Liberal Democrat Backs Prop. 8, The Amendment To Ban Homosexual Weddings in California
A James Hartline Report Exclusive
Polls published by left-leaning pollsters are declaring that Prop. 8 is on its way to defeat. This has helped homosexual publications, and activists working to defeat Prop. 8, to fuel a flood of reports highlighting the idea that they are winning the battle to permanently legitimize same-sex marriages in California.
However, behind the scenes, an entirely different scenario is becoming abundantly clear: Prop. 8 is beginning to receive overwhelming approval among important voter constituencies in the Golden State.
Certain historically liberal-leaning pollsters tell voters that Prop. 8, the voter initiative to ban homosexual weddings in California, is losing according to their most recently conducted polls. These are the same pollsters who published polls in 2000 prior to that year's vote on Prop. 22, the California initiative that declared marriage in California is to be limited to one man and one woman. While these liberal-leaning pollsters, like the Field Poll, were reporting right before the election that Prop. 22 was only supported by 53% of voters, over 61% of voters did, in fact, vote for Prop. 22 on election day. That was an 8% differential reporting error in the Field Poll.
Why would pollsters, like the Field Poll, regularly under report the actual support for a propostion dealing with traditional marriage values?
In the great culture war over homosexuality and its place in society, the homosexual political movement is dependent on the promotion of its agenda and ideas through the media. Without the intentional exaggeration of support for homosexuality in America, via liberal media proponents of the gay community, the homosexual political movement would have never accomplished what it has accomplished politically. For example, statistics show that approximately 2-3% of American males actually engage in continuous homosexual sexual behaviors. Compare that to the now-discredited, but highly promoted by gay activists, Alfred Kinsey research which claimed that 10% of American males were homosexual. The Kinsey study has been used as a tool for manipulating state legislatures to inact laws protecting those engaged in homosexuality as a protected class. Kinsey's distorted research has also been used to access schools and legitimize the promotion of homosexuality in classrooms throughout America.
Or, take for example, the claims by liberal media sources that there are an estimated 65,000 military enlistees who engage in homosexuality. The Washington Post quotes a study from the Williams Institute of UCLA. What they conveniently leave out when quoting that study is that the Williams Institute was founded by Charles R. Williams, a rabid supporter of the homosexual movement. Williams has given in excess of $10 million dollars to the Williams Institute (named after him) for the purposes of "studying" the effects of laws on gays and lesbians. Any study or poll conducted by the Williams Institute is designed to promote the interests of the homosexual political movement. Thus, the idea that this group can accurately estimate the number of men in the military who engage in homosexuality is preposterous. There is simply no credible way to claim that there are 65,000 closeted homosexuals in the military. In reality, like so many in the gay-friendly media, the purpose in claiming 65,000 homosexuals in the military is for the purposes of legalizing, sanctioning and establishing such behavior in the Armed Forces. In other words, the repeal of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy.
Countering the deceptive message and goals of the Williams Institute is as easy as finding the truth behind the numbers of California voters who are actually supporting Prop. 8. For example, Washington Monthly cited a survey of 3,400 military officers from Foreign Policy which shows that only 22% of 3,400 officers holding the rank of major or lieutenant commander and above from across the services, active duty and retired, general officers and field-grade officers, support allowing openly homosexual and lesbian enlistees to serve in the military. This counters claims by gay-friendly media sources and leaders within the homosexual political movement who often claim 70% or more of military personnel, and the public, are ready to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell.
And then there are the claims by the homosexual political movement of the financial clout within the gay community. A recently published report from gay community leaders in Los Angeles quoted the following study for the purposes of highlighting a claim of the financial power of that community: According to a newly published analysis by Witeck-Combs Communications and Packaged Facts, the total buying power of American GLBT adults in 2008 is projected to be $712 billion, up from $690 billion in 2007. What the article did not disclose is the fact that Bob Witeck, founder of Witeck-Combs, is a rabid support of the most radical elements of the gay political movement in America. Witeck served five appointed terms on the board of directors for the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, and currently is on the board of the Commercial Closet Association. He also is a member of the Honorary Board of the Matthew Shepard Foundation. He formerly served on the board of directors for the NEA Foundation and on the first national board for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), and for the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network (GLSEN).
With so many in the gay community suffering from AIDS, working for government-funded social service programs, and dealing with drug addictions and alcoholism, incomes and total financial worth within the gay community hardly supports the claim that $712 billion was the real buying power of that community in 2007. The study form Witeck claims that the financial power in the gay community jumped to $712 billion in 2007 from $690 billion in 2006, an increase of $22 billion. These kinds of preposterous claims serve only one purpose: to present to the world, a Goliath-like image that benefits the homosexual agenda being promoted by people like Bob Witeck.
