Maggie Gallagher
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Maggie Gallagher (born 14 September 1960) is a United States writer and commentator who has written a syndicated column for Universal Press Syndicate since 1995. Her most recent book is The Case for Marriage: Why Married People are Happier, Healthier, and Better Off Financially (Doubleday, 2000), which she co-authored with Linda J. Waite, a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago. Gallagher is widely known as a strong social conservative. Her opposition to pornography led her to give a surprisingly positive statement about radical feminist Andrea Dworkin when she died. She has also been actively opposed to assisted suicide. Hence she wrote editorials in defense of the position of Terri Schiavo's parents. She is also among America's foremost opponents of same-sex marriage. Ms. Gallagher serves as President of the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy[1], a conservative think tank whose purpose is "strengthening marriage for a new generation."[2][3] Ms. Gallagher also serves as President of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), a 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization that seeks to organize opposition to same-sex marriage in state legislatures and supports pro-traditional-marriage initiatives across the nation.[4]
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[edit] Life history
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Maggie Gallager is from Lake Oswego, Oregon, where she attended Lakeridge High School, and graduated from Yale University in 1982. A former single mother, she is married with two children and currently lives in Westchester County, New York. [5]
[edit] Quotations
[edit] On Marriage
- Marriage as a universal social institution is grounded in certain universal features of human nature. When men and women have sex, they make babies. Reproduction may be optional for individuals, but it is not optional for societies. Societies that fail to have “enough” babies fail to survive. And babies are most likely to grow to functioning adulthood when they have the care and attention of both their mother and their father.[6]
- Same-sex marriage is an expression of a powerful public commitment to the ideal that there are no important differences between gay and straight, between same-sex relationships and other kinds of relationships. Getting to that commitment necessarily requires us to consistently deny or downgrade the significance of the biggest, most obvious and intractable difference between same-sex and opposite-sex unions: that only the latter are capable of producing children and uniting the child with his own mother and father.[7]
- Women shouldn't settle for less; we should appreciate more. A good family man is not a step down -- he's a step up. Find a good man and love him. Do it not only because it's the best way to raise a family. Do it because spending your life actually loving a man, however imperfectly, is better than spending your time perpetually shopping for the right set of inner sensations in your brain (aka waiting for "The One"). Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.[8]
[edit] On Euthanasia
- Legal approval of suicide amounts to a declaration to the old, sick and vulnerable that others consider their lives worthless.
[edit] On Polygamy
- Polygamy is not worse than gay marriage, it is better. At least polygamy, for all its ugly defects, is an attempt to secure stable mother-father families for children.
[edit] On Bigotry
- Judges and politicians like that imply that the 60 percent of black Americans and 60 percent of white Americans in a November Pew poll who say they oppose gay marriage must be motivated by "animus." Translation? You're a bigot.
- March 3, 2004 [10]
- In the America that Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD) dreams of, the idea that children deserve mothers and fathers will become the legal and moral equivalent of racism. Their logic leads not to live-and-let-live tolerance, but to an ugly culture war, using the law to root out public expression of such "prejudices".
[edit] On Islam
- To suggest that in order to modernize, Muslim societies need to embrace the worst of the trashy commercialism of Western culture is not true
[edit] On Discrimination
- Same-sex marriage advocates are saying there is no difference between two men being intimate and a husband and wife, even when it comes to raising children. They are saying that the opposite idea, that mothers and fathers both matter, is a form of hate, ignorance, animus, bias. That's why they claim that the normal definition of marriage is discrimination.
[edit] On Controversy
- I should have disclosed a government contract when I later wrote about the Bush marriage initiative. I would have, if I had remembered it. My apologies to my readers.[12]
[edit] On Andrea Dworkin
- According to Reuters, "Dworkin is survived by her husband, John Stoltenberg, also a feminist activist and author." Maybe in the end, she found that kind of love, too. I hope so. Rest in peace, Andrea.
[edit] Controversy
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This article or section is missing citations or needs footnotes. Using inline citations helps guard against copyright violations and factual inaccuracies. (February 2008) |
On January 26, 2005, Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post uncovered records of Gallagher receiving payments of tens of thousands of dollars from the Department of Health and Human Services from 2002-2003 for helping the Bush administration promote the President's "healthy marriage" initiative.[14] During this time, Gallagher testified before Congress repeatedly in favor of "healthy marriage" programs, but never disclosed the payments.
[edit] Books
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Please help improve this section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. |
- The Abolition of Marriage: How We Destroy Lasting Love (1996) ISBN 0-89526-464-1
- Enemies of Eros: How the Sexual Revolution Is Killing Family, Marriage, and Sex and What We Can Do About It (1989) ISBN 0-929387-00-7
- The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier, and Better Off Financially with Linda J. Waite (2001) ISBN 0-7679-0632-2
- The Case for Staying Married with Linda J. Waite (2005) ISBN 0-19-516929-8
- The Age of Unwed Mothers: Is Teen Pregnancy the Problem? : A Report to the Nation (1999) ISBN 0-9659841-5-X
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Liberal rundown of Gallagher's donors and supporters
- Kurtz column on Gallagher's money trail
- short biography on uexpress.com
- Archive of her editorials
- Institute for American Values
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