Below The Beltway

As summer turns into fall, the fall election will heat up considerably, and one of the biggest fights in Virginia this year, aside from the Senate race between George Allen and James Webb, will be over the referendum to add an Amendment banning same-sex marriage to Virginia’s Constitution. As I’ve announced before, I am opposed [...]

The Washington Supreme Court has upheld that state’s Defense of Marriage Act, dealing yet another setback to the effort to legalize same-sex marriage.
OLYMPIA, Wash. — The state Supreme Court upheld a ban on gay marriage Wednesday, saying lawmakers have the power to restrict marriage to unions between a man and woman.
The 5-4 decision disappointed gay-marriage [...]

Yea, I know it seems about as likely as snow in the Sahara, but people are worried enough about it that they’ve got an Amendment on the ballot this year just like Virginia.
Glenn Reynolds isn’t happy about the idea:
I’m going to try to figure out what I can do to oppose this measure, though it’s [...]

I cross-posted my Friday essay Getting Government Out Of The Marriage Business at The Liberty Papers and its generated quite an interesting response from my fellow bloggers over there.
First Brad Warbiany picks up on a quote from my post and asks this question
Imagine that you?ve been married 20 years. You got married in the Church, [...]

That’s what one New York Assemblywoman is proposing in the wake of yesterday’s Court of Appeals decision:
Assemblywoman Barbara Lifton, D-125th District, who announced her plan to run for re-election a few hours after the court decision was made public, said this about the court ruling:
?Let’s get government out of the wedding business and have everyone, [...]

The strategy of using the Court system to establish the right of homosexuals to marry was dealt a setback in two states today as both New York and Georgia’s highest courts declined to rule that bans against gay marriage are unconstitutional.
First, in New York the Court of Appeals stated that the New York’s marriage law [...]

The summer is barely halfway over, and already both opponents and supporters are taking an aggressive stance in the fight over the Virginia intiative to amend the state Constitution to ban gay marriage.
The proposed state constitutional amendment that would ban same-sex marriage in Virginia has sparked an aggressive fundraising effort, with each side of the [...]

There are several pieces out today on the issue of whether the arguments being advanced in favor of gay marriage will, over time, be used by those who practice polygamy as support for the argument that their relationships should be legalized.
First, Charles Krauthammer writes on the issue and argues that the answer is emphatically yes.
In [...]

Today’s Washington Post reports that Virginia is on the verge of becoming the newest state to have a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage on its ballot:
A proposal to write a ban on same-sex marriage into the Virginia Constitution has won easy Senate passage.
With only a fraction of the debate the measure received yesterday, the [...]