It is the David vs. Goliath principle. Like Goliath, the modern homosexual political movement, presents itself as being much bigger and much more accepted in America than it really is. This is done as a means of intimidating and manipulating opponents of the radicalized homosexual agenda. This goes to the core of why the Field Poll would report the numbers that it is reporting on voter opposition to Prop. 8.
Like the recent and extremely questionable Field Polls on Prop. 8, the goal is to intimidate and discourage supporters of Prop. 8. They want Prop. 8 to fail so that the goals of the homosexual political movement can be achieved.
An abundance of credible information has now become available which indicates that Prop. 8 is supported by many important voting groups in California, far in excess of the 50.1% needed to pass Prop. 8. Contrast that with the recent poll put about by the Field Poll showing that opposition to Prop. 8 is growing and now sets at 55% voting no on Prop. 8. It is simply ridiculous to think that there has been a 16% swing in just 8 years among voters regarding their opinions of homosexual relationships being given the same status of marriage as that of the norm of one man and one woman. Even more telling as to questioning the validity and motives behind the Field Poll is the fact that the San Francisco Chronicle reports this: The most recent polls, conducted in 2006 and 2007, found that 51 percent and 49 percent of survey respondents opposed making gay marriage legal, while 43 percent and 45 percent endorsed the idea.
From the enormous number of donors to the various Yes on 8 campaigns, it is clear that support from across the political spectrum is growing for the passage of Prop. 8. This counters the questionable polling from the Field Poll.
Perhaps the best example of how wide is the support for Prop. 8 comes from this report in the Los Angeles Times of a liberal Democrat who is supporting Prop. 8:
Protecting marriage to protect children
Marriage as a human institution is constantly evolving. But in all societies, marriage shapes the rights and obligations of parenthood.
By David Blankenhorn September 19, 2008
I'm a liberal Democrat. And I do not favor same-sex marriage. Do those positions sound contradictory? To me, they fit together.
Many seem to believe that marriage is simply a private love relationship between two people. They accept this view, in part, because Americans have increasingly emphasized and come to value the intimate, emotional side of marriage, and in part because almost all opinion leaders today, from journalists to judges, strongly embrace this position. That's certainly the idea that underpinned the California Supreme Court's legalization of same-sex marriage.
But I spent a year studying the history and anthropology of marriage, and I've come to a different conclusion.
Marriage as a human institution is constantly evolving, and many of its features vary across groups and cultures. But there is one constant. In all societies, marriage shapes the rights and obligations of parenthood. Among us humans, the scholars report, marriage is not primarily a license to have sex. Nor is it primarily a license to receive benefits or social recognition. It is primarily a license to have children.
In this sense, marriage is a gift that society bestows on its next generation. Marriage (and only marriage) unites the three core dimensions of parenthood -- biological, social and legal -- into one pro-child form: the married couple. Marriage says to a child: The man and the woman whose sexual union made you will also be there to love and raise you. Marriage says to society as a whole: For every child born, there is a recognized mother and a father, accountable to the child and to each other.
These days, because of the gay marriage debate, one can be sent to bed without supper for saying such things. But until very recently, almost no one denied this core fact about marriage. Summing up the cross-cultural evidence, the anthropologist Helen Fisher in 1992 put it simply: "People wed primarily to reproduce." The philosopher and Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell, certainly no friend of conventional sexual morality, was only repeating the obvious a few decades earlier when he concluded that "it is through children alone that sexual relations become important to society, and worthy to be taken cognizance of by a legal institution."
Marriage is society's most pro-child institution. In 2002 -- just moments before it became highly unfashionable to say so -- a team of researchers from Child Trends, a nonpartisan research center, reported that "family structure clearly matters for children, and the family structure that helps children the most is a family headed by two biological parents in a low-conflict marriage."
All our scholarly instruments seem to agree: For healthy development, what a child needs more than anything else is the mother and father who together made the child, who love the child and love each other.
For these reasons, children have the right, insofar as society can make it possible, to know and to be cared for by the two parents who brought them into this world. The foundational human rights document in the world today regarding children, the 1989 U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, specifically guarantees children this right. The last time I checked, liberals like me were supposed to be in favor of internationally recognized human rights, particularly concerning children, who are typically society's most voiceless and vulnerable group. Or have I now said something I shouldn't?
Every child being raised by gay or lesbian couples will be denied his birthright to both parents who made him. Every single one. Moreover, losing that right will not be a consequence of something that at least most of us view as tragic, such as a marriage that didn't last, or an unexpected pregnancy where the father-to-be has no intention of sticking around. On the contrary, in the case of same-sex marriage and the children of those unions, it will be explained to everyone, including the children, that something wonderful has happened!
