as we move around try to see if we can do that see what its like good evening i'd like to welcome everyone here tonight to the marriage amendment forum i'm john brandt chair of the maplewood human rights commission and moderator of tonight's forum the forum is jointly sponsored by the human rights commissions of the city of maplewood and the city of roseville in the interest of minnesota open meeting laws human rights commissioners from the city of maplewood are present here this evening but we will not convene a commission meeting tonight and no business of the commission will be conducted we have four excellent speakers here this evening each are experts in their field are here tonight to share information and perspectives that we hope people will find useful in thinking through the pros and cons of the proposed marriage amendment before we hear from our first presenter we want to explain how this forum was developed provide some background on the marriage amendment and find out a little bit about who is in the audience this evening can i ask people to stand up if you are truly politically independent we're not asking anybody to define themselves as a republican or democrat yeah bob i think you've been outted and we're not going to ask anybody what their position is on the amendment or whether you're democrat or republican or conservative or liberal just if you are politically independent still standing please remain standing okay we got four people now second question among the people standing if you have pretty much decided how you were going to vote on the marriage amendment want you to sit back down okay thank you which leaves maybe two people maybe armando alright good job we got another recruit okay we've got a little experiment here and we're asking for two volunteers and we happen to have just two if you would go see maurice over here we've got a little experiment and you two folks are going to be part of our integrity response at the end of this presentation to give a little feedback on how we did with this event so if you'll see maurice you'll get it via a name tag and theresa will give you a handout so that you know what the four questions are that we're going to be talking about tonight and the questions for our integrity review panel are up on the screen i'll leave them up there for just a second so you can see them unfortunately i can't read them from here so if you can read them we'll also bring those up at the end of the forum when voters go to the polls on november 6th people will simply vote yes or no on the amendment questions but the commission believes that citizens of minnesota will vote yes or no for many different reasons many in the audience came here tonight with an opinion and not undoubtedly many are here this evening that have already decided how they're going to vote and many people are perhaps even passionate about the outcome so let's acknowledge that reasonable people see these issues very differently and that we all have a responsibility to be civil and respectful of our neighbors who have different viewpoints please listen and hear i'm sorry people listen and hear others better when discussions are more respectful than passionate to bring everybody up to speed on the current status of gay marriage i have a few slides and i'm gonna have to move down to the screen can people still hear me okay yes gay marriage is recognized in six states and washington dc states that currently recognize gay marriage include vermont new hampshire massachusetts connecticut new york and iowa civil unions are recognized in five states rhode island new jersey delaware illinois and hawaii gay marriage is currently not legal in thirty nine states in every state that has gay marriage it has been the result of a legislative initiative or court action in the thirty one times that it has been put to a popular vote gay marriage has been defeated in every state and incidentally it has been put to a popular vote or will be put to a popular vote more than once in some states this is a gallup poll from one thousand nine hundred and ninety six to two thousand and twelve and it helps to realize the direction that gay marriage is going in the united states in one thousand nine hundred and ninety six sixty eight of people polled by gallup's said that gay marriage should not be valid only twenty seven thought that they should be you can see as over the years that these have converged and for the first time in two thousand and eleven the gallup poll showed that there was a reversal in two thousand and eleven and that currently now i think this was in june of two thousand and twelve that it's very close fifty to forty eight in november two thousand and twelve gay marriage is on the ballot in four states in minnesota the ballot issue is to decide whether to ban gay marriage in minnesota in maryland and washington the ballot issue is a vote to wrap by legislation and in may if it passes it will be a vote to legalize gay marriage the polls indicate that each one of these ballot measures are very close in four states if it passes in any of these states it will be the first time that on ballot referendum supporting gay marriage has passed in the united states human rights commission announced over the summer that we would host two educational events on the proposed constitutional amendments one on voter identification and the other on the marriage amendment we chose two different formats for the town hall meetings and here's why there are basically two ways to provide a public event to learn more about important social issues one is the traditional debate format to have speakers for and against a proposal take polarized positions and present adversarial viewpoints the other is the familiar academic discussion essentially the traditional classroom that we are all familiar with from high school or college with the academic format speakers are invited for their knowledge in a particular area and asked to share information from their respective areas of expertise the two proposed amendments are both controversial but beyond that they are quite dissimilar the voter id amendment is inherently political so we chose a traditional debate format at the town hall meeting that we had at maplewood city hall two weeks ago the marriage amendment is different it reaches into the hearts minds and souls of many people in minnesota and politicizes very personal relationships between people while the voter id amendment has the potential to change how people vote in minnesota the marriage amendment has the potential to change how people live in minnesota for those that were expecting to hear a debate tonight between warring factions over gay marriage that is not the format the commission shows the less polarizing more civil and respectful academic format of an educational setting that all here tonight are well familiar with who should have the burden of responsibility to make the case for social change should it be those that propose a new constitutional amendment to maintain the status of traditional marriage or should it be those that are suggesting gay marriage should be recognized as a legitimate matter of civil rights the truth is we have difficulty we had difficulty finding experts to speak on either side of this issue the reasons actually are fairly obvious there are a lot of people on both sides of the marriage amendment that are long on opinions short on facts and loaded for bear our objective was to find four experts that have the education credentials knowledge and experience to bring highly credible information to the forum to that end the commission reached out to organizations on all sides of the marriage amendment and also to neutral organizations to find expert speakers we were dismayed that several pro amendment organizations declined our invitations the commission contacted organizers at minnesota for marriage seven times over the last three months we reached out to them three times by email and four times by phone we got no response by email and only one response by phone from a organization leader who told me that minnesota for marriage would not participate in our event if there were people speaking against the amendment at one point we had to decide if we were going to cancel the event or hold the event as planned with experts that could speak knowledgeably to the controversies around the marriage amendment we decided not to cancel the event incidentally our efforts to find speakers to provide a more balanced forum this evening will be a topic of discussion at the next human rights commission meeting on november 13th at seven hundred pm at city hall we welcome your participation so in the interest of integrity it's important to note that our speakers here this evening are not without bias all have studied the issues around gay marriage for many years before this proposed marriage amendment each has written or spoken publicly about issues surrounding gay marriage all four speakers are experts in their respective fields but in the interest of disclosure three of the four speakers have spoken or written publicly about why they believe the marriage amendment would not be good public policy but all our presenters here tonight were invited to speak to not just one side of these complex issues but rather to all sides of the many competing values principles and issues related to marriage families and children in minnesota they are here tonight not to speak to their conclusions but rather to share some of the facts research information experience and perspectives that we hope will lead those in the audience to their own conclusions we are expecting all of our speakers to be long on facts and short on opinions we hope every member of the audience here this evening will listen critically to the information that speakers will share with you and you will be the judge as to whether the information presented leads you to vote yes or vote no on the amendment at the end of the at the end of the forum we will ask our review panel members to indicate whether they think we met our objectives this evening for educational integrity let me say briefly why this amendment matters to so many people if it passes gay marriage in minnesota will be unconstitutional pass or fail it will affect a lot of people in minnesota and let me tell you why the outcome may not decide the future of marriage in minnesota on november 7th the morning after the election day the sun will rise as it always has regardless of the outcome of the marriage amendment gay marriage in minnesota will still be illegal and there's another important reason why the outcome might be shortlived this issue is already in the federal courts and may end up being decided by the supreme court our law professor here this evening mark ostler will speak to these issues in just a minute so with all this in mind i'd like to share with you one of my favorite quotes everything is either going to get better or it's going to get worse so we are either worrying about nothing or we are worrying too soon here's the format for our speakers tonight each speaker will have about fifteen minutes to present their information we will have time for questions after each speaker and we believe that by allowing questions from the audience to challenge our panel by respectfully raising good questions we can maintain both integrity and civility we will take a break halfway through the forum after the break we will hear from our last two speakers get some feedback from our review panel and we'll leave time at the end for refreshments i'd like to introduce excuse me all of our our speakers this evening and i'll ask you to hold your applause until i've introduced all four speakers our first speaker will be professor mark ostler mark ostler is a professor of law at the university of st thomas in minneapolis a graduate of the college of william and mary and yale law school his work frequently strikes at the intersection of law and faith he currently is the head of the association of religiously affiliated law schools in two thousand and nine mr ostler published a book titled jesus on death row challenging the death penalty based on the experience of christ as a criminal defendant he writes regularly on religion and law for the huffington post and has been interviewed as an expert on sentencing and related issues on cnn npr is morning edition and abc's good morning america he's been sourced in hundreds of newspapers in two thousand and nine mr ostler was the lead counsel on a case before the us supreme court on the winning side of a supreme court