Civil Unions Turn One Year Old
Posted October 29, 2007

Thursday marked the one-year anniversary of same-sex unions in New Jersey. On October 25, 2006, the State Supreme Court handed down a 4-3 ruling that left to the state legislature the decision either to legalize same sex "marriage" or to allow unions conferring the same benefits of marriage but called by a different name.

The legislature responded on December 14 by passing the New Jersey Civil Union law. Governor Corzine signed the law a week later, and it went into effect on February 19, 2007.

Former New Jersey Supreme Court Justice Deborah Poritz, who reached the mandatory retirement age of 70 one day after the court's decision, believed the court's ruling didn't go far enough. "Ultimately, the message is that what same-sex couples have is not as important or significant as 'real' marriage, that such lesser relationships cannot have the name of marriage." Poritz wrote in the minority opinion.

But for the majority, Justice Barry Albin wrote, "We cannot escape the reality that the shared societal meaning of marriage - passed down through the common law into our statutory law - has always been the union of a man and a woman..To alter that meaning would render a profound change in the public consciousness of a social institution of ancient origin."

Yet despite Albin's warning, pro-gay marriage advocates have spent the last year and more seeking to "escape the reality" of the real meaning of marriage. In an anniversary letter to Governor Corzine, Senate President Richard Codey, and Assembly Speaker Joe Roberts, Kevin Cathcart, Executive Director of Lambda Legal, a pro-lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender advocacy group, wrote, "It is time to establish equality in New Jersey and allow same-sex couples to marry just as other couples can." The letter continued to state, "[E]ven where same-sex couples appear to have the same concrete benefits that married couples do, they do not have the security and dignity of being able to explain to their children, their neighbors, or their children's teachers that they are married. Civil unions are a discriminatory label that renders same-sex couples different and inferior.."

For millennia, the institution of marriage has been defined as the union of one man and one woman with the threefold purpose of preventing sexual immorality, providing companionship, and procreating and rearing children for the continuance of society.
While same-sex couples may claim to boast a level of companionship and, by self-created standards of "morality," may even assert that their actions are morally acceptable, it is, nonetheless, a biologic impossibility for them to procreate without outside assistance. Additionally, they violate the very children they do claim for themselves by depriving them of either a mother or a father.

By their very nature, same-sex unions are unable to fill the core purposes of marriage. Indeed, their effect is the actual deconstruction of the very cornerstone of a stable society.

As New Jersey marks one year of civil union acceptance, it should not be with joy. However, we should have a re-invigorated determination to protect the time-honored institution of marriage and say YES to the time tested union of one man and one woman who are knitted together physically, spiritually and emotionally through God-ordained marriage. To change that definition would not be a redefinition but rather the destruction of a core meaning of marriage and the understanding of our society and its people here in New Jersey. So we say, "Let the People Vote" on the definition of marriage!

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