The bill, which would grant homosexual couples all the state legal benefits of marriage except the name, passed the Senate 13-6 on April 7 and now moves to the House. Both chambers are controlled by Democrats; Democratic Gov. Jack Markell supports the bill.
"Every time civil unions have been imposed on a state, demands for same-sex 'marriage' have followed," the traditional group Delaware Family Policy Council said in a statement. "The activists lobbying for civil unions really want same-sex 'marriage.' Since they cannot convince people to redefine marriage (losing 31 out of 31 times when marriage protection or redefinition has been brought to a vote of the people), they pursue strategies such as civil unions as a stop-gap until they get what they really want."
Three states -- Connecticut, New Hampshire and Vermont -- have legalized civil unions only later to legalize "gay marriage."
Seven states recognize either civil unions or their cousin, domestic partnerships. Five states recognize "gay marriage."
PROF ESTIMATES GAY POPULATION
A professor at UCLA has examined surveys from the past seven years and estimated that 1.7 percent of the U.S. population is homosexual and an additional 1.8 percent is bisexual, the Los Angeles Times reported. The estimate by Gary Gates of the Williams Institute at UCLA's School of Law would mean that about 9 million people are homosexual or bisexual.
FEDERAL COURT: STUDENT CAN HAND OUT CHURCH FLIERS
An elementary student and her mother can distribute church-related fliers at an elementary school in Sherwood, Ark., while their court case proceeds, a federal court said in late March.
The Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) sued the Pulaski County Special School District last year after the district told the family the fliers could not be distributed because they were advertising "church-related" activities. The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas, Western Division, issued a preliminary injunction that said the student is likely to win the case on First Amendment grounds. The court wrote that school officials "seem to permit almost any organization, with the exception of churches, to circulate material. Indeed, the record clearly shows that defendants' regulations, as presently enforced, merely stamp out certain viewpoint-based speech."
Compiled by Michael Foust, associate editor of Baptist Press. World News Service contributed the brief about the church flier court ruling.
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