decision regarding federal sentencing guidelines his work on one case is portrayed in the samuel goldwyn film american violet dr laura boysen is a professor at augsburg college she earned her doctorate degree from the university of minnesota since one thousand nine hundred and ninety six she has been teaching and doing research at augsburg college in the department of social work in the 1990's she was a researcher in the center for advanced studies in child welfare she has recently been doing research on the meaning of marriage with gay couples and how children are affected by being raised in gay or lesbian households annekaner roth is the executive director of project five hundred and fifteen she earned an msw in public policy from boston university she's on the national board of directors of the equality federation in two thousand and six and seven she was the university of minnesota humphrey institute as a policy fellow she lives in minneapolis with her husband mark and three children reverend grant stevenson has been a pastor for twenty years and besides minnesota has ministered in wisconsin taiwan and new guinea he is currently a pastor at st matthew's lutheran church in st paul and the faith director for minnesota united for all families reverend stevenson and his wife karen have five sons would you please give a welcome to our panel and with that i will turn it over to our first presenter professor mark ostler well it's a pleasure to be here the first thing i should probably make very clear is that i'm from the university of st thomas but i don't represent the official views of the university of st thomas i really really don't if you if you followed the discussion there i am really fortunate though to work in a place where there's a diversity of viewpoints this is an issue and i'm going to talk about the legal perspective as well as my own personal perspective i can't really separate the two since i'm an attorney but i think there's principal positions on both sides of this debate about a year ago i wrote a piece for the star tribune about the coming controversy on this and talk to my the person in the office next to me is teresa colette who is one of the leading speakers on the other side who's a friend of mine and a colleague and someone whose opinion i respect and i talked to her about that i was going to start writing about this and one of the things that i told her that i'm going to tell you right now as my starting point is what i think is the best argument on the other side and it's not legal at all it's a simple story of a few moments that some of you have experienced i think and it's this i'm a father i have three children my wife and i have put those children at the center of our lives as some of you have with your own children when they were babies there was something that happened with those babies and us and it was this that when i was holding one of the boys all three of them are boys i was swinging them around and pretending that they were falling and catching them and tossing them up in the air and then when my wife took them she didn't do that she held them close wrapped her arms around them kept them still and calm and there's something very deep in that that men and women are different in certain ways now is it socially constructed is it something that is within our nature i don't know and i can't say i know exactly what that is but there is something probably to having one person there who is tossing the baby around and the other person whose instinct is to hold that baby close and still so why is it that i'm against this amendment and why am i against it so much that i have been fairly outspoken it's because there's several parts of me that have overwhelmed that instinct that i can't quite describe fully one of them is legal and i'm going to talk about the legal aspect of it in a couple of ways first of all the law already prohibits gay marriage in minnesota there's a statute that defines marriage as being between one man and one woman so this isn't going to change the law in any way what it's going to amend is the constitution and the constitution is fundamentally different than a law than a statute a law and i you know i'm a prosecutor at heart i was a federal prosecutor in detroit before i started teaching and you know if you want to do serious law enforcement detroit's the place to go it was it was fascinating but it was all about law and the thing about law about statute civil or criminal is it restricts freedom it tells you what you can't do you can't go and take that money if it's not yours you can't hit that guy in the bar it's a set of rules that restricts freedom now as a society we think that's an acceptable restriction on freedom in civil law there are some things that within the law if somebody does it to you they can sue you they can enforce a contract if you sign that contract it limits your freedom to walk away from the contract that's what law and statutes do but one of the geniuses of the framers of the constitution is that the constitution is different and what was revolutionary in that time is that it gave freedom to individuals as against their government you know there was an idea that that goes deep into british history but it came to full fruition in the constitution we talk about what's amazingly new about that document about why other countries look to it for guidance is because it does something beyond restrict freedom like laws do it's not a law in a way it's the opposite of a law it's what stops the government from restricting our freedoms and it does it in a few ways alexander hamilton wrote very eloquently about this in the federalist papers and one of the things that he expresses over and over is that you have to have divided government but beyond that jefferson in particularly madison in writing the bill of rights the first amendments to the constitution expressly gave individual rights to people protected them from their government because they didn't trust government to intrude on the most personal aspects of a person's life it was something new and different and wonderful and since that time with one exception in the federal law as we've amended the constitution we've been very careful not to use the constitution to restrict freedoms because that's the opposite of its true purpose which is to protect individual freedoms versus a government whose instinct is to limit them and to take from us our money and our freedom that one exception of course was prohibition that didn't turn out very well now in the case of minnesota minnesota's constitution in many ways replicates the federal constitution in fact it includes most of the bill of rights in its text it does the same thing as the federal constitution and that was intentional it protects individual freedoms it doesn't take them away in the amendments and you know there's a website you can go to and pull up all the amendments to the minnesota constitution and i did this and i read them all and there's a lot of them but what's fascinating about them is they do three things one of them one of those things is that it affects the structure of government you know that this department's going to report to this person things like that the second thing that it does is talk about budgetary issues about the way that money can be raised or spent how bonds can be passed how municipalities can raise money and the third thing and there's much fewer of these but there are some it enlarges individual liberties it doesn't restrict them for example giving women the right to vote and amend the constitution to do that and so we've got those three things what we don't have in the minnesota constitution up to this point is a constitutional amendment that restricts individual liberties because if we think an individual liberty should be restricted we expressed that in a law as minnesotans already have done and i think that's very powerful because as much as my friend theresa believes very strongly and sincerely not out of bigotry but out of religious belief that that principle of marriage being between one man and one woman is important there's a countervailing also conservative principle at play here and that's the principle of what a constitution is supposed to do and i think that's something that's very important as we go forward i also oppose this amendment as a christian i'm not going to speak on that i'm going to defer for reverend stevenson on that but i will say that i know how controversial that is i wrote a piece for cnn several months ago and it was called the christian case for gay marriage and it got over twelve thousand comments and i got a lot of email too several people thought i should be cast into a lake of sulfur which fortunately it hasn't happened yet but the third reason that i am and this crosses over into my legal views as well is that i'm prolife i'm not ashamed to say that i believe in a constant prolife ethic i am against the death penalty as just was mentioned last week in fact i was in california talking about that at fuller seminary i'm also against abortion i don't think abortion should be legal and i write and speak about that i just finished a piece for stanford's law review that i'm going to go out and speak on regarding abortion but one of the reasons that i'm prolife and this is linked both to my view of the law and my view of my faith is because there is an imperative that we value life that we value the life that god has created within and amongst us and yes to me that means protecting unborn children it also means not executing people even those who are guilty but it means something beyond that it means also that people who are here those who are amongst us everyone has the right to be who they were created to be i don't think having known a number of gay men and lesbians that they chose that especially in texas where i lived for ten years where being a gay man or a lesbian caused you to be cast out of every circle that you were a part of who would choose that and when i was in texas i worked at baylor university baylor university has a policy that they do not hire gay men or lesbians as faculty or staff they do not allow them to enroll as students and in fact when i started teaching there the rule was that it wasn't even that people were sexually active just the status of samesex attraction was a bar to admission and i taught there unfortunately without thinking through the implications of that what we were telling people those amongst us who were gay and some of them were my students was that there was no love for you on earth or in heaven and i feel very deeply that that's not something that we have the right to say to others and then i think that if there is love for those people on earth and in heaven it should be within the covenant of marriage the last thing before i conclude we lawyers tend to be very much on time because if we're not a judge yells at us is as a father i started out talking about fathers and being a father and the reason it matters to me as a father is that i hear the arguments from the other side that there's a threat to children posed by gay marriage and the argument i suppose is that if there is gay marriage then children will see that gay men and lesbians are married to one another it will undermine their belief in heterosexual marriage and they'll be less likely to get married themselves which to me seems like a fairly obtuse set of connections but as a father there's something that i know and it's this there are gay men and lesbians in relationships in this state in this community within my own school who have children and they're not hypothetical children they're real children with names it's katie and bobby they're kids that go to school with my kids and they have two parents who care for them maybe two women maybe two men but for those children i believe what the other side said says is true that those parents in marriage are better parents that marriage provides a stability that's good for children and if i care about those children those real actual children with names and birthday parties and graduation dates i should want their parents to be married and have the ability to do that and have the law reflect that important reality thank you we are going to take questions for professor ostler who has any questions for mr ostler i'm bob zik and i do public television and i was hoping let me just hold this i was hoping that you would actually touch on the law concerning this issue and not get focused on the emotional feeling of the issue now i mean you started off by saying that it