“It is time that our community stands up and fights for those moral, social, civic and cultural values that are found in the Bible and that our grandparents have instilled in us in our native Hispanic countries,” he said before the event.
Supporters of traditional marriage have launched a $500,000 television ad campaign and are robo-calling voters in swing vote districts.
Although Republicans nationally tend to be strong supporters of traditional marriage, some wealthy New York party backers are funding the push for marriage redefinition. They include financiers Steven A. Cohen, Clifford S. Asness, Daniel S. Loeb and Paul E. Singer, the New York Times reports.
The funds help support New Yorkers United for Marriage, a group targeting Republican lawmakers to persuade them to join most Senate Democrats in supporting the bill.
Singer, a hedge fudge manager and top GOP donor, chairs the Manhattan Institute and has a homosexual son who contracted a marriage with a man in Massachusetts. He has donated $425,000 of his own money and has personally solicited $500,000 from others.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a former Republican who is now unaffiliated, has also donated at least $100,000 of his own money. He has hosted a fundraiser for the effort and has lobbied lawmakers on the issue.
Donations from these men make up about two-thirds of the same-sex “marriage” coalition’s fundraising coffers. Some of the donors were recruited by Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee from 2005-2007 and campaign manager for George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign. Mehlman announced that he was homosexual and a supporter of “gay marriage” in 2010.
“We can’t match the money that’s being thrown at this by the other side, from Hollywood celebrities, from Mayor Bloomberg who’s a billionaire, and from these so-called Republican business leaders,” Poust told CNA.
“All we can do is speak the truth and hope that the legislature is not swayed by dollar signs, and instead they are swayed by a fundamental truth that everyone in their heart really knows.”
Asness told the New York Times he is a “small-government guy” who thinks same-sex marriage is “an issue of basic freedom.”
However, Archbishop Dolan suggested freedom would be endangered if the bill passes. He invoked the work of dystopian novelist George Orwell and warned that supporters of traditional marriage become “harassed and penalized” in countries where marriage is redefined.
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“If big, intrusive government can re-define the most basic, accepted, revealed truth that marriage simply means one man + one woman + (hopefully) children, in a loving family, then, I’m afraid, Orwell’s works will no longer be on the fiction shelf."
Kevin J. Jones is a senior staff writer with Catholic News Agency. He was a recipient of a 2014 Catholic Relief Services' Egan Journalism Fellowship.