(LifeSiteNews) — On this week’s episode of The Van Maren Show, Jonathon is joined by conservative activist and author Amy Contrada to discuss her recent book Corrupt Bargains: How Gay Marriage Began in Massachusetts.
According to Contrada, the reason why Massachusetts began allowing same-sex “marriage” in 2003 is because of a lack of conservative leadership and the scheming of politicians from both parties, highlighting the state’s then-Republican Governor Mitt Romney in a constitutional fight that dates to the late 1990s.
At that time, she explains, there was a push for a constitutional amendment to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman after Vermont passed a same-sex “civil unions” law. A petition supporting the amendment managed to receive enough support for the state legislature to vote on it. But the leadership in both parties illegally ignored it – something Romney and acting governor Jane Swift, also a Republican, did in the buildup to the state Supreme Court ruling in 2003 that designated same-sex “marriage” a constitutional “right.”
Contrada emphasizes that conservatives failed to point out in the aftermath that court rulings are not laws. She also notes that language used by laws to “protect” sexual orientation and “gender identity” never define what they intend to protect, saying “we don’t know what these things are, and yet we’re making rights for people who define themselves that way.”
She also believes that another failure on the part of conservative activists was shying away from moral language, recounting that with a few exceptions, most people were afraid of being labelled “homophobic” in the face of leftist propaganda, operating under the belief that moral arguments would “turn off the public.”
“If you challenge [same-sex ‘marriage’] in any way, you cannot bring up morality,” she recalls vis-a-vis the arguments used. “You cannot bring up religion, you cannot bring up public health … All you can say is every child needs a mother and a father, and that’s why we have to preserve real marriage.”
“If you look at history and you understand that we are in fact on a slippery slope … this is what happens when you don’t step up and stop being a chicken about saying something about morality,” Contrada explains. “You got to speak up at the time, which we didn’t do then.”
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