shouldn't be in the constitution because it's restricted but maybe it should be in constitution because it's protective those are some bad things and then we get down here to have the right to be who they are nobody takes that right away nobody takes the right from a gay person to love who they want to love so i don't think you need to go there i'm not threatened by gay lesbian transgender not at all as a christian we're taught to love everyone because we all share the same father god now let's i want to touch a little bit is there a question coming here bob there is a question i'm gonna ask him a question because the normal argument i guess is the 14th amendment no one shall deny the equal protection under the law the law applies to everybody correct so let's look at discrimination from a legal perspective what does discrimination mean my understanding or what has been taught to me it means to make a distinction that's what discrimination in the law means to make a distinction now when you look at the law concerning this because when you mentioned that this issue will be taken or is in the courts there's the rational basic basis test rational basis for the distinction correct different treatment discrimination the discrimination is a distinction i'm going to have to ask you to quickly get to your question well we'd like to understand the law and i'm asking how to explain this law so i'm gonna make two more points here okay so if you could get to you question quickly the next next part of that is strict scrutiny test if the law impact the fundamental right or a suspect classification and what would be is there a compelling state interest now suspect classification now you're giving a lecture to a professor just give us another second here you are not asking a question you're giving a lecture if we could get to a question aspect classification race religion gender national borders not sexual preference and your question is the question is what is the legal basis for challenging this in courts under the 14th amendment i have a short answer to that that is that i didn't address that because it's not an issue here of course there's not a challenge to the minnesota amendment it hasn't been enacted i'm talking to voters that's how it's being decided that's where the law rests right now next question yes sir you broached the issue of right now we have gay people raising children that raises the issue of adoption is it not the case that it is legal for gay people to adopt in the city and if that is so do you have an opinion as to why the legislature simply didn't ban adoption by gay people if the one of the major objects of this amendment is to protect children yeah i can't i'm not a family law expert the constitution is one of my fields but but to answer that question and i always try to be generous to the people who made the decision if i wasn't there if i just remembered that legislature one reason i might make that distinction from area principle is that with adoption you have people who are the natural parents of the child where it then is going to they're in a new relationship and the original mother or father is now out of the picture now there's a samesex partner they let that partner adopt the child so that there will be two parents and i think that was seen as something where that relationship was going to be there anyways and they couldn't intercede or affirm it or deny it in any way and you know from a point of compassion the other thing is that i think that social workers who play a key role in adoption part of their code is that they don't discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation that because so much of adoption goes through social workers and has social worker involvement that if you mandated that kind of description of who could adopt and who couldn't you would lose their cooperation in that important process one of the arguments i hear is that clergy people do not want to be put in the boxes of they must marry gay or lesbian couples and could you explain if that's a legitimate way to go about this or not my interpretation of it simply is that it could become something that could be used as a weapon if you go about it like that so could you explain that yeah that's a question that first of all it's pretty far away from what we're talking about with the amendment i mean with the amendment it's if what's already in the law is going to be put into the constitution that said let's say we were talking about one of those other states where what they're voting on is to allow gay marriage directly in those states of course you have clergy saying the same thing clergy always have had the freedom to not marry people that they don't approve of if i was to go to the catholic church and say i want you to marry me to someone they would say you're not catholic and not let me be married there and that's something that's respected by the state and so i think that that is something that would be such a radical departure from our current relationship between the state power and religion that it's pretty unimaginable did you have a follow up on that the reason i bring it up is because it's one of the reasons people are handing out to people and so the distinction really is that marriage is a civil process and isn't it the story with the churches if you will right or option to marry people and two separate services you have the civil ceremony and the religious ceremony there are always these options that's why we got so far from what this is really about well i'm fortunate to have reverend stevenson here because he actually has married people and so i'll defer to him and he'll probably address it in his part i'm tim finley i also would like some more on the constitutional issues one comment you made was we don't have in our constitution which restricts liberties in minnesota constitution which is different than the federal constitution seventeen year old's can't vote even in the federal constitution you have to be a certain age twenty one thirty five to be able to do things judge to judge you have to be learned within the law there's all kinds of restrictions that are in our constitution what is the constitution about because why is the is the relationship between things and people and the way our corporate government is designed is that people are the final authority the people determine the relationship with government that has to follow it just briefly on that the restrictions that you're talking about a restriction to the relationship in the government and that's different than what we're talking about here which is the relationship between people and so i think that's an important distinction okay last question hi i'm kenny noel i have two moms and the fact that they know when they married they talk about the bills and and how they express the matter of how they want everything because it's separate well if i let me just make sure i understand the question correctly and that is that you've got two moms and right now they have to deal with everything separately as your parents instead of being a unit as a whole and that's part of you're exactly the person i was talking about you know that there are things that go with marriage i was talking about the stability but there's also that there's the recognition of the family unit and you know what whether your mothers are married to one another or not you're a family and and the society generally accepts that if marriage is a good thing for a family to have as a part of it then this is a promarriage thing to allow your mothers to get married to one another okay thanks for your question we'll move on to our next speaker dr laura boysen good evening i actually worked not only at augsburg college but i'm also doing some adjunct work at the university of minnesota and again these are not any reflection on i'm not speaking for either of the university or the college i actually was going to start tonight by saying how glad i was to be here because in fact the project at my house tonight is doing some foundation work on my house doing some masonry and of course that's not an area of my expertise and i was thinking man this has gotten me out of something good i do think that diy network gives you a little false sense of security nowadays but now i what i'm hoping is that i can talk a little bit about the family this is a for the past two or three decades i've been working with infants and families and children and what i'm hoping to do is kind of talk about what we know about what's good for children what's good for infants what's good for families and actually wanted to talk a little bit about how families have changed because they have changed significantly during my lifetime we know that families now look a lot different than the mid 1950s the mid 1960s many of us in this crowd probably grew up watching the cleaver family maybe the brady bunch and families really the majority of families in the us now most families for parents who have children most of those families have children that are over eighteen years of age most of them most families the majority of families now don't have young children so people are marrying we know at an older age we know that the highest number of births to women are to women who are now over age thirty we know that from one thousand nine hundred and seventy to two thousand children in two parent families actually decreased from eighty five to below seventy and currently over thirteen million there are over thirteen million single parents and most of the single parents that have children are women and although most of these women work a third of them are living in poverty and we know that the biggest the largest variable for poor outcomes for children is if you live in a family or a home where you're low income and in fact we know the divorce rate is as high as nearly sixty of new marriages now end in divorce we know that approximately ten of children are now living in homes with their grandparents and if those children living in their grandparents home are without a parent in that home they're more likely to be poor this is what perhaps is one of the most amazing statistic when you think about the impact of poverty on poor outcomes for children is that fifty of all children in the us will at some point while they're a child be on food stamps and if you're a black child in this country ninety of black children are at some point going to be on food stamps so many times as i tell my students the fastest way into poverty for a woman is divorce the fastest way out of poverty is marriage and finally one other statistic in terms of families and marriage is the drop in the marriage rate in this country the annie e casey foundation is reporting that over the past thirty years there's been a forty drop in the number of us citizens who are getting married and that delay is based on seems to be due to the economy we are increasingly seeing folks cohabitate that are unmarried and so from these stats we know that families are really looking very different than what they used to look like we also know that children are growing up in gay and lesbian families when we the two thousand and ten data the census data tell us that there are at least nine hundred thousand samesex couple households and this is an increase in fifty two from two thousand to two thousand and ten and it's estimated that twenty two of partnered lesbians and five of gay men have children in their households so we know that that even though folks can't marry that in fact at least in minnesota that in fact what we're seeing is we're seeing kids live in families with two moms and or two dads one of the things i would like to say when you think about poverty and poor outcomes for children we know that gay men out gay men earn more money than heterosexual couples we know that in fact women earn lesbian women they earn more money than heterosexual women and so one of the things if you're thinking about what's good for kids we know that poverty is not good for kids and in fact because lesbian and gay couples are more highly educated they are more likely to have advanced degrees college degrees in fact they tend to have higher median incomes there has been a lot of research and here i want to point out some things about google because one of the things that people in fact i did this today i googled children raised by gay and lesbian couples and if you do that what you're going to do is you're going to see a whole page the first page is going to be a gentleman by the name of reganour and he is at the university of