthermore, it’s terribly dangerous to mislead young people like this. When young people heard Bill Clinton equivocate and deny that oral sex was indeed sex, they felt liberty to try it themselves — and now society is reaping the consequences. Similarly, if Suze Orman identifies herself as a lesbian while calling herself a virgin, she sends a confusing and mixed message — and a deceitful one — to young women.

Homosexual sex may not carry the “risk” (or as we Christians like to think if it, the great blessing) of pregnancy, but homosexual sex practices (lesbian, “gay,” or “trans”) substantially increase the risk of physical, emotional, and spiritual damage to the human body and soul. If Suze Orman has been in a lesbian relationship for seven years, she is no virgin. If you “experiment with” or engage openly in homosexual sex (or are heterosexually intimate, even without intercourse), you cannot please God unless you repent (ie, change). — Sonja Dalton

——————————

The following is excerpted from She’s So Money (an interview with financial guru Suze Orman), by Deborah Solomon, published Feb 25, 2007, by New York Times Magazine:

Q: Are you married?

A: I’m in a relationship with life. My life is just out there. I’m on the road every day. I love my life.

Q: Meaning what? Do you live with anyone?

A: K.T. is my life partner. K.T. stands for Kathy Travis. We’re going on seven years. I have never been with a man in my whole life. I’m still a 55-year-old virgin.

Q: Would you like to get married to K.T.?

A: Yes. Absolutely. Both of us have millions of dollars in our name. It’s killing me that upon my death, K.T. is going to lose 50 percent of everything I have to estate taxes. Or vice versa.

Continue reading at New York Times Magazine…

If you read only one article about the homosexual agenda this year, make this be the one. It describes homosexual activist and Quark founder Tim Gill‘s stealth strategy of targeting pro-family, Republican state legislators for defeat by funneling “gay” donors’ money to these candidates’ opponents. The plan worked and the result is that states like Iowa are now facing a burst of pro-“gay” legislation fueled in part by out-of-state checks — about which the average citizen knows nothing.

We don’t imagine that The Atlantic Monthly’s editors would be quite so upbeat about this story if it were about secret donations from evangelical moneymen targeting pro-homosexual state legislators. But now is not the time for sour grapes. Instead, we need concerted action to stop this sneaky plot from succeeding in the form of new “sexual orientation” laws.

One more thing: isn’t it telling that Patrick Guerriero, the former head of the national Log Cabin Republicans — a group dedicated to advancing homosexual interests in the GOP — took a job to help achieve Democratic takeovers of state capitols? More proof that the Log Cabin activists are homosexuals first, and Republicans second. After all, this is the same “Republican” group that refused to endorse President Bush for re-election because he supported a Federal Marriage Amendment (horrors!). And yet there are still plenty of “moderate” Republicans who insist that the key to the party’s success is tilting more toward the Log Cabins and away from the GOP’s conservative, religious base. — Peter LaBarbera

——————————

The following is excerpted from They Won’t Know What Hit Them, by Joshua Green, published March 2007 in Atlantic Monthly:

The software mogul Tim Gill has a mission:
Stop the Rick Santorums of tomorrow before they get started.
How a network of gay political donors is stealthily
fighting sexual discrimination and reshaping American politics.

…Danny Carroll, the Republican speaker pro tempore of Iowa’s House of Representatives, …was among the dozens of targets of a group of rich gay philanthropists who quietly joined forces last year, under the leadership of a reclusive Colorado technology mogul, to counter the tide of antigay politics in America that has generated, among other things, a succession of state ballot initiatives banning gay marriage.

Like many other state legislatures last year, Iowa’s was narrowly divided. …If Democrats took control of the House and Senate, however narrowly, the initiative would die, and with it the likelihood of further legislation limiting civil rights for gays and lesbians…

Over the summer, Carroll’s opponent started receiving checks from across the country—significant sums for a statehouse race, though none so large as to arouse suspicion (the gifts topped out at $1,000). Because they came from individuals and not from organizations, nothing identified the money as being “gay,” or even coordinated. Only a very astute political operative would have spotted the unusual number of out-of-state donors and pondered their interest in an obscure midwestern race. And only someone truly versed in the world of gay causes would have noticed a $1,000 contribution from Denver, Colorado, and been aware that its source, Tim Gill, is the country’s biggest gay donor, and the nexus of an aggressive new force in national politics…

Tim Gill is best known as the founder of the publishing-software giant Quark Inc., and for a long time was one of the few openly gay members of the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans…In 2000, he sold his interest in Quark for a reported half-billion dollars in order to focus full-time on his philanthropy.

Gill’s principal interest is gay equality. His foundations have given about $115 million to charities. His serious involvement in politics is a more recent development, though geared toward the same goal. In 2000, he gave $300,000 in political donations, which grew to $800,000 in 2002, $5 million in 2004, and a staggering $15 million last year, almost all of it to state and local campaigns…

“My goal is to see that all Americans are treated equally regardless of sexuality,” he told me when we met.

…Gill decided to find out how he could become more effective and enlisted as his political counselor an acerbic lawyer and former tobacco lobbyist named Ted Trimpa, who is Colorado’s answer to Karl Rove. Trimpa believes that the gay-rights community directs too much of its money to thoroughly admirable national candidates who don’t need it, while neglecting less compelling races that would have a far greater impact on gay rights—a tendency he calls “glamour giving.” Trimpa cited the example of [a prominent, Democratic presidential candidate]: an attractive candidate, solid on gay rights, and viscerally exciting to donors. It feels good to write him a check. An analysis of [the candidate’s] 2004 Senate race, which he won by nearly fifty points, had determined that gays contributed more than $500,000. “The temptation is always to swoon for the popular candidate,” Trimpa told me, “but a fraction of that money, directed at the right state and local races, could have flipped a few chambers. ‘Just because he’s cute’ isn’t a strategy.”

Together, Gill and Trimpa decided to eschew national races in favor of state and local ones, which could be influenced in large batches and for much less money. Most antigay measures, they discovered, originate in state legislatures. Operating at that level gave them a chance to “punish the wicked,” as Gill puts it—to snuff out rising politicians who were building their careers on antigay policies, before they could achieve national influence. Their chief cautionary example of such a villain is Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, who once compared homosexuality to “man on dog” sex (and was finally defeated last year, at a cost of more than $20 million)…

Gill’s idea was to identify vulnerable candidates like Danny Carroll and move quickly to eliminate them without the burden of first having to win the consent of some risk-averse large organization or board of directors. Another element of this strategy is stealth. Revealing targets only after an election makes it impossible for them to fight back…

In the 2006 elections, on a level where a few thousand dollars can decide a close race, Gill’s universe of donors injected more than $3 million, providing in some cases more than 20 percent of a candidate’s or organization’s budget. On Election Day, fifty of the seventy targeted candidates were defeated, Danny Carroll among them; and out of the thirteen states where Gill and his allies invested, four — Iowa, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Washington — saw control of at least one legislative chamber switch to the Democratic Party… Gill’s stealth campaign was both effective and precedent-setting. For the first time, in a broad and organized way, gays had taken the initiative in a sweeping multistate strategy and had mostly prevailed.