For me, what we are encouraged or permitted to say, or not say, to one another about what our society owes its children is crucially important in the debate over initiatives like California's Proposition 8, which would reinstate marriage's customary man-woman form. Do you think that every child deserves his mother and father, with adoption available for those children whose natural parents cannot care for them? Do you suspect that fathers and mothers are different from one another? Do you imagine that biological ties matter to children? How many parents per child is best? Do you think that "two" is a better answer than one, three, four or whatever? If you do, be careful. In making the case for same-sex marriage, more than a few grown-ups will be quite willing to question your integrity and goodwill. Children, of course, are rarely consulted.
The liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin famously argued that, in many cases, the real conflict we face is not good versus bad but good versus good. Reducing homophobia is good. Protecting the birthright of the child is good. How should we reason together as a society when these two good things conflict?
Here is my reasoning. I reject homophobia and believe in the equal dignity of gay and lesbian love. Because I also believe with all my heart in the right of the child to the mother and father who made her, I believe that we as a society should seek to maintain and to strengthen the only human institution -- marriage -- that is specifically intended to safeguard that right and make it real for our children.
Legalized same-sex marriage almost certainly benefits those same-sex couples who choose to marry, as well as the children being raised in those homes. But changing the meaning of marriage to accommodate homosexual orientation further and perhaps definitively undermines for all of us the very thing -- the gift, the birthright -- that is marriage's most distinctive contribution to human society. That's a change that, in the final analysis, I cannot support.
David Blankenhorn is president of the New York-based Institute for American Values and the author of "The Future of Marriage."
What's Your Opinion? Should truth trump political goals? Is anything gained when any agenda is built by deceiving the public?
Polls published by left-leaning pollsters are declaring that Prop. 8 is on its way to defeat. This has helped homosexual publications, and activists working to defeat Prop. 8, to fuel a flood of reports highlighting the idea that they are winning the battle to permanently legitimize same-sex marriages in California.
However, behind the scenes, an entirely different scenario is becoming abundantly clear: Prop. 8 is beginning to receive overwhelming approval among important voter constituencies in the Golden State.
Certain historically liberal-leaning pollsters tell voters that Prop. 8, the voter initiative to ban homosexual weddings in California, is losing according to their most recently conducted polls. These are the same pollsters who published polls in 2000 prior to that year's vote on Prop. 22, the California initiative that declared marriage in California is to be limited to one man and one woman. While these liberal-leaning pollsters, like the Field Poll, were reporting right before the election that Prop. 22 was only supported by 53% of voters, over 61% of voters did, in fact, vote for Prop. 22 on election day. That was an 8% differential reporting error in the Field Poll.
Why would pollsters, like the Field Poll, regularly under report the actual support for a propostion dealing with traditional marriage values?
In the great culture war over homosexuality and its place in society, the homosexual political movement is dependent on the promotion of its agenda and ideas through the media. Without the intentional exaggeration of support for homosexuality in America, via liberal media proponents of the gay community, the homosexual political movement would have never accomplished what it has accomplished politically. For example, statistics show that approximately 2-3% of American males actually engage in continuous homosexual sexual behaviors. Compare that to the now-discredited, but highly promoted by gay activists, Alfred Kinsey research which claimed that 10% of American males were homosexual. The Kinsey study has been used as a tool for manipulating state legislatures to inact laws protecting those engaged in homosexuality as a protected class. Kinsey's distorted research has also been used to access schools and legitimize the promotion of homosexuality in classrooms throughout America.
Or, take for example, the claims by liberal media sources that there are an estimated 65,000 military enlistees who engage in homosexuality. The Washington Post quotes a study from the Williams Institute of UCLA. What they conveniently leave out when quoting that study is that the Williams Institute was founded by Charles R. Williams, a rabid supporter of the homosexual movement. Williams has given in excess of $10 million dollars to the Williams Institute (named after him) for the purposes of "studying" the effects of laws on gays and lesbians. Any study or poll conducted by the Williams Institute is designed to promote the interests of the homosexual political movement. Thus, the idea that this group can accurately estimate the number of men in the military who engage in homosexuality is preposterous. There is simply no credible way to claim that there are 65,000 closeted homosexuals in the military. In reality, like so many in the gay-friendly media, the purpose in claiming 65,000 homosexuals in the military is for the purposes of legalizing, sanctioning and establishing such behavior in the Armed Forces. In other words, the repeal of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy.
