“It is a conflict of interest for two advocates to be the leaders of a commission that is supposed to determine whether or not the act is working,” he argued.
“We look on it as a marketing report, done by good and decent people who are well-intentioned, but just because they’re well-intentioned, that doesn’t mean we should change long-standing social institutions.”
Brannigan noted that when he testified, the commission had received only eight complaints about the implementation of the civil union act.
“Of those eight, two were either from the same person or from two people with the same name.
And two were complaints about the same incident,” a Methodist camp which refused access to a lesbian couple.
Brannigan also told CNA that he had spent seven years as Deputy Director of the Division of Citizen Complaints in the Department of the Public Advocate. That department would receive “tens of thousands of complaints” each year and would consider it a very good sign “if we only ever got eight complaints about an agency.”
Reporting that Goldstein, the Civil Union Review Commission vice-chairman, claims to have received 1,500 complaints, Brannigan said that if that is true “he hasn’t made those complaints public.”
Brannigan added that in his experience many complaints tend to be irrelevant, misdirected, or not even complaints at all.
“Our experience showed that of the 20-30,000 complaints I received in a given year, the vast majority of them were from people who were confused or needed information, and so it wasn’t really a complaint about an agency.
“They wouldn’t all be complaints but different inquiries.”
Describing some of the complaints the commission received, Brannigan noted that some complained about matters of federal law.
(Story continues below)
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“If New Jersey implemented same-sex marriage it would not affect those individuals.”
He noted that a civil union under New Jersey law “gives people every single benefit that heterosexuals obtain when they enter marriage.”
Brannigan then described Catholic teaching on marriage.
“Marriage can only be between a man and a woman. Biology supports us, because the bodies of man and woman are complementary.
For unions not for complementary sexes, “it’s a different institution, and it’s called the civil union. But it’s not marriage. It’s almost like calling an ocean a mountain. A tree cannot be a stone.”
“Marriage must be something between a man and a woman.