texas at austin and he's recently published some research that gives lots of poor outcomes for kids that are in gay and lesbian households the reason i say that is because i caution you to not always go to the front page what you might want to do is google and then go to the academic site or the scholar site because that will give you a more balanced view in terms of the literature and let me just talk about kids that are raised in gay and lesbian homes the bulk of the literature says that those kids are more empathic and in fact the census that they're more empathic because they face more scrutiny and they may face more bias with the things that are said against about them and about their families these kids that are raised in gay and lesbian homes they are no likely they are no more likely to be gay than kids raised in heterosexual homes they seem to have the same level of selfconfidence and ego strength unfortunately they do sometimes suffer because of the bias that they may face because of their parents and one of the other things in the comparison is that you'll notice lesbians lesbian couples are more often than single heterosexual females single heterosexual mothers to include men in their children's lives they have an appreciation that they need to have they need as you were talking about how men are throwing up their children women are more cuddly they seem to understand that in fact they need to have the different sorts of interactions with their kids the other thing when you look at the literature is that when you think about are gay and lesbian couples happy as happy as heterosexuals in general gay couples report as much satisfaction as heterosexual couples and when you look at lesbian couples they actually report more satisfaction in their relationships than heterosexual couples finally i have done some one of the things that a colleague and i were interested in is why are gay and lesbian people getting married in particular we were interested in we researched older lesbians because the literature is pretty replete in the back to that older lesbians are sometimes pretty protective about their social identity category because they don't want to face bias and so they may be more likely to be closeted and so one of the questions we had was why would they go to a county clerk's office and kind of face what we call in social work we call it microaggressions why would they want to have bias come their way and so what we did was we we interviewed some folks in california some women in california washington state iowa and what we found was similar themes that you'll find in the research and i also want to tell one little story before i get to the themes there were several couples we interviewed that had gotten married in san francisco at the time when the mayor opened up marriage and i don't know if any of you have seen any of the footage about that particular day in san francisco where the mayor opens it up and what happens is gay and lesbian couples start forming outside of the courthouse waiting to get married well there's a driving rainstorm and they decide that even in the driving rainstorm they are going to stay outside of that courthouse many people don't get in the courthouse that day to get married and so the police come out about five o'clock and they say to many of these couples you need to leave you can't assemble here overnight and several couples said that they talked about they talked to the police and they said well what are you going to do if we don't leave will you arrest us and the police officer said well probably not so there was like a monsoon rainstorm throughout the night and the crowd continued to grow and there are stories about people in san francisco coming to the courthouse throughout the evening bringing food bringing umbrellas bringing raincoats and bringing chairs for people to sit in and supporting those folks who were waiting in line who were scared that if they left the line that they would never be permitted to get back into the line so that they could marry the next day when the courthouse opened so that's a little bit of kind of the resolve that many had in california and when you look at the literature about and when you talk to the people about and you talk to these lesbians about why would you go through this why would you choose to marry many of them talk about wanting the legal and civil rights that come with marriage that anne's actually going to be talking about many talked about how they were very surprised these women that we spoke to had been who had been together anywhere from ten to thirty five years and some of them actually some of them were very surprised and they talked about how when they got married there was a deepening commitment to their relationship they talked about how marriage changed their perceptions about how they were as a couple and that they now felt legally and financially more secure and in fact for the folks in california we talked to several folks that they now had rights to their california pensions and these were people who were no longer they didn't have to worry about living in poverty they also said that they had much more of a feeling of permanence so when you look at the literature the literature is pretty it's pretty clear that gay and lesbian parents are not there are no poor outcomes for kids because of gay lesbian parents and that marriage somehow creates a permanence and more of a financial security and finally one other thing i want to say when i had a real job before i started teaching i actually worked in infant mental health and one of the things that was very clear when we worked with infants and toddlers and that we believe very so any of you that know selma fraiberg and the research she has done is that children are mirrors of their she just said mirrors of their mothers we like to say mirrors of their primary caretakers and one of the things that we know is that if in fact the parents are secure not living in poverty and not depressed feeling secure in terms of their family and the commitment that in fact children do much better and so i would say that one of the things we need to think about is if children are in fact mirrors of their parents in terms of their mental health we need to look at that literature very seriously as we think about what sorts of policies we enact for children or for children and parents thank you are there any questions for dr boysen i want to ask people to identify themselves by first name so we can keep a record i'm david i have a question on internationals people moving in from other cultures into like these cities what's that research on them where their families are i'm curious to see that maybe you're tapping into some research on people moving in from other cultures into and living in our cities and this is unrelated to this to this topic what would kind of be your research with families in general oh so you're wondering about yeah so we are there are actually we have four groups of people we actually are either the first we are first in the country or second in the country in terms of these populations moving immigrating here so for instance among folks the car in actually i'm trying to pull from my lecture i just did last week in terms of immigration we actually are a hotbed in terms of immigration and twin cities and you're wondering and besides that the additional question is the views of marriage family things you'd have to face with when you immigrate okay so as you know when people immigrate they immigrate with the cultures that they had in their home country and so really the one of the tasks for families who immigrate is when they get to the firstgeneration or that second generation how do they then mold into their family kind of what happens with the mores of the united states with what's happening in their home countries and so what you'll see is that many of the parents who immigrated will stick with traditional values and then their children and then their grandchildren will start to integrate the values of the united states and in fact what you'll find in that generation of young children that have moved here perhaps at a young age is that many times you'll find that those kids take on the united states persona very strongly and so there can be a lot of tension and in fact many times the people that are seen for problems or in within the family are those families where they've been unable to kind of negotiate those inherent intensions of immigrant parents and this first generation so it is a tension other questions i appreciate you mentioning about the 1950s and the families back then compared to today but i think that's a part of the problem is that the culture has been the needing a father making a big effort to push the father now the statistics for fatherless families and the kids being deprived of continuity is very high but but that is not i mean kicking a father out does not help our country does not help the tax burden the taxes everything so i don't see that as a positive step of even for heterosexuals that are families one of the things i would say about that tim is actually a public policy when you look at the researcher on public policy and what's best for families one of the things that's not good for families is the inequity between the inequity that we're seeing in our country right now in terms of lowincome versus highincome and when you look at those inequities it is the inequity in the us is as high now as it was in the 1920s and we know that when there's that kind of inequity and the kind of we just we're having there are books being written right now about what's happening with our males with our male youth and terms of that we don't have strong policy for what to do around our young men and that we need to have more social policies that actually speak to education getting them educated getting them jobs those sorts of things and that in fact i would agree with you completely i think that a two parent household maybe where we would disagree was who those two parents are but certainly two parent households we know that they are more apt to not live in poverty and they are more sensitive and more responsive and receptive to their children and so i actually would agree with you completely that two parent households are in fact much better for children there are many more resources for those kids and they have much better outcomes okay were going a little bit long there will be a time again for additional questions for all the panelists we're just going to take a ten minute break we have water and cookies at the table if you did see the surveys when you came in we'd like to have everybody fill out a survey we mentioned that the the cable the broadcast here this evening is being recorded by ransom washington cable commission the recording will be cablecast by the city of maple on channel sixteen and will be online at the city of maplewood and at rwcablecom before i introduce anne again i'd like to ask gary if he would like to make comments to the audience hi my name is gary grefenberg i'm chair of the roseville human rights commission one of the two cosponsors of this event i wanted to welcome you tonight especially wanted to thank john and the maplewood human rights commission for their efforts to hold this forum in an unbiased and fair way i want to repeat repeated efforts were made with the minnesotans for marriage to send a speaker they consistently refused so we tried our best i also want to add that the roseville human rights commission believes that human rights are controversial but that should not reclude rational and respectful dialogue on these issues human rights in this country have always been controversial if there had been a referendum in mississippi and alabama and georgia we never would have seen the civil rights and the rights of black people to exercise their so from our viewpoint the roseville human rights commission believes that marriage is a civil right and civil law civil law and civil constitutions should permit all of those irrespective their sexual orientation the ability to exercise that right so thank you again for coming if you'd like further information on future human rights events and activities please sign up by the water on your way out oracle an event next monday night on religious perspectives on samesex marriage this event will have the representative pastors from a variety of religious perspectives including those of an evangelical persuasion proceeding will be speaking from their beliefs so we invite all of you to come to roseville monday night