Author Archive | Dale Carpenter

In today’s Wall Street Journal (available online only to subscribers), Bob Barr comes out against “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and lambastes the Republican presidential field for timidity on the issue: As a conservative Republican member of Congress from 1995 to 2003, I was hardly a card-carrying member of the gay-rights lobby. I opposed then, and […]

Jonathan Rauch has written a characteristically generous, thoughtful, and engaging review of David Blankenhorn’s recent book arguing against gay marriage, The Future of Marriage. Rauch writes: [Blankenhorn] wants to lift the gay-marriage debate from its isolation in the mud-pit of the partisan culture wars and place it within a larger theory of marriage. He also […]

President Bush’s recent nomination of Dr. James Holsinger for Surgeon General has drawn a lot of criticism. In 1991, Holsinger wrote a paper for a committee of the United Methodist Church studying homosexuality entitled “Pathophysiology of Male Homosexuality.” Holsinger cited and quoted from a few studies and concluded thus: When the complementarity of the sexes […]

After we were told that the various state marriage amendments around the country were just about “protecting” marriage from gay couples, we’re starting to see consequences that go well beyond marriage. In Michigan, an appeals court has ruled that the state marriage amendment passed in 2004 forbids public entities from offering even health benefits to […]

I support antidiscrimination laws that prohibit certain types of group-based discrimination by government, including discrimination based on sexual orientation. I also support extending these principles to the private sphere on important matters like employment and housing, with some limitations and exemptions. On this, I may be less libertarian than some of my co-Conspirators. Nevertheless, I […]

A good column today about Lou Dobbs’ latest whopper, that “invading” immigrants are bringing an epidemic of leprosy to the U.S.:

In a new column, I argue that anti-gay marriage policy is pushing gay families to seek alternative protection in family law though untraditional means. These work-arounds, however, are also available to straight couples and may undermine marriage and traditional parental presumptions and family forms in ways that gay marriage would not. Here are are four […]

In Britain, seven years after being forced by a European court to allow gays to serve openly, the policy is producing yawns: Since the British military began allowing homosexuals to serve in the armed forces in 2000, none of its fears

As of today, gay couples have been marrying in Massachusetts for three years. In each state legislative session since then, there’s been an effort to ban gay marriage by constitutional amendment. Initially there was strong legislative opposition to gay marriages, with perhaps 3/5 of the state’s 200 house and senate members supporting some form of […]

In a unanimous opinion joined by the court’s Republican-appointed justices, the Minnesota Supreme Court today upheld a trial court order that a woman should be allowed visitation with the two children she helped raise with her lesbian partner of 22 years. The trial court’s order was based on a Minnesota statute allowing third parties to […]

President-elect Nicolas Sarkozy’s first speech to the French nation concluded with a wonderful endorsement of human rights. (Video here.) Sarkozy spoke from a prepared text , which appears on his official campaign websites. If you read the text while listening to the speech, you will find various minor ways in which he deviated from the […]

Over at National Review Online, Stanley Kurtz is touting a Pennsylvania state appellate court decision involving a lesbian couple and a sperm donor as the latest evidence that gay marriage will “dissolve the family” and lead to multi-partner marriage. Kurtz misunderstands both the substance and the import of the decision, which can be found here. […]

The bill passed the House today, 237-180. It goes on to the Senate. A statement released by the administration says that Bush’s senior advisors will recommend a veto. That’s not quite the same as saying he will veto it, but it’s pretty close. If he does, it would be the third of his presidency, after […]

Two interesting op-eds in today’s New York Times offer ways to deal with the troubling persistence of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. One calls for Congress to impeach Gonzales: A false claim not to remember is just as much a lie as a conscious misrepresentation of a fact one remembers well. Instances of phony forgetfulness seem […]

Two weeks after the state house did so, today the state senate voted to grant same-sex couples all of the rights, benefits, and responsibilities of married couples under state law. The governor has said he will sign the bill. As in the other states that have adopted civil unions, the new status is limited to […]