Countering the deceptive message and goals of the Williams Institute is as easy as finding the truth behind the numbers of California voters who are actually supporting Prop. 8. For example, Washington Monthly cited a survey of 3,400 military officers from Foreign Policy which shows that only 22% of 3,400 officers holding the rank of major or lieutenant commander and above from across the services, active duty and retired, general officers and field-grade officers, support allowing openly homosexual and lesbian enlistees to serve in the military. This counters claims by gay-friendly media sources and leaders within the homosexual political movement who often claim 70% or more of military personnel, and the public, are ready to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell.
And then there are the claims by the homosexual political movement of the financial clout within the gay community. A recently published report from gay community leaders in Los Angeles quoted the following study for the purposes of highlighting a claim of the financial power of that community: According to a newly published analysis by Witeck-Combs Communications and Packaged Facts, the total buying power of American GLBT adults in 2008 is projected to be $712 billion, up from $690 billion in 2007. What the article did not disclose is the fact that Bob Witeck, founder of Witeck-Combs, is a rabid support of the most radical elements of the gay political movement in America. Witeck served five appointed terms on the board of directors for the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, and currently is on the board of the Commercial Closet Association. He also is a member of the Honorary Board of the Matthew Shepard Foundation. He formerly served on the board of directors for the NEA Foundation and on the first national board for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), and for the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network (GLSEN).
With so many in the gay community suffering from AIDS, working for government-funded social service programs, and dealing with drug addictions and alcoholism, incomes and total financial worth within the gay community hardly supports the claim that $712 billion was the real buying power of that community in 2007. The study form Witeck claims that the financial power in the gay community jumped to $712 billion in 2007 from $690 billion in 2006, an increase of $22 billion. These kinds of preposterous claims serve only one purpose: to present to the world, a Goliath-like image that benefits the homosexual agenda being promoted by people like Bob Witeck.
It is the David vs. Goliath principle. Like Goliath, the modern homosexual political movement, presents itself as being much bigger and much more accepted in America than it really is. This is done as a means of intimidating and manipulating opponents of the radicalized homosexual agenda. This goes to the core of why the Field Poll would report the numbers that it is reporting on voter opposition to Prop. 8.
Like the recent and extremely questionable Field Polls on Prop. 8, the goal is to intimidate and discourage supporters of Prop. 8. They want Prop. 8 to fail so that the goals of the homosexual political movement can be achieved.
An abundance of credible information has now become available which indicates that Prop. 8 is supported by many important voting groups in California, far in excess of the 50.1% needed to pass Prop. 8. Contrast that with the recent poll put about by the Field Poll showing that opposition to Prop. 8 is growing and now sets at 55% voting no on Prop. 8. It is simply ridiculous to think that there has been a 16% swing in just 8 years among voters regarding their opinions of homosexual relationships being given the same status of marriage as that of the norm of one man and one woman. Even more telling as to questioning the validity and motives behind the Field Poll is the fact that the San Francisco Chronicle reports this: The most recent polls, conducted in 2006 and 2007, found that 51 percent and 49 percent of survey respondents opposed making gay marriage legal, while 43 percent and 45 percent endorsed the idea.
From the enormous number of donors to the various Yes on 8 campaigns, it is clear that support from across the political spectrum is growing for the passage of Prop. 8. This counters the questionable polling from the Field Poll.
Perhaps the best example of how wide is the support for Prop. 8 comes from this report in the Los Angeles Times of a liberal Democrat who is supporting Prop. 8:
Protecting marriage to protect children
Marriage as a human institution is constantly evolving. But in all societies, marriage shapes the rights and obligations of parenthood.
By David Blankenhorn September 19, 2008
I'm a liberal Democrat. And I do not favor same-sex marriage. Do those positions sound contradictory? To me, they fit together.
Many seem to believe that marriage is simply a private love relationship between two people. They accept this view, in part, because Americans have increasingly emphasized and come to value the intimate, emotional side of marriage, and in part because almost all opinion leaders today, from journalists to judges, strongly embrace this position. That's certainly the idea that underpinned the California Supreme Court's legalization of same-sex marriage.
But I spent a year studying the history and anthropology of marriage, and I've come to a different conclusion.
Marriage as a human institution is constantly evolving, and many of its features vary across groups and cultures. But there is one constant. In all societies, marriage shapes the rights and obligations of parenthood. Among us humans, the scholars report, marriage is not primarily a license to have sex. Nor is it primarily a license to receive benefits or social recognition. It is primarily a license to have children.
In this sense, marriage is a gift that society bestows on its next generation. Marriage (and only marriage) unites the three core dimensions of parenthood -- biological, social and legal -- into one pro-child form: the married couple. Marriage says to a child: The man and the woman whose sexual union made you will also be there to love and raise you. Marriage says to society as a whole: For every child born, there is a recognized mother and a father, accountable to the child and to each other.