there's some flyers here if you'd like to further continue the dialogue on religious perspectives thank you okay thanks gary anne we have two different microphones that you can use you can use the handheld microphone you can use the one at your desk or the podium we have one that you can take if you need to walk out to see your presentation if you need to be able to see your powerpoint well thank you very much john and thanks so much everybody for being here tonight i'm really glad to be here this evening i appreciate both human rights commissions invitation to speak with you tonight i'm annekaner roth i am the executive director of project five hundred and fifteen and i'm going to talk with you a little bit about project five hundred and fifteen and the work that we do as well as the research that we've done which really relates to the topic on your agenda which are the kinds of rights and responsibilities that couples access with legal civil care so just a little bit about project five hundred and fifteen project 515's mission is equal rights and considerations under the law for samesex couples in minnesota and just to reiterate what some of the speakers have referenced currently in minnesota law marriage between samesex couples is not legal and this came into play in one thousand nine hundred and ninety seven when the minnesota legislature hatched its own version of what we've seen at the federal level as the defense of marriage act and see some of the language here on the slide in law which states that lawful marriage is only between persons of the opposite sex and that marriage between the persons of the samesex is prohibited so just to clarify not really have what the law is in minnesota currently so just a little bit of background of how we got to where we are at this point looking at this ballot measure which we will have on the ballot exactly two weeks from today ballot measures have been passed by the legislature they bypass the governor and go directly to the electorate to approve or or deny and so you see on the slide what we saw happen at the minnesota legislature with the constitutional amendment passing in the senate as well as in the house on a bipartisan manner on both sides in fact there were republicans that opposed the amendment there were democrats that supported it again legislature bypasses the governor so although the governor folks may remember i issued a symbolic veto of the amendment the ability to approve these kinds of amendments go directly to the electorate and on the evening of the passage of the bill in the final body of legislature that campaign which was called minnesotans united for all families was launched to work against this amendment and to defeat it on the ballot language that folks will see on the ballot is important to look at it see and think i've been working with this issue and with this campaign now for what's going on almost two years and what i've seen in the discussions that i have with voters every day is that there is a lot of confusion about what this question is what language would be on the ballot and what that question actually means and so i think it's important to take a look at it in advanced point to the ballot box and the language we'll see is shall the minnesota constitution be amended to provide that only the union of one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in minnesota yes or no as we talk about a little bit marriage for samesex couples in minnesota is presently illegal so a yes vote puts a ban on samesex marriage in the constitution which replicates what we already have in statute a no vote keeps the current basically the status quo there's a little bit about project five hundred and fifteen what we work on as we move into some of the research that we do project five hundred and fifteen has four primary strategies the first is public education we do quite a lot of public speaking and talking about the research that we do telling the stories of the families which i'll be getting to in just a moment one of the things that we find is that it is illuminating for people to hear about the kind of impact that minnesota law has on families in minnesota presenting on that as well one of the niches that project five hundred and fifteen has in the community is specific outreach in the corporate community folks may know that minnesota has a special corporate community and that is per capita the largest in the country in terms of fortune five hundred companies and interestingly enough some seventy of those companies have offered domestic partner benefits to their employees for decades in fact and so minnesota businesses have really stepped out in the past for quite some time in terms of trying to level the playing field for their employees and finding a legislative advocacy is one of the keystones of project five hundred and fifteen so as we work towards eliminating the five hundred and fifteen laws that discriminate against samesex couples who work at the state capitol to change those thoughts some of the research that we have done works on surveying minnesotans in fact project five hundred and fifteen did the very first survey of minnesotans to start to understand how minnesotans felt about issues related to equality for samesex couples in minnesota and one of the things that we found was that eight out of ten of the respondents said that government shouldn't treat people differently because of their sexual orientation and that seventy minnesotans said that gays and lesbians have the same rights and responsibilities as everybody else and this is the same data really that we have gathered year after year asking questions in many different ways but what we found is that in minnesota minnesotans really do support equality the primary research however that project five hundred and fifteen is really known for came originally out of william mitchell school of law where we worked with law professors there and students to essentially gather data on minnesota statutes by calling through every statute in minnesota to find out how many statutes afforded rights or benefits or responsibilities to people by the ability to access marriage and so what we used were keywords like spouse and marriage to see what would that trigger for families in minnesota and what we found is that there were as you've probably gathered by now at least five hundred and fifteen laws in minnesota that discriminate against samesex couples and their families by not allowing marriage for those families and what we see in that research really is laws that impact families really in the full spectrum of life everywhere from from birth to death you see differences in the way that samesex couples are treated to married couples in so many different ways in healthcare in social services in politics in providing for your family and also at the time of death and beyond we know that these are things that hurt families deeply as the speaker before me referenced there are many many samesex couples in minnesota that are raising children so just to kind of dig into it a little bit more if you can see this slide we can see really the range of laws that we're talking about ninety one laws that relate to death estates and trusts twenty eight laws that relate to courts and criminal law thirty seven laws that relate to tax and property so you start to see that we really are talking about every way in which the law impacts people's lives whether that's your day to day life or a certain events over the course of your lifetime these statutes really do impact families all the way through so i want to tell a little bit about some of these various specific statutes i find that it's usually interesting for people who can't wrap their head around what could these five hundred and fifteen statutes really be and how is that meaningful to people in minnesota so the first one that i have up here says the spouse of a patient is the first person a treating physician must consult if a patient can't consent to treatment and this might be something that folks who are married in the room would just sort of assume this is kind of social convention right so you're in the hospital and your spouse is unconscious not able to make decisions for themselves and you're there you're the spouse or the partner who should be the person that helps to make those decisions in fact this is something that is directed by statute in minnesota specifically to the legal next of kin and for a samesex couple a legal next of kin is never going to be the samesex partner because they are not legally married so they are not legally related in the eyes of the law so here's a story that was told to us that highlights what this could look like for real families this is the story of earl and chuck and earl and chuck had been together for several years at the time of this story when chuck experienced a medical emergency while he was out of running he was taken to the hospital fortunately although he did not have any identification on him a friend of the couple was on duty at the hospital and called the partner earl to come to the hospital but when earl arrived at the hospital he was not allowed to be in the emergency room with chuck he was not allowed to make medical decisions on his behalf and chuck was unconscious and so could not consent to the treatment that he needed and so it fell to earl to spend two hours of precious time to track down chuck's parents to be able to consent to the treatment that their son needed and lost valuable hours in which the treatment could have been delivered so second statute that i wanted to talk with you about and this is sadly one story that we hear over and over married couples have the right to control the disposition of their spouse's remains so this is that what could perhaps be the most tragic point in someone's life where your spouse or partner has passed away you know what their final wishes were and instead of the coroner's office being able to talk with you about what those final wishes would be the coroner is required to speak to the next of kin so like in this story bob and his partner richard who've been together for eighteen years had each other's contact information in their wallets in case of emergencies but when richard died unexpectedly from a heart attack at a grocery store bob was not contacted by the medical examiner's office they initially called bob's phone but they couldn't share any information with him and instead they needed to look for the next of kin next of kin ended up being richard's sister marge who lived out of town it took quite some time to track her down we actually heard this story from the sister she was quite irritated actually that the partner of eighteen years was not the one that was allowed to take this final responsibility of caring for his partner at this final stage and that in fact she was the one that needed to take responsibility for that even though it was richard or that was bob that knew about richard's wishes so now we're going to try a little bit of technology i want to show you a video of another story of carrie rebecca and ruby so hold tight lets see if we can get this technology to work oh that pregnancy was awesome she was picture perfect we had a beautiful pregnancy and and then one night i woke up in a crisis i guess you can say i woke up i was losing ruby feeling pain and then ripping around at me and and and fainting i guess or i dunno if they even got the anesthesia in and then ruby was born they had to resuscitate her a few times they did everything lifesaving that they could but as far as this elective treatment which saved her brain saved her from having a life of of severe brain damage and allows her to live a normal life and allow her to live yeah it was an elective treatment because it was very experimental and just a clinical trials and it's not an automatic it's something you have to consent to we had started talking to our lawyer about adopting ruby since before she was born but you can't adopt an unborn child so i had no legal rights to ruby's medical care and so they were communicating back and forth with rebecca's doctor at the hospital and she hadn't woken up yet and her doctor knew the severity of it and her doctor literally ran her over to children's to sign the papers as soon as she woke up and it was within minutes if she'd been a few minutes later we would not have been able to get her this treatment because there's a small window of opportunity if i hadn't woken up in time you know she wouldn't have gotten this therapy and that means she probably could have died