He turned himself into a pretzel trying to justify a Catholic vote for the abortion candidate, now abortion president, Barack Obama. Latest great idea: he thinks we ought to ditch marriage as a legal institution.
From the Catholic News Service:
"Awkward"? What's awkward is Kmiec's employment at a reputedly Catholic institution. One has to seriously question his Catholic identity and beliefs. Or his sanity.Doug Kmiec, a prominent Catholic who backed Barack Obama’s presidential bid, has endorsed replacing marriage with a neutral “civil license,” a proposal law professor Robert P. George called a “terrible idea” that would make the government neglect a vital social institution.
Speaking to CNSNews.com, Pepperdine University law professor Doug Kmiec said that although his solution to disputes over the definition of marriage might be “awkward,” it would “untie the state from this problem” by creating a new terminology that would apply to everyone, homosexual or not. “Call it a ‘civil license’,” he said.“The net effect of that, would be to turn over--quite appropriately, it seems to me, the concept of marriage to churches and a church understanding,” he said.
Read the rest for his reasoning. More Kmiec-ish ideas: let's pave over our lawns so we won't have to cut the grass, and call everyone Bruce to avoid confusion.
Robert George, noted defender of the unborn, says this:
h/t: K-LoGeorge told CNSNews.com that marriage is not like baptisms and bar mitzvahs but has “profound” social and public significance.
“It’s a pre-political institution,” he said. “It exists even apart from religion, even apart from polities. It’s the coming together of a husband and wife, creating the institution of family in which children are nurtured.”
“The family is the original and best Department of Health, Education and Welfare,” he continued, saying that governments, economies and legal systems all rely on the family to produce “basically honest, decent law abiding people of goodwill – citizens – who can take their rightful place in society.”
“Family is built on marriage, and government--the state--has a profound interest in the integrity and well-being of marriage, and to write it off as if it were a purely a religiously significant action and not an institution and action that has a profound public significance, would be a terrible mistake,” George told CNSNews.com.
“I don’t know where Professor Kmiec is getting his idea, but it’s a very, very bad one.”
Cross-posted and updated in the Green Room. There are some comments over there.
RSM links and comments, contra-Kmiec. Ed Morrissey goes with Kmiec. Unfortunately I won't be around to follow the argument today.
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