With a potentially precedent-setting legal challenge to California's Proposition 8 working its way through the federal court system, the National Constitution Center presents a timely program on the issue of same-sex marriage. Last November, California voters approved the Proposition 8 ballot measure, amending their state Constitution to ban marriages between same-sex couples. A lawsuit filed on behalf of two gay couples wishing to marry has attracted national attention.
David Boies, one of the leading lawyers in the case, is joined in a conversation by Keith Boykin, Maggie Gallagher and Glenn Stanton. Margot Adler moderates.
Bio
Margot Adler
Margot Adler is a National Public Radio correspondent based in NPR's New York Bureau. Her reports can be heard regularly on "All Things Considered," "Morning Edition" and "Weekend Edition." She has been with NPR since 1979 and worked in radio journalism for 40 years. Until June 2008, she hosted NPR's "Justice Talking," a weekly show that explored the cases and controversies that come before our nation's courts.
Adler is the author of two books, Drawing Down the Moon, a study of contemporary nature religions and Heretic's Heart, a 1960s memoir. In 1982 she was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.
David Boies
David Boies is a founder of and the chairman of the law firm Boies, Schiller & Flexner. This year, with Theodore Olson, he successfully argued in federal court for the overturning of Proposition 8, California's ban of same-sex marriage. He previously served as lead counsel to Al Gore in his litigation relating to the 2000 Presidential election and as special trial counsel for the U.S. Department of Justice in its successful antitrust suit against Microsoft. In 2004, he published "Courting Justice."
Keith Boykin
Keith Boykin is the editor of The Daily Voice online news site, a CNBC contributor, a BET TV host, and a New York Times best-selling author. He served in the White House as a special assistant to President Bill Clinton.
Each of Boykin's three books has been nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, including his most recent book, Beyond the Down Low: Sex, Lies and Denial in Black America. Boykin won the Lambda Literary Award for his second book, Respecting The Soul. He is an associate producer of the 2007 feature film "Dirty Laundry" and is working on his fourth book.
Maggie Gallagher
Maggie Gallagher is president of the National Organization for Marriage, which the Washington Post recently called the "pre-eminent organization dedicated to preventing the legalization of same-sex marriage." NOM is widely credited with getting Proposition 8 on the ballot. She is also president of the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy (www.marriagedebate.com).
Gallagher is a nationally syndicated columnist, the author of three books on marriage, including The Case for Marriage: Why Married People are Happier, Healthier, and Better-Off Financially.
Glenn T. Stanton
Glenn T. Stanton is the Director for Family Formation Studies at Focus on the Family in Colorado Springs as well as directing a major research project on international family formation trends at la Institut du Mariage et de la Famille Canada. He served the George W. Bush administration for many years as a consultant on increasing fatherhood involvement in the Head Start program.
Stanton is a founding signatory of the new Hampton Proclamation, a cooperative effort of diverse leaders launched by the National Center on African American Marriages and Parenting at Hampton University with the goal of strengthening marriage and married parenting in the African-American community. He has contributed to eight books and is the author of three including Why Marriage Matters: Reasons to Believe in Marriage in Postmodern Society and Marriage on Trial: The Case Against Same-Sex Marriage and Parenting. He is currently completing Beyond Pink and Blue, about the significance of sex-difference in child development and parenting.