because the seizures or she probably would've been severely brain damaged are you going to do some of the puzzle with me we love our daughter and we love each other and we've been together for almost ten years now and it's now we're we're a family we're not any different project five hundred and fifteen started with really a broad base give you a break from the promotional piece there thank you for that so that that's another type of story folks may have actually seen carrie and rebecca on the ellen show they were on that show a few months ago they actually are a minnesota couple and after that story became public i think it's sort of a story that really shows how in the moment and quickly these kinds of laws can impact a family where you see an instance where the child is at risk of dying the birth mother is unconscious and the partner who is intended to be the mother is not able to make decisions for that child and places that child's life at risk these are the kinds of stories that we see in minnesota really every day so i'm actually going to wrap up here but i think you get a feel at this point for the kinds of laws that we have in minnesota right now that impact married couples in a very very different way than they impact samesex couples five hundred and fifteen of those laws in minnesota right now this amendment is something that doesn't change those five hundred and fifteen laws but that's creating a premise for those families to never be able to achieve the full equality through being able to achieve those same rights responsibilities and obligations so if it's not fair there's provision up here for you and i'd be glad to take some questions does anyone have questions they've been together for over thirty years and tom died last year and they thought that they had everything covered they had gone to a lawyer and gotten all kinds of powers of attorney contracts and all kinds of things set up that they thought would cover them because they knew tom was ill and they knew his time was short but scott was left with nothing he had no rights as it turned out after tom died and the issues of property issues of like even the car that was in tom's name scott couldn't sell it because he couldn't sign the title so i'm wondering if in reality is there anything short of changing the statutes that gay couples can do samesex couples can do to address these inequalities if they have a sense that they may be in a situation like that great thanks for that question this is something actually that comes up quite a lot is can't we just impact these kinds of inequities through some kind of legal contract that you could go to a lawyer and draft up and therefore protect your family and the reality is that there are some things that you can affect in that way and many many more things that you can't the reality also is that some families can afford to go to a lawyer and spend thousands of dollars to draft up that kind of legal paperwork and a lot of families aren't able to even afford that even if it were available so the reality is that there are there are some things that can be impacted that way and it just depends some of those things end up helping out those families and then sometimes there are families that experience a devastating loss where that wasn't able to be impacted other questions is there more about the question i think it is it's an interesting question i think there have been these progressions throughout history where you see some differentiation made between certain kinds of families and other kinds of families certain kinds of people and other kinds of people this movement towards equality for for lgbt people and samesex couples is frankly a fairly new movement but i think that it is a reference that is sometimes made is that this was a learning that our country went through at one point where we felt that it was appropriate to treat caucasians differently than we treated people of color and had laws that reflected that and ultimately those laws were changed and so i think that that is the direction that organizations like mine expect the state to have moved towards one more question identify yourself by your first name hi i'm tyler i was wondering is there a progression in how not only in high school but they're over in district eleven a couple of years ago there's a bunch of kids committing suicide because of bullying is there a progression in how much understanding of the lgbt there is i think so i think what tyler's reflecting on is is really a devastating impact of discrimination and bullying that that we saw very very clearly in the inoca hennepin school district to much national and of course local attention as well the direction that the state has started to move in is reflecting on how to impact that level of bullying at the state level through legislation the governor had appointed a task force to really study the issue of bullying in minnesota i believe that taskforce just ended in the summer and had recommendations that were issued there has been legislation that has been introduced several years in a row i believe that would really create some stronger guidelines for schools around what is allowed and what's not we do obviously in minnesota have laws that should protect youth from bullying those laws are not what's called enumerated which means that it's sort of a blanket law but it doesn't specify certain kinds of populations that research really shows could use some extra protection and that that enumeration does help to protect children in that way so that is something that frankly i would expect to see at the legislature i know that that has been an active coalition that safe schools for all coalition has been an active coalition for a number of years and the goal is to pass legislation that will protect kids in a stronger way we'll take one more question and then others that have questions please save it for the end of this evening hello my name is shaun i have a question so well first of all if you could define this a little bit more so we could understand what this means as a change in terms of the marriage act well first of all in terms of a definition i'm not sure that i can give you a definition there are i think as john reflected on a number of states in the country that have enacted civil union legislation it looks different in different states states also have different kinds of domestic partner benefits that are in place two states in the country has something called reciprocal beneficiaries which is a different kind of policy that impacts samesex couples as well as a broader relationships it really so really depends what a state has decided to put forward what we have seen in states is that there are protections that can be provided through these kinds of domestic partner benefits and you know some states have broader protection some have more narrow protections they could all be called civil unions but it really depends what the legislature has put inside of that legislation what we've seen in states that have had civil unions or domestic partner type legislation enacted is that over time they find that frankly it just doesn't work very well because in our society the way that we identify family structures and legal family units is through marriage and so in these examples for that you saw on the slides if you were to go to a hospital and say i need to see bob and they were to say well who are you and you would say well i'm the civil unioner they might not really know what that means if you were to say i'm the husband everybody knows what that means and so some of what we find in states is that even though there is protections that are put in place through these kinds of mechanisms and they are important without question because in minnesota samesex couples have absolutely no protections at all not one so not to deny at all that these kinds of protections can be put in place in some ways but it does seem that the experience in states has been that that has not worked quite well enough and that most of those states start to move towards enacting a broader definition through marriage our last speaker is pastor grant stevenson good evening i really am grateful for your persistence and staying until the last speaker gets up and talks and i have some i have some good news i think i have a theory as to why i might be able to be brief or at least try we have heard speakers tonight from various from various fields and as they have been speaking i'm a pastor i'm a lutheran pastor i would guess because we're in roseville and maplewood that there are other lutherans in the room but i think i could take a pretty good guess that that's not true for everybody i think i could take a pretty good guess that there may be catholics in the room i think i could take a pretty good guess that there may be people who don't identify with a religious faith in the room i think i'm pretty well maybe right about all of those things and we've been listening to other speakers and what here's what i've noticed although a professor also might disagree with this but bear with me for a minute in the area of law everyone knows that there are disagreements right that's why we have courts there are disagreements but there is something of a consensus as to how to approach a problem there's something of a consensus as to what makes a good argument or a bad argument and when that consensus breaks down i guess we have juries i'm sure that i'm just being horrifically simplistic in my explanation in science and dr boysen and i'm going to you may have the agreement or disagree in science hard sci what they refer to as hard science sciences or also social sciences we have clearly many many disagreements but we have something of a consensus in the modern world about methodology and where we have breakdowns in our understanding of methodology we have at least peer reviews the review of our work and the review of our outcomes and the review of our conclusions by peers that's how am i right that's how it works in my field in the field of religion i think it is crystal clear we have disagreements but in two thousand and twelve we have no semblance of a consensus on methodologies or peer reviews or even how to read the basic book that many of us claim holds truth zero consensus fail zero's two strong very very little consensus so part of what makes me sympathetic to those who are having i told you john i would try to present as much of both sides as i could part of what makes me sympathetic to those who are having a strong religious reaction to the idea of gay and lesbian people being married part of what makes me sympathetic is that i am aware that it's just true it's true in my own family it's just true that when we stand and speak of religious truth we just don't all stand in the same place now you might be true a really good historian could tell you that there were times that there's never been a time when we all stood in the same place but it is there have at least been times when there were people who could impose a unification of truth i think the middleages or something like that that's just not true in america and so we are left we are left in america to probably live out the words of the apostle paul more deeply and more profoundly than any generation in the history in any generation that has lived since he spoke them work out your salvation by the way that's a nice greek word that really means healing work out your salvation or work out your healing with fear and trembling we're not exactly on our own but there is no dominant force there is no standard bearer in the area of religion and so you'll see religions flourishing and we indeed have to grasp at what we find is most basic and most true for us for me i would name as one of those things what we often refer to as the golden rule that we treat our neighbors as we ourselves would wish to be treated it seems to be a very standard thing that runs true across so many different religions the problem with the religious discussion is when one group of people want to claim a kind of unified authority that just doesn't exist in modern america and i for one am not unhappy about that that it doesn't exist i think we're doing quite well exploring our spirituality exploring our faith exploring our religion it does seem to me though that this debate we're having in the state of minnesota is steeped in religious disagreement as much as any other kind steeped in religious disagreement as much as any as much as any other kind of disagreement i have been working myself these last months as i work on the campaign