Anscombe to draft amicus brief

Following the passage of a referendum that calls for the USG to sign on to an amicus brief supporting gay marriage, the Anscombe Society, a socially conservative student group, is drafting its own brief in opposition.

The brief is intended to be filed in the Lewis v. Harris case currently on appeal to the New Jersey Supreme Court.

Anscombe, which according to its mission promotes "chastity and 'traditional' sexual and familial ethics," recently hosted a talk by Maggie Gallagher, who sharply criticized gay marriage.

"The Anscombe Society is not primarily a political society," Anscombe spokesperson and founder David Schaengold '07 said in an interview. "However, one of our positions is that we define marriage as the union between a man and a woman."

Schaengold and Anscombe president Cassandra Debenedetto '07 stressed that the brief is still in the drafting stages.

The Anscombe brief will counter the pro-gay marriage brief composed by the Princeton Justice Project (PJP) and signed by the USG after a referendum passed narrowly in the USG election last week.

"We're going to compile a range of reasoning, legal and otherwise, for defending the current New Jersey laws on marriage," Schaengold said.

A student who is a member of both the Anscombe Society and the Princeton Tory approached the College Republicans on Sunday to ask that they sign onto the brief, according to College Republicans president Alexander Maugeri '07, also a writer for The Daily Princetonian.

"The five elected officers and I talked about it, and obviously because this was coming from those two groups we took it quite seriously. We do have a sense of solidarity with the other conservative groups on campus," Maugeri said.

The leaders of the College Republicans ultimately declined to sign the brief, Maugeri said. The Tory has also not signed the brief as a group, Schaengold said.

"After a fair amount of deliberation, we decided that we wanted to ensure that the views of the entire membership were represented in our decision," Maugeri said. "The Republican Party is really a big tent; it includes libertarians, social conservatives, fiscal. We thought it would be presumptuous to speak in the name of over 600 members on our list."

Maugeri noted that the College Republicans suggested that their members vote 'no' on the referendum directing the USG to sign the PJP brief, but "told members to vote their conscience" on whether to support the right of all consenting adults to marry, regardless of sexual orientation.

"Speaking personally," Maugeri added, "I tend to admire the courage that the members of the Anscombe Society are displaying. It's not easy to express vocally your position when 70 percent of the undergraduates in the school expressed a different position."

Class of 2006 president Chris Lloyd, who heads the PJP Gay Family Rights Project, said the Anscombe society was "perfectly in their right" to submit a friend-of-the-court brief, but raised concerns about the timing.

"It's getting late in the game to submit briefs," Lloyd said. "If it's not submitted by the end of this week, the court probably won't read it."