People who oppose same-sex marriage on religious grounds are being deprived of their right to live as they choose by a movement that claims to champion personal freedom, a judicial analyst for Focus on the Family told "MidPoint" host Ed Berliner on
Newsmax TV Tuesday.
With
the chief justice of Alabama invoking states' rights to resist a federal court decision in favor of gay marriage, Bruce Hausknecht said that religious liberty is also under threat for believers in heterosexual marriage.
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"We've seen it across the country," he said, citing fines and and injunctions handed out against bakers, florists and wedding photographers for raising religious objections to accepting jobs from same-sex couples.
Hausknecht said the punitive social pressure to embrace gay marriage, whatever one's religious beliefs, extends beyond the workplace and into people's homes.
"I will teach my children what the Bible teaches about marriage," he said. "However, when society then reorders marriage and decides that through the courts or judicial decree that same sex marriage is now the law of the land, those decisions impact my children when they go to school, what they're being taught from kindergarten and on, and what they're being taught about sex education."
Hausknecht agreed that he is free to raise his children according to his beliefs.
"Well, of course that's true," he said, "but why should there be a competing source of education about marriage in schools?"
Hausknecht also said that the overturning of bans like Alabama's raises valid questions of law and public policy that same-sex marriage advocates have not satisfactorily answered.
"Anyone has the right to live their life as they see fit, but when they seek to change the law, then you're entering the realm of public policy," he said. "The question is, what's best for the society governed by that law?
"Whether it's a state or the federal government, when you enter the arena of public policy, you have to look at issues like what's best for children in that jurisdiction, not just what's best or what do adults want," said Hausknecht.
"Marriage is not about what adult desires are," he said, but instead "about recognizing an institution that raises the next generation in the best way possible, and we believe that's with a man and a woman as mother and father."
Hausknecht said that "certainly there are loving LGBT parents" but that comparative studies of child-raising show children fare best in stable, heterosexual two-parent homes.
Another "MidPoint" guest on Tuesday, law professor and gay-marriage advocate Arthur Leonard, discussed the many-sided legal battle playing out in Alabama, even as the U.S. Supreme Court looks poised to make a decision that will render the drama in the states moot.
"We are in a very unusual situation here," said Leonard, who teaches at New York Law School and edits the Lesbian/Gay Law Notes newsletter.
Leonard said that two justices,
Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, are right that the High Court majority has all but declared gay marriage the law of the land without hearing a single attorney argument.
Those hearings are set for this spring. But the majority's refusal thus far to consider any gay marriage bans on emergency appeal from states "sends a pretty clear message to people … about how they're going to finally decide this issue."
That decision, in turn, could arrive much sooner than any appeals Alabama still has in the federal judicial appeals pipeline. In the meantime, gay-marriage supporters have filed two more lawsuits seeking to overturn the ban and require individual counties to issue same-sex marriage licenses.
Roy Moore, the Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice trying to defend the state against what he called "unlawful federal authority," could conceivably find himself confronting U.S. marshals coming to enforce a high court ruling on gay marriage, said Leonard.
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