john mentioned i'm not an unbiased person in the room i am the faith director for minnesotans united that's the campaign urging minnesotans to vote no on this and i have been working myself with two concepts that i find personally very compelling and one is personal the concept of personal freedom if any generation has been aware of the obligations and the responsibilities that come that are ours in two thousand and twelve it is in the area of personal freedom we have an enormous amount of freedom to decide how we will spend our lives and how we will live them and who we will live them with and i think as americans we celebrate that i think i think as americans we yearn for that and we desire more of that and we don't like it when someone else tells us how we should or shouldn't live but then the question that grabs my attention even more than that is the question of religious freedom how is it in two thousand and twelve that we could still be having a conversation about which theology will carry the day in the state of minnesota i saw on the agenda the question that i was supposed to answer was can the church reconcile gay marriage yes it already has right there are all kinds of churches there are all kinds of churches there are all kinds of synagogues that right now bless and celebrate the unions of samesex couples it already has we can't talk about it as if it's a hypothetical thing that someday might happen it's true now so the question is will this in my mind will the state of minnesota endorse all of the unions that are churches and synagogues and places of worship bless and celebrate or will it pick and choose i think that's why we're having this debate in the state of minnesota and i think it's what this amendment is really about i work with a couple and i'm just going to close i'm going to close with this cause i'd really like to deal with questions but before i do that let me just do something that i forgot when i said yes we do it's not a few religious traditions that bless and affirm and celebrate the unions of samesex couples my own church the elca evangelical lutheran church in america we're divided up into what they call synods there are six of them synods it means a gathering i don't know why we can't use regular english there are six of them in the state of minnesota five of the six voted this year either in either at the end of may or in the beginning of june as synods to encourage the people in their church minnesotans to vote against this amendment there was one senate in southwest minnesota that voted to not take a vote on on the issue the episcopalian church the presbyterian church the united church of christ universalist church unitarian church the methodist church and the rabbinical association all of the rabbis in the rabbinical association of minnesota all have been asking their congregants to vote against the amendment so i say that not to convince you that you should vote against it but to lift up the obvious that the faith community is at least very divided on this so the division already exists each day when i go to work at minnesotans united i sit next to olbie obadiah but we call him olbie and javin who is his husband they were married while they were both attending seminary at yale which i think is a little uppity but these are really good people they were married at the chapel in yale it was a legal it was a legal marriage they now live and work here javin works for outfront minnesota and is hoping soon to have a call into the lutheran ministry and olbie is a pastor as we speak in the united church of christ so it's a mixed marriage but sitting next to them every day at work is such a dissonance to me that the two of them i've seen their wedding pictures that the two of them are considered married in one part of this country and not married here what does that say about our laws in minnesota what does it say about where we've come well we're in conversation we're in conversation and we're not done we're not done yet sometimes i encourage people to vote no just because we're not done there's just lots of conversation to be had i'd like to stop there because to go on would lead me down the path of doing a bible study and i've already i hope i convinced you that if i were to do that i would do it from my perspective a lutheran trained pastor probably a bit on the progressive end of things and it may not be yours so we have to be in conversation with one another about how we read these books and how we understand these and how we understand these truths thank you questions for pastor stevenson okay bob several questions pastor first of all do you believe the bible is the revealed word of god i believe this is the kind of conversation that will get tricky but yes i do i believe that that i mean for me that's just true i believe that the bible is the revealed word of god and i believe i was speaking for myself and i believe that the narrative and the bible is a narrative of freedom and liberation and that includes me and i think and i believe that it includes you i'd like to say on behalf of my friend bob here that's the first time i've heard an answer that was longer than bob's question the next question is do you believe words have meanings clearly they do i'm answering your question so the question becomes how do you negate all the scriptures in the bible that absolutely say two things one that homosexuality is an upfront i'll say it nicely upfront to god why say it nicely say it how the bible says it abomination and then the thing how do you justify and debate scriptures but one that immediately comes to mind is the one that's usually used at most by everybody a man shall leave his mother and father mother and father not two mothers not two fathers and marry his wife and become one when you have those kinds of direct usages of words in a revealed word of god how do you see a pastor and pastor's interpretation by humans how do you justify saying that it's open for interpretation clearly it is open for interpretation i mean you've made an you've made an interpretation just now you quoted a passage for example from the book of genesis that i would read as a passage of hope and a passage of promise and and a passage of love a man shall leave his mother and father and cling to his wife i myself have done exactly that i don't know if you're married but perhaps perhaps you have done it as well and i believe that passage reflects one of the deepest truths that i hold about my faith which is that god created us for relationship and god created us for community the truth is god created some of us gay so should relationship and that kind of community and that kind of intimacy be denied someone who's gay or not and i would say that has i don't understand how that could be from a perspective of a loving god could i take just give a different perspective and answer to bob's question and that is that this is a question i struggle with a lot i do take the bible to be the authoritative word of god and i agree that homosexuality is described as a sin in places in the bible but here's where i come down on that what i am is a relatively affluent straight white guy from adina i have my sins that's not my sin if i were gay i would struggle with that but i'm not and i go to church all the time surrounded by people who have sins that are very different than mine i sit in church next to someone who is divorced and remarried now that's something that christ spoke directly about in a way he didn't speak directly about homosexuality but that person was married in my church and i've come to accept that and i have a problem with differentiating the way i treat that person from the way i different i treat a gay couple because if i was to treat the gay couple differently than that remarried person i think at some level i'd have to admit it was bigotry within me that was coming out because christ was very clear about the remarried person and in the same way that you're saying that the bible has words those words have meaning i think those words have meaning coming from christ as well in a word that something i was facing i was struggled mightily with that the same way i struggle with the sins that christ has named in my own book but i think if i could just add to that one of the things i have heard since since this amendment has been put on the ballot that i didn't hear so much before people are talking so often about a biblical marriage that's a phrase i've heard recently a biblical marriage and i've started to ask them which one are you talking about which one adam and eve might be the best but they didn't do so well in their children were homicidal we can't be talking about abraham whose wife gave her slave because she was sarah initially barren so gave her slave to abraham so that their first child could be born not from sarah but from her slave and i think a real a real grownup conversation that we have to have in the faith community is to realize that there's there there has been a pretty big shift mostly over the last two hundred years in marriage and it has not come about because of gay and lesbian people it has come about because of straight people who have said more and more that a marriage is no longer a contract between a man and his future soninlaw about a piece of property but is a contract between a man and a woman and god and god but that's but that's an enormous change so to talk about biblical marriage without addressing the ownership of women and what it means for another person to be property is to miss the mother load of what's going on and so what we ended up doing is pulling out of the scriptures what are for us fundamental bottom line values do unto others love mutuality hope these are the themes that we've and commitment it's also edified and don't leave that one out yeah thank you a question i have had throughout this entire debate and how we go about this reform is how we do have separation through the state and this has always been framed around religious issues and the whole reason that this needs to be on the ballot is a lot of people's religion of what's their opinions and some people choose other things and may have other rights so how is it is this something that then will then be challenged in the courts that this constitutional amendment is unconstitutional yeah well that may happen and there's a i was supposed to address a question that came up earlier i was asked back here about clergy functioning as agents of the state that's actually that's actually true there's only one place in my work where i function as an agent of the state i'm registered in the county of ramsey and that is to do marriages i have no idea why that came about but i have a theory my theory is that as the population in this country expanded westward there were more clergy than there were government bureaucrats and so we were deputized by the government to do a civil marriage along with the religious right of marriage so if you're if you're a catholic you use the word sacrament for marriage a sacrament is a religious right we have other ways of talking about it if you're a protestant but that civil right is separate i mean that sacrament is separate from the civil marriage the civil marriage that is recognized by the state and that's why by the way religious leaders will never be forced to marry people that they that they wouldn't want to marry it's true now it's always been true and it would be true in the future okay got a question here hi my name is eric i just can't agree more on using a more constructive dialogue on this issue i just feel that there is that need to go beyond the shallowness of describing some individuals by our sexual orientation so much more makes up a person and i think everybody should receive equal dignity and respect going forward my only issue going into this instead of avoiding it it is my understanding of the amendment and this is where i like you to do a fact check on me is that this is not a ban on gay marriage and that it's strictly is prohibiting the government or judge or a lawyer or a politician to pass it as a law without voting people and for me i want a vote as regardless of the topic it could be a hundred different topics it just happens to be marriage right now that the people have a say have a vote to determine law rather than the judge or lawyer or politician i just think that there's a lot of misdirections and misinformation pertaining that and please correct me wrong but i think all of this energy needs to be directed towards putting gay marriage on the ballot itself and let the people speak