Family Council Responds to Arkansas Poll on Same-Sex Marriage

1 CommentHomosexuality, Marriage, ,

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Wednesday, October 23, 2013

LITTLE ROCK, ARK. – On Wednesday, the University of Arkansas released its fifteenth annual Arkansas Poll. The poll included questions regarding Arkansans’ views of same-sex marriage and civil unions.

Family Council President Jerry Cox released a statement saying he agrees with the general conclusions made by the University of Arkansas. “The poll says, ‘by and large results were similar to previous years, with less than a quarter of Arkansans supporting marriage or civil unions for same-sex couples. When it comes to the statement “There should be no legal recognition of a gay couple’s relationship,” only 46 percent of Arkansans agreed, the first time the response has dipped below 50 percent.’ Overall, I don’t think this poll shows us anything all that new. Sixty-seven percent of the people polled said they do not support same-sex marriage. Twenty-three percent said that they do. Now, yes, some of that sixty-seven percent say they support civil unions and domestic partnerships, but if you look at the numbers, you see that has always been the case in Arkansas.”

Cox said there’s a lot of debate and confusion over what constitutes a civil union. “To some people, a civil union is something that gives a person the right to visit another person in the hospital. To others, it’s marriage by a different name.  Everyone has their own idea of what civil unions are.”

Cox also said there is much more going on than polls reveal. “Experts at RiceUniversity studied this issue for six years, from 2006 to 2012. What they found was that people on both sides of this issue change their minds. They don’t just switch from opposing same-sex marriage to supporting it. They also go from supporting same-sex marriage to opposing it. The end result, though, is not much has changed. Most people oppose same-sex marriage; some people support it; and some are undecided.

“The most important poll I’m concerned with is the one the State of Arkansas took in November of 2004, when seventy-five percent of Arkansas voters chose to define marriage as the union of one man to one woman. The way people answer polling questions about homosexuality and the way they vote are not the same. Experience tells us that in the privacy of the voting booth people vote more traditionally. If an election were held today, the majority of Arkansans would still vote to define marriage as the union of a man and a woman. That’s what counts.”

Family Council is a conservative education and research organization based in Little Rock, Arkansas.

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Words From Our Founders: John Adams’ Prayer Proclamation

Words From Our Founders,

John AdamsToday we continue our series examining our Founding Fathers in their own words and considering their high esteem for religion, religious liberty, and virtue.

Below is proclamation of prayer and fasting issued by President John Adams on March 19, 1799. Among other things, Adams offers prayers regarding “awful pestilential visitations” and the health of the American people as well as prayers for peace at home and abroad–presumably a reference to the Quasi-War, Fries’s Rebellion, and the battles and wars taking place between Napoleon Bonaparte and other European powers in Africa and elsewhere.

As no truth is more clearly taught in the Volume of Inspiration, nor any more fully demonstrated by the experience of all ages, than that a deep sense and a due acknowledgment of the governing providence of a Supreme Being, and of the accountableness of men to Him as the searcher of hearts and righteous distributor of rewards and punishments, are conducive, equally, to the happiness and rectitude of individuals, and to the well-being of communities; as it is, also, most reasonable, in itself, that men who are made capable of social acts and relations, who owe their improvements to the social state, and who derive their enjoyments from it, should, as a society, make their acknowledgments of dependence and obligation to Him who hath endowed them with these capacities and elevated them in the scale of existence by these distinctions; as it is, likewise, a plain dictate of duty, and a strong sentiment of nature, that in circumstances of great urgency and seasons of imminent danger, earnest and particular supplications should be made to Him who is able to defend or to destroy; as, moreover, the most precious interests of the people of the United States are still held in jeopardy, by the hostile designs and insidious acts of a foreign nation, as well as by the dissemination among them of those principles subversive of the foundations of all religious, moral, and social obligations, that have produced incalculable mischief and misery in other countries; and as, in fine, the observance of special seasons for public religious solemnities, is happily calculated to avert the evils which we ought to deprecate, and to excite to the performance of the duties which we ought to discharge, – by calling and fixing the attention of the people at large to the momentous truths already recited, by affording opportunity to teach and inculcate them, by animating devotion and giving to it the character of a national act:

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Words from Our Presidents: Eisenhower on Our Shared Convictions

Words from Our Presidents, ,

As part of a series entitled Words from Our Presidents we are bringing you different from quotes from U.S. Presidents on religious liberty and individual freedom. Today we have a quote from President Eisenhower on how our nation’s convictions are rooted in faith.

“Basic to our democratic civilization are the principles and convictions that have bound us together as a nation. Among these are personal liberty, human rights, and the dignity of man. All these have their roots in a deeply held religious faith — in a belief in God.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower
June 4, 1958

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