These days, because of the gay marriage debate, one can be sent to bed without supper for saying such things. But until very recently, almost no one denied this core fact about marriage. Summing up the cross-cultural evidence, the anthropologist Helen Fisher in 1992 put it simply: "People wed primarily to reproduce." The philosopher and Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell, certainly no friend of conventional sexual morality, was only repeating the obvious a few decades earlier when he concluded that "it is through children alone that sexual relations become important to society, and worthy to be taken cognizance of by a legal institution."
Marriage is society's most pro-child institution. In 2002 -- just moments before it became highly unfashionable to say so -- a team of researchers from Child Trends, a nonpartisan research center, reported that "family structure clearly matters for children, and the family structure that helps children the most is a family headed by two biological parents in a low-conflict marriage."
All our scholarly instruments seem to agree: For healthy development, what a child needs more than anything else is the mother and father who together made the child, who love the child and love each other.
For these reasons, children have the right, insofar as society can make it possible, to know and to be cared for by the two parents who brought them into this world. The foundational human rights document in the world today regarding children, the 1989 U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, specifically guarantees children this right. The last time I checked, liberals like me were supposed to be in favor of internationally recognized human rights, particularly concerning children, who are typically society's most voiceless and vulnerable group. Or have I now said something I shouldn't?
Every child being raised by gay or lesbian couples will be denied his birthright to both parents who made him. Every single one. Moreover, losing that right will not be a consequence of something that at least most of us view as tragic, such as a marriage that didn't last, or an unexpected pregnancy where the father-to-be has no intention of sticking around. On the contrary, in the case of same-sex marriage and the children of those unions, it will be explained to everyone, including the children, that something wonderful has happened!
For me, what we are encouraged or permitted to say, or not say, to one another about what our society owes its children is crucially important in the debate over initiatives like California's Proposition 8, which would reinstate marriage's customary man-woman form. Do you think that every child deserves his mother and father, with adoption available for those children whose natural parents cannot care for them? Do you suspect that fathers and mothers are different from one another? Do you imagine that biological ties matter to children? How many parents per child is best? Do you think that "two" is a better answer than one, three, four or whatever? If you do, be careful. In making the case for same-sex marriage, more than a few grown-ups will be quite willing to question your integrity and goodwill. Children, of course, are rarely consulted.
The liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin famously argued that, in many cases, the real conflict we face is not good versus bad but good versus good. Reducing homophobia is good. Protecting the birthright of the child is good. How should we reason together as a society when these two good things conflict?
Here is my reasoning. I reject homophobia and believe in the equal dignity of gay and lesbian love. Because I also believe with all my heart in the right of the child to the mother and father who made her, I believe that we as a society should seek to maintain and to strengthen the only human institution -- marriage -- that is specifically intended to safeguard that right and make it real for our children.
Legalized same-sex marriage almost certainly benefits those same-sex couples who choose to marry, as well as the children being raised in those homes. But changing the meaning of marriage to accommodate homosexual orientation further and perhaps definitively undermines for all of us the very thing -- the gift, the birthright -- that is marriage's most distinctive contribution to human society. That's a change that, in the final analysis, I cannot support.
David Blankenhorn is president of the New York-based Institute for American Values and the author of "The Future of Marriage."
What's Your Opinion? Should truth trump political goals? Is anything gained when any agenda is built by deceiving the public?
Comments
“For example, statistics show that approximately 2-3% of American males actually engage in continuous homosexual sexual behaviors. “
Our numbers may be smaller but we beat the competition by careful planning, engage in unholy alliances, and leverage our power. We pursue our goals with a passion that overwhelms our opponents. Forget about praying to Jesus ,(who promises to give us anything we desire if we just ask for it in His name), we go straight to God and get things accomplished without the middleman.
James quotes from the liberal media; “ there are an estimated 65,000 military enlistees who engage in homosexuality”. That is true but there are a couple of million horny soldiers that need to be serviced. Hard work but someone has to keep our troops satisfied when they are away from their wives. The Army desperately needs more gay soldiers.
James also said, “It is simply ridiculous to think that there has been a 16% swing in just 8 years among voters regarding their opinions of homosexual relationships being given the same status of marriage as that of the norm of one man and one woman.”
James, society is evolving. Opinions change and sometimes they change rapidly when confronted with the truth. Society has never been static; it gradually evolves to make this a better world for everyone. If you would read your history book more and stop spending all of your time studying your Bible, you would realize why gay people are moving forward.