rather than a judge in a year or two determining on their own like had happen in new york or massachusetts and that's where i'm okay so i'll tell you what i'm going to join my colleagues on the panel and let somebody who works with the law answer that question all right well first of all it is a ban on gay marriage and of course there's already a ban on gay marriage and it was passed in one thousand nine hundred and ninety seven as we've already heard described so it does it reinforces that you know in terms of you know could in terms of what you're saying could a judge overrule that law the legislature go back and change it sure that's how our democracy works i mean one thing is that what you're talking about in terms of direct democracy where you have a referendum on things that's not our system of government for the most part i mean we're a representative democracy we do elect politicians and man that's messy and unfortunate but that is the way the american system works is that we don't vote individually on everything there's some places that come closer to that vermont's one of them where they have town meetings and they send a representative from every hamlet but it's a small state with a tiny population relative to minnesota so in terms of you know something like this referendum it's pretty rare that we do this that we vote on something so in terms of the legislature making a choice like that that's kind of in our system now in terms of judges making those choices i think that's a legitimate concern that judges i mean the nature of judges that can overrule a statute you know in law we say it's counter of majoritarian that the majority of the people consistent think something and then judges overrule it luckily they do it pretty rarely now this is an area in which you're right in some states they have done that but here's something to think about is that maybe that's where the people's vote comes in in massachusetts the people didn't rise up and say you know you're wrong judges in iowa you know it's a different situation in california they did in california there was a judicial decision that allowed gay marriage that allowed that incredible moment in san francisco but then they passed proposition eight that there was a referendum that came after that and that kind of dialogue back and forth between the branches of government and the people actually works pretty well in the end you know maybe california will come back again in a couple of years and they have a referendum again and switch back the other way that's in the nature of american government it's part of the package of what we have here and there's a lot of good to them i open questions up to anybody that hasn't had a chance to ask a question to anyone of the presenters my question goes to professor ostler as kind of referenced before at the city court system that could be appearing before the supreme court can you speculate that whether you anticipated that this would come before the supreme court and when they rule on that and how does that immediately impact the state and things that we put into the state constitution yeah there's a couple issues relating to this and one is right now we've got a challenge and a very active challenge to the defense of marriage amendment or the act i'm sorry in the federal system which is a statute not a constitutional amendment and the second circuit in new york for example just ruled on that i believe by striking it down now was that going to come up before the supreme court a lot of people think that it will but that's not this issue that's talking about that federal act that really has to do with the full faith and credit clause of the constitution and things like that what happens when people move to state to state now that's important it's a different issue now with this amendment if it's passed could there be a challenge in court there could be who is that likely to reach the supreme court most people that i know who know a lot about the supreme court think that kind of challenge is unlikely to because the justices tend to unless they've got something that's been overruled that's been sustained up through the court of appeals they're not going to pluck a case out to decide that because they tend to defer to the way the states came out so unless that's being upset they're not likely to go after that i hope that makes sense my question is to grant possible the law enforcer and i appreciate grant's distinction that the religious perspectives vary if the archbishop can persuade then others can force their conception of religion down everyone's throat what's the difference between that and the muslims believe that the qur'an should be the basis of civil law isn't this a problem throughout the world where one religion assumes it has god on its side and forces all of us to follow its religious victings well i understand i think i understand what you're saying i think that i would think about it in a somewhat different way i think that we are by definition in this culture in a conversation and what we expect of each other what we what we hold what we expect of our institutions isn't a process and my concern about so i'll be honest with you i have some sympathies to the way that you asked that question but my concern about the way that you ask that question is it tends to shut off the conversation with the constitutional amendment isn't the archbishop should be off the conversation yes i believe that this constitutional amendment does in fact shut off the conversation yes it does that's my point just just briefly on that i think the difference is ugly crazy wild democracy you know that the archbishop unlike in countries where there's sharia law can't decide something and have it become law it has to go through the process of democracy and what's happening in minnesota is really remarkable i'm really heart because i disagree with the archbishop i don't think that's a correct thing to be i mean obviously i disagree with him about that about the separate point but you know look at the reaction that's happened look at the people who are here i mean what i'm hearing is that the other side is out raising them six to one that is i really believe that this election in the end in this state is going to be a great american moment thirty one states in a row went the other way the archbishop wants us to do that what we're seeing because of people like these people here and what grant is doing what the people in his office are doing there is against that pile of money that started out a hundred thousand voices and it's going to start to go the other way and this is that turning point can i say one more one more thing so i think maybe it goes without saying that i have a pretty strong disagreement with derek bishop on this amendment there are so many things that he stands for that i'm grateful for and part of i think part of our challenge in a political debate that is that is in fact a deeply heated political debate part of the challenge is to be able to have it to make it real and to be able to come out the other end as neighbors and as people who can move forward together on other issues cause there will be some we're talking about my relationship talking amendment i guess the dialogue here is how would you feel if there was a constitutional amendment that would validate your heterosexual relationship how would you feel and my point is on this issue you have much more faith than i do the amendment will probably pass because when people go into a polling place they thought well of course in religion it's one man and one woman that it's not the american way that is not the bill of rights i'd like to have your question i you're the law professor what is the basis for thinking that minnesota is so exceptional that it can pull apart from this the polls right now that we're seeing and i mean i think that what we're seeing is that that it's very close or that the opposition is ahead i am an optimist i'll admit to that i think that you know i think there's others that we're likely to lose for example i've been working on the death penalty referendum in california we're likely to lose that one but with this one i think there's a there's a good chance this is going to be that turning point okay one last question and then we've got our panel member that has a quick review the law in minnesota i don't quite get why people are putting such a push on this constitutional thing and it seems to me that it's kind of strange but the other part is that if we want in fact real change that people should have the freedom to marry in this case samesex couples what do we have to do first do we have to engage in constitutional things and then go back and do something about the law or how do you make a real change in this kind of juxtaposition well i have to say that i was at the capitol the entire time that this amendment legislation was being considered and i don't think i have an answer for you about why this is something that the proponents of it decided to push forward obviously it was a priority that they had i think there were a lot of different reasons for that and here we are in terms of the way that you move forward i think it does depend on what the outcome of this election is to be if this amendment passes and it is in the constitution then the only way to roll that back would be a second constitutional amendment which i don't expect anybody is projecting will happen anytime soon or perhaps something that comes from the higher court but as as the professor mentioned that does seem to be coming anytime soon either if the amendment fails then i think in minnesota we typically use the legislative process as the mechanism to move forward in these kinds of issues that we are not a state that tends to have a lot of ballot measures folks can probably remember you know count even on one hand the ballot measures that you have voted on in this state very different than other states i moved here a long time ago from california and i know that in that state there is a referendum on just about everything and so you get a book in advance so you can study up on on which referendums you will support but in minnesota typically we use the legislative process in order to move forward on these kinds of things and i would expect that going forward that is the way that that minnesota will progress would you have to operate separately on the constitutional piece then and the original law or does it depend it does depend yeah it did does it operate separately on the constitutional and then go back and operate off the law if the outcome that you're talking about was to get to a point where samesex couples legally were allowed to marry and the constitutional amendment passes then you would need to do a constitutional change through another ballot measure in order to move forward legislation is that does that answer your question okay we lost our panel review people except armando's still here but he's actually got a question hi i'm armando i was just wondering this is for the reverend you said if god was he created gays and lesbians i was just wondering why would god set people up for failure like that if it's an abomination you know i'll do my best i think god created people because god loves people and people are different from each other and it's people not god who make those differences into something that's hurtful so i wouldn't put at god's feet the pain that gay and lesbian people feel when they're discriminated against by others i would put that at our feet and my perspective is that if we weep for people who are hurt by our behavior and by our laws god didn't set us up to fail god weeps with us and waits for us to fix that i'd like to just make a couple of comments we'd like to have everybody fill out the survey tonight if you take just a second to give us feedback we will collect those surveys and review the results at the next human rights commission meeting november 13th tuesday seven hundred pm at the maplewood city hall and we welcome all of your ongoing participation and this discussion will continue at that meeting this has been a great panel discussion here tonight i want to thank the maplewood staff and commissioners from both maplewood and roseville for the significant effort that it took to put this event together we especially want to thank the audience for your great questions and respectful and civil manner which people gathered here to talk with neighbors and finally to our speakers for their outstanding contribution to this town hall meeting thanks everybody and good night