'Porno' Pete LaBarbera protesting legalization of marriage equality with the help of a big lie

Peter LaBarbera

'Porno' Pete LaBarbera, an old adversary, whom I haven't written about in a long time because of his continued irrelevancy, is promoting an event which I decided to spotlight to show how the anti-LGBTQ industry freely lie in their attempts to undermine our equality.

On his Americans for Truth webpage, LaBarbera announced a rally in front of the US Supreme Court on June 26. This rally will be negatively commemorating the fourth anniversary of the Obergefell ruling, which legalized marriage equality in 2015:

Four years ago, on June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court arrogantly imposed homosexual “marriage” on the nation – overriding amendments and laws in more than 30 states protecting marriage as between a man and a woman. Join concerned citizens testifying to the tragedy of this evil ruling by 5 unelected Justices. Some of our speakers once considered themselves “gay” or “transgender”—and will discuss how Obergefell was based on a lie: that homosexuality, like race, is unchangeable. Come hear their powerful testimonies! 2019 is also the 50-year anniversary of the anti-cop “Stonewall Riots” that launched the destructive, in-your-face “gay” revolution in the USA. 

Like so many of his past rallies, attendance and attention will probably be sparse. But his attempt to recast the history of marriage equality needs to be called out.

LaBarbera is lying. He tends to do that a lot when it comes to the LGBTQ community.

In reality, The SCOTUS ruling for marriage equality had nothing to do with the belief of whether or not homosexuality is unchangeable  It was a question of whether or not there was a logical reason for gays to be denied the right to marry. And SCOTUS found that there wasn't.

From Politico:

The majority opinion, authored by Kennedy, was framed as a legal interpretation of the constitutional rights of gays and lesbians. However, the decision appeared to reflect and ratify one of the most dramatic and rapid shifts in public opinion on a high-profile social issue in American history. 

Kennedy bluntly rejected arguments from same-sex marriage opponents that allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry would undermine and disrespect the marriages of heterosexual couples. 

“In forming a marital union, two people be­come something greater than once they were,“ Kennedy wrote. “As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves.”

From The Atlantic:

The Court’s opinion . . . lists four major reasons for its decision. First, Kennedy writes that “decisions about marriage are among the most intimate that an individual can make.” Allowing LGBT people to marry is a matter of personal choice and autonomy, just as it was in the Court’s 1967 decision in Loving v. Virginia, which outlawed bans on interracial marriage. 

Second, Kennedy writes, marriage is a distinctive institution: “It supports a two-person union unlike any other in its importance to the committed individuals.” Here, he points to the Court’s opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut, which affirmed the right of married couples to use birth control. “Same-sex couples have the same right as opposite-sex couples to enjoy intimate association.” 

 . . . “Protecting the right to marry ... safeguards children and families and thus draws meaning from related rights of childrearing, procreation, and education,” Kennedy writes. Not all straight married couples have children, and they’re certainly not required to do so by law, he reasons; the same rule should apply to gay married couples. But more importantly, for those gay couples that do want to have kids—including the many couples who adopt or have children using the genetic material of one parent—that their unions are less than marriage under the law creates a “more difficult and uncertain family life. The marriage laws at issue thus harm and humiliate the children.” 

Finally, Kennedy affirms that marriage is “a keystone of the Nation’s social order.” It is the institution at the center of the United States’ legal and educational structures, and because of this, “it is demeaning to lock same-sex couples out of a central institution of the Nation’s society, for they too may aspire to the transcendent purposes of marriage.”

LaBabera's  attempt to create an alternate history of SCOTUS legalizing marriage equality is laughably pathetic, but it should put us on notice.  As clumsy as it was, LaBarbera's attempt will not be the only one to recast the ruling for marriage equality into something negative. And there are many other anti-LGBTQ talking heads and groups which employ more sophistication and finesse in their undermining of our community and history. Lets not laugh so hard at "Porno Pete" that we ignore the lesson he is teaching us.  It's not enough for us to win big victories. We must maintain control over the narrative so that the stories of these victories aren't deliberately spun inaccurately.