DNC platform will openly support marriage as being between…

… two adults, regardless of sex. File under, “If you’re surprised, we’ll assume you’ve been living on Mars for a while”:

Democrats are set to include a pro-gay marriage plank in their convention platform for the first time in history, party sources confirm to POLITICO. The language was approved unanimously by a 15-member platform draft committee, and now heads for approval by the full platform committee in August.

The party’s Platform Drafting Committee agreed, unanimously, to approve the language at a meeting this weekend in Minneapolis.

A source in the meeting said the decision was “not controversial.”

The language will not become official until the party’s full Platform Committee meets Aug. 10 in Detroit.

The effort to include gay marriage in the platform gained increased momentum after President Barack Obama announced in May that his views on the issue had changed to support legalization.

“I don’t think that we had any issues that were controversial,” one member of the committee said Monday. “I think we were pretty much in sync and in agreement with where we ended up.”

Read the entire piece on the Politico site. While we’re on the topic of assaults on marriage, family, and commonsense, here is an excerpt from Matthew Franck’s review of the book, Debating Same-Sex Marriage, co-authored by John Corvino and Maggie Gallagher:

But as Gallagher shows, the reason marriage exists in the first place is not to satisfy the longings of any two (or more) persons for social recognition of their desire to care for one another for the long haul, or to make anyone feel better about his place in society. The reason marriage exists is because (in the briefest version of her argument), “sex makes babies, society needs babies, children need mothers and fathers.” These are, she rightly notes, social problems for which marriage is the institutional solution. Our private relationships are generally none of the state’s proper business. But society’s manifest need to regulate procreation and the responsibility for children elevates marriage—and the legitimate family relations that flow from it—from the plane of private law to the plane of public law. As the family of mother, father, and children is more basic and natural than the state, so marriage, as the relationship that founds the family, needs and deserves all the status the state can bestow upon it.

What problem, by contrast, does same-sex marriage solve? No two persons of the same sex can, without the aid of others, generate children. Again, the best Corvino can offer is that “it’s good for people to have a special someone” and that “commitment matters.” True enough. But these are not, even remotely, social problems requiring an institutional solution. Marriage, for same-sex couples, is a solution in search of a problem.

Franck notes how the leading “argument” for same-sex marriage is an appeal to fairness and “equality”. A perfect example of this can be found in the op-ed, “How My View of Gay Marriage Changed” (New York Times, July 22, 2012), by David Blankenhorn, founder of the Institute for American Values, whose basic argument is, “Hey folks, I still don’t think gay marriage is really marriage, but in the name of fairness, we should all pretend like it is”:

No same-sex couple, married or not, can ever under any circumstances combine biological, social and legal parenthood into one bond. For this and other reasons, gay marriage has become a significant contributor to marriage’s continuing deinstitutionalization, by which I mean marriage’s steady transformation in both law and custom from a structured institution with clear public purposes to the state’s licensing of private relationships that are privately defined.

I have written these things in my book and said them in my testimony, and I believe them today. I am not recanting any of it.

But there are more good things under heaven than these beliefs. For me, the most important is the equal dignity of homosexual love. I don’t believe that opposite-sex and same-sex relationships are the same, but I do believe, with growing numbers of Americans, that the time for denigrating or stigmatizing same-sex relationships is over. Whatever one’s definition of marriage, legally recognizing gay and lesbian couples and their children is a victory for basic fairness.

Another good thing is comity. Surely we must live together with some degree of mutual acceptance, even if doing so involves compromise. Sticking to one’s position no matter what can be a virtue. But bending the knee a bit, in the name of comity, is not always the same as weakness. As I look at what our society needs most today, I have no stomach for what we often too glibly call “culture wars.” Especially on this issue, I’m more interested in conciliation than in further fighting.

Read the entire piece. Then weep for the death of beliefs, guts and logic.