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Mike Huckabee Politics Republican

Mike Huckabee Threatens to Leave The Republican Party – Audio

Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder

Since the United States Supreme Court decided not to take up same sex marriage, over 30 more states have adopted the lower courts’ decision and allowed gay couples to marry their partners. This is not going over well with some Republicans and some, like former Republican Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, is demanding that the party stand up and defend its values.

Huckabee warns that if the Republicans fail to lead, he and more like him, will leave the party and become members of the independent.

On Wednesday’s broadcast of American Family Association’s Today’s Issues program, Huckabee lambasted the Republican party and it’s leaders for allowing gays to marry and giving up on their so-called “moral” obligation in being the obvious superior party.

*Eyeroll*

“I am utterly exasperated with Republicans and the so-called leadership of the Republicans who have abdicated on this issue,” warning that by doing so the GOP will “guarantee they’re going to lose every election in the future.”

“Guarantee it,” he said before proclaiming that the Republicans are going to “lose guys like me and a whole bunch of still God-fearing, Bible-believing people” if the party does not stand and fight on the issues of gay marriage and abortion.

“I’m gone,” Huckabee warned. “I’ll become an independent. I’ll start finding people that have guts to stand. I’m tired of this”:

Audio

Categories
Politics

Chris Christie – Very Unhappy with Supreme Court’s Ruling on DOMA

Chris Christie is not too happy with the Supreme Court’s ruling on gay marriage.

“I don’t think the ruling was appropriate,” said Christie, who is running for reelection in a blue state, one in which Democrats have hailed the SCOTUS decision on gay marriage.
“I think it was wrong,” Christie continued, calling it “typical of the problem we see” in New Jersey’s own Supreme Court.

He blasted the U.S. Supremes for substituting “their own judgment for the judgment of a Republican Congress and a Democratic President. In the Republican Congress in the ‘90s and Bill Clinton. I thought that Justice Kennedy’s opinion was, in many respects, incredibly insulting to those people, 340-some members of Congress who voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, and Bill Clinton.”

“He basically said that the only reason to pass that bill was to demean people. That’s heck of a thing to say about Bill Clinton and about the Republican Congress back in the ‘90s. And it’s just another example of judicial supremacy, rather than having the government run by the people we actually vote for,” said Christie, who recently appeared with Clinton at a Clinton Global Initiative conference.

Clinton himself has walked away from the signing of DOMA, and in a statement said he was pleased with the court’s ruling.

Christie is polling as a top prospect for the GOP presidential nomination in 2016, and a number of evangelical leaders made clear after the SCOTUS ruling that the base of the party will remain opposed to same-sex marriage.

Yet, Christie is running in an overwhelmingly Democratic state, and wooing Democrats has been a huge part of a strategy aimed at driving up his margin of victory, should he win over rival Barbara Buono.

Categories
Politics

Analysis: Supreme Court Will Not Budge On Same Sex Marriage

If the country is rushing headlong toward full-throated endorsement of same-sex marriage, the Supreme Court apparently didn’t get the memo.

Over two days of oral arguments on what has been described as the civil rights issue of the 21st century, the justices spent more time addressing mundane matters of states’ rights and judicial standing than threshold issues of equality and morality.

The result still may be at least incremental progress for the gay rights movement, but it’s likely to come more with a whimper than a bang — and with substantial regrets about the way the two cases were presented, argued and decided.

The best guess at this point is that the court, controlled by Justice Anthony Kennedy, its swing vote, will leave California’s gay marriage ban in the hands of that state’s courts, which already have struck it down. That would legalize gay marriage in the nation’s largest state — no small matter — but would not implicate similar bans in 37 other states.

And even on the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which offered a fatter target for the court because it denies financial and other benefits to legally married same-sex couples, the court fretted more over the government’s jurisdiction than matters of morality.

Categories
marriage equality Politics

Love Is Natural, Hatred Is Learned

Two alcoholic heterosexuals get married. They produce a child with fetal alcohol syndrome. This marriage has the blessings of both state and church. Two men or two women who want to marry each other, who are upstanding members of their communities and have adopted and raised productive children, are prohibited in most states and allowed civil unions, which are inferior to marriage in fact and in law, in a few.

This is equality under the law?

Marriage equality will be the law of the land sometime in the future but, for most gays and lesbians, justice delayed is justice denied. How can this be? How can a country that promises freedom and civil rights for all of its citizens continue to deny basic rights to a sizable group?

Opponents say that being gay is unnatural and that there’s something inherently wrong with loving someone of the same gender. That’s exactly wrong. Love is one of the most natural processes humans have. You don’t even have to think about it. It just happens from the time we’re born and lasts throughout our life.

Hatred and discrimination, on the other hand, are unnatural. We need to remember that people are not born anti-gay. Discrimination and hatred are learned behaviors and most children learn them from the very adults who claim to be fair, just and responsible. And why are these adults anti-gay? Some are frightened or threatened or jealous or ignorant or all of the above. Some use a rigid cultural definition of what constitutes a family. Some are offended by how other people show their love. Some use a deity as a weapon to threaten and marginalize.

The religious argument strikes me as utter hypocrisy. How can we love the sinner but hate the sin? Isn’t that attitude responsible for sanctioned discrimination and actions against homosexuals? The same goes for the social argument that the right wing peddles. How can the party that lives on freedom and keeping the government out of our lives continue to preach that government should deny marriage equality? Both groups have made the claim that allowing gays to marry would damage heterosexual marriage. In fact, the opposite is true. Marriage has been shown to make families more stable and productive, strengthens commitments to social values, and provides for economic expansion as people make purchases for different stages of life. Gender preference has nothing to do with how we love our family members or how firmly we commit to them.

The more compelling democratic argument is that every adult should be able to marry the person they love, adopt children and be protected by all laws and rights that all other adults have, including economic rights and privileges.  A federal court decision on Wednesday used an employment benefits case to determine that the Defense of Marriage Act was unconstitutional. The decision by U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White was unambiguous in its defense of liberty and equality:

“The imposition of subjective moral beliefs of a majority upon a minority cannot provide a justification for the legislation. The obligation of the Court is ‘to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code,'” White wrote. “Tradition alone, however, cannot form an adequate justification for a law….The ‘ancient lineage” of a classification does not render it legitimate….Instead, the government must have an interest separate and apart from the fact of tradition itself.”

 On February 7th, a panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found that:

“Proposition 8 (which denied homosexuals the right to marry) served no purpose, and had no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California.”

These courts have it exactly right. Denying citizens their full rights because of who they love is utter nonsense. The history of the United States shows us to be a country of inclusive rights. To have candidates for the highest office in the land proudly proclaim their preference for discrimination, hatred and disdain is obnoxious, offensive and backwards. Marriage equality is on its way. Let’s make it sooner rather than later.

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