Tom Minnery Ph.D.

The presentations on this morning’s panel have as their title: “Faith and Family: the Vital Bond.” And the subtitle for these presentations focuses the point even more sharply. It is “Messages of Hope.”

And there can be no more suitable title and subtitle for my remarks to you today than those words. For in the United States, in the last three years, we have seen an unprecedented response by the community of faith, represented mostly by local churches and their pastors, to a very direct attack on the sanctity of the family, namely, an assault on the definition of marriage.

The attack was launched, not by any large expression of sentiment from the American people, but rather by a court decision from a single court in a single state. The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts decreed in 2003 that it was a violation of the Constitution of the State of Massachusetts for the institution of marriage to be limited to its ancient definition of one man and one woman.

Now Massachusetts has been a state since 1788, and its Constitution was written by one the American founding fathers, and our second president, John Adams. The idea that any part of that document could remotely require the marriages of two men or two women would have been dismissed by him as absolutely ridiculous. Indeed, a portion of the preamble to the state constitution of Massachusetts is a prayer of thanksgiving to God for His blessings upon the people of Massachusetts.

On May 17, 2004, the marriage of homosexuals began in Massachusetts. At the time, our great fear was that homosexual couples from other states would travel to Massachusetts for the purpose of marriage, and then return to their home states to file lawsuits in local courts, demanding that their own state recognize their marriages. Thankfully, that did not happen, because eventually the governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, invoked an old state law that confined marriages only to residents of the state. (A new governor has campaigned to eliminate that law, however).

For awhile, it looked as though homosexual marriages would spread quickly across the United States, and so in response, in state after state, local Christian people began mobilizing to change their own state constitutions to define marriage directly and explicitly as an institution between one man and one woman. In past years, several states already accomplished that as a result of earlier legal battles with homosexuals, but by Election Day 2004, citizens in 11 states had managed to place on the election ballot, either by vote of their elected representatives in state legislatures or by the initiative (plebiscite) process.

On that single day, every one of those 11 ballot measures passed, by an overwhelming vote of the people. The average vote in those 11 states was 70 percent to 30 percent. To the best of my knowledge, our country has never experienced such overwhelming support for any significant public issue, as it has for the institution of marriage in 2004. The national media was shocked, and wondered, collectively, where had all of those conservative people come from?

The trend continued in 2006, when eight more states voted on whether to define marriage in their constitutions, and seven of those eight did so. The only loss was in the state of Arizona, and that measure was defeated there by a combination of unusual local factors. The organizers plan to return the measure to the ballot next year, in 2008.

In summary, a total of 28 states have voted on whether to preserve the traditional definition of marriage, and 27 have done so, most of them overwhelmingly.

My organization, Focus on the Family, has been involved in nearly all of these battles, as have the representatives of several of the American pro-family organizations represented at this conference. The work of Focus on the Family has included the purchasing of advertising, registering people to vote, encouraging pastors to preach about the sanctity of marriage, and consulting with attorneys to produce suitable language for the ballot measures.

Our familiarity with this series of state-by-state campaigns leads me to make the following observations, which may be helpful to you:

• These campaigns were built from the ground up, not from the top down. Average people became citizen activists when they understood the importance of the issue at stake.

• Few of the measures would have succeeded without commitment from many local churches and their pastors. We have been frustrated for a long time about the unwillingness of pastors to speak out on social issues, but when the issue became the institution of marriage, an institution vital to the church and ordained by God, many pastors jumped into the campaign.

• A significant part of the campaign involved voter registration drives in local churches, and our strategy to assist pastors was led by Peter Brandt, a senior director in the Public Policy Division of Focus on the Family, who is in attendance at this conference with me. We expect to see these voter registration drives continue in the years ahead. If this indeed happens, it will mark a substantial advance in social action by local churches.

• A bad miscalculation by our opponents contributed to some of our success. In the months following the start of homosexual marriage in Massachusetts, leftist politicians in several other states began issuing marriage certificates to homosexual couples, out of a sense of exuberance, and in plain violation of their own state laws. Among the locations where this happened was in the state of Oregon, one of our most liberal states. That action alone energized the pastors in the state of Oregon to respond, and in that liberal state, it was pastors, rather than citizen activists, who led the fight to put a marriage measure on the Oregon ballot. One of the pastors who led this effort told me that as long as homosexual marriage was something that was occurring in far-off Massachusetts (on our east coast) he could ignore it, but when it started to happen here in Oregon (on our west coast) he could no longer remain silent.

• Homosexual activists across the country realized that the battle on their side was going badly, and they desperately desired at least one victory, so they concentrated much of their effort in this one liberal state of Oregon. But even there, marriage prevailed on Election Day by a comfortable margin of 57 percent to 43 percent. This exposes the decisive influence that can be wielded by the local church, even in states such as Oregon, which are reliably liberal.

• The issue of marriage produced unprecedented cooperation among Christian organizations dedicated to a variety of pro-family causes. For example, Focus on the Family printed and distributed voter registration kits to pastors, but the content of those kits was produced not by us but by the Southern Baptist Convention, which simply gave to us what they had labored to produce.

• At the national level, the campaign to save the institution of marriage has produced an unprecedented level of cooperation among conservative organizations devoted to the family. A coalition known as the Arlington Group, containing representatives of some 50 organizations began meeting on the issue of marriage, and it continues to meet periodically in Washington D.C., n\and now has expanded its range of issues.

• The work of the Arlington Group coalition at first centered on the task of producing an amendment to the federal constitution, rather than trying to solve the problem state by state. A federal solution remains the ultimate answer to the problem, and until marriage is defined clearly in the federal constitution, the threat to marriage will not be ended.

• In Massachusetts, citizen activists are at work to reverse the damage of the court decision and, remarkably, they have advanced further in the process than many of us ever expected.. Their ultimate goal is to place the traditional definition of marriage on the ballot statewide. In that particular state, the process is complicated and lengthy, but the activists are half way there.