Civil-rights movement that advocates equal rights for gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transsexuals. Supporters of gay rights seek to eliminate sodomy laws barring homosexual acts between consenting adults and call for an end to discrimination against gay men and lesbians in employment, credit, lending, housing, marriage, adoption, public accommodations, and other areas of life. The first group to campaign publicly was founded in Berlin in 1897 by Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935) and had 25 local chapters in Europe by 1922; suppressed by the Nazis, it did not survive World War II. The first U.S. support group, the Mattachine Society, was founded in Los Angeles c. 1950; the Daughters of Bilitis, for lesbians, was founded in San Francisco in 1955. The Dutch Association for the Integration of Homosexuality COC, founded as the COC (Cultuur en Ontspannings Centrum [“Culture and Recreation Center”]) in 1946 and headquartered in Amsterdam, is a prominent European group and the oldest existing gay rights organization. Many date the expansion of the modern gay rights movement to the Stonewall rebellion in New York City in 1969, when a raid by police on a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn provoked a riot by bar patrons. “Stonewall” came to be commemorated annually by the observance of Gay and Lesbian Pride Week in cities around the world. The International Lesbian and Gay Association (founded 1978), headquartered in Brussels, lobbies for human rights and opposes discrimination against homosexuals. Although the movement is strongest in western Europe and North America, gay rights organizations exist in many countries throughout the world. Among the major issues pressed by gay rights advocates in the 1990s and into the 21st century were the passage of hate crime laws and the establishment of legal rights for homosexuals to marry, adopt children, and serve openly in the military.
I am so sick and tired of Maggie Gallagher misrepresenting the facts so she can play the victim card! The Methodist Group (notice she didn't say Church) that she and the other members of NOM love to mention did not lose their tax exemption simply because they wouldn't allow a lesbian couple to get married.
First off, it was a civil union ceremony, NOT a wedding. Same sex marriage is not recognized in NJ. A technicality, yes, but it gets better.
Second, this wasn't a church she is talking about. This Methodist group owned several buildings on a camp site, one of which was a beachside pavilion that received a tax exemption from New Jersey. This was not the type of exemption a religious institution gets for being a religious institution. This was given to them by NJ's Dept. of Environmental Protection and one of the stipulations of this exemption was that it be open to the public. In fact, they were originally denied this exemption because NJ didn't think that it would be used enough by the public to warrant the exemption.
Once they did get the exemption, they held many interfaith weddings, and secular events. When a lesbian couple wanted to have their civil union there, they said no and later had their exemption taken away because they violated the state's sexual orientation nondiscrimination policy.
Had the couple wanted to get married in the church and were denied, they would have had no legal recourse!
NJ basically said that if you're going to reap the benefits of being open to the public, that means you have to be open to ALL of the public.
MAGGIE, STOP LYING AND PRETENDING THAT YOU'RE NOT!
Ok, Maggie Gallagher's argument against gay marriage seems to boil down to "if we legalize this, it will be even tougher to be an outspoken homophobe in America than it already is." Well, that's a great argument for denying civil rights to an entire subset of our population, isn't it?
C'mon, people. Have have a heart for those poor, downtrodden homophobes. Let's deny gays their right to get married so future bigots won't get their feelings hurt.
To me the most important section is the purpose of the state in marriage. If we got rid of marriage as a legal institution this debate would be over. We would no longer need to argue about this because everybody could live their lives as they please. Then people could make their own legal arrangments as for as marriage is concerned and single people would have the same monetary value of benefits from their employers and pay the same percentage of their income in taxes as married people do. This would be a true reflection of what the framers intended. True equality under the law. This has been my position for some time and I don't understand why it doesn't get more steam.
The historical ideal form for raising a child wasn't one or two... it was a dozen or more. The arguments in favor of Prop H8 are just so vapid and disoriented.
The guy with a goatee is a victim of his own idiotic and off-base generalizations. NOT all cultures have marriage, and NOT all cultures list it between a man and woman or the "two branches of humanity" - whatever the hell that is supposed to mean. He's obviously an evangelical Christian, because he doesn't know anything about anything. His ENTIRE argument in part 4 is completely and irrevocably wrong. If he had ever actually read anything, he would know that. There are cultures with same sex marriage all around the world, but his wonderful Jesus freaks have DESTROYED those cultures over the course of 500 years. I could go on and on, but I'll leave with this point...
"If you go and read the anthropologists"... oh right, THE anthropologists, the unified anthropologist collective, got it. The same anthropologists who show that your religion is an artificially created tradition of nomadic tribesmen, which has absolutely zero historical recognition making it more "factual" than any of the other THOUSANDS of tradition? Thanks guy!
member. 
