NEWS
March 12, 2012 | By David Meeks
After years of battling false claims and viral emails alleging that he is a Muslim, President Obama hasn't gotten far among Republican voters in Alabama and Mississippi - about half still believe he is Muslim and about 1 in 4 believes his parents' interracial marriage should have been illegal, a new poll shows. The automated survey by Public Policy Polling, conducted over the weekend in advance of Tuesday's GOP primaries in both states, showed Republicans Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich locked in a three-way battle for votes.
NEWS
May 23, 1996 | MICHAEL HAEDERLE, SPECIAL TO THE TIMES
Krickitt Carpenter perches on her living room couch viewing the wedding videotape and frowns when she sees the bride and groom exchanging vows. "It makes me miss her more and more, the girl in the picture," she says. "I wish I knew what she was thinking--she's just gotten married." For Krickitt, the radiant bride and happy groom in the video are just familiar-looking strangers, shadows of people she once knew. But the people on the videotape are Krickitt and her husband, Kim.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
May 16, 2012 | By Maria L. La Ganga, Los Angeles Times
SAN ANSELMO, Calif. — Days after President Obama announced his support for same-sex marriage, the Presbyterian Church's Northern California governing body refused to rebuke a retired minister for marrying gays and lesbians when it was legal in California. The Presbytery of the Redwoods, which governs churches from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Oregon border, voted 74 to 18 Tuesday to reject the church's official denunciation and instead support the Rev. Jane Adams Spahr, who had been found guilty by an ecclesiastical court of violating the Presbyterian Constitution and her ordination vows for marrying 16 same-sex couples.
OPINION
November 28, 2009
Philosophers have argued for centuries over whether it is ever justifiable to break the law in the service of a higher cause. The question acquired a new complexity with the advent of societies such as the United States, in which laws were enacted by elected representatives and not decreed by a monarch or dictator. Few today would criticize civil rights activists, including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., for participating in or condoning the violation of laws that perpetuated white supremacy -- with the understanding that they would face punishment for their actions.
OPINION
January 19, 2012 | By Stephanie Coontz
As of 2010, according to a recent report from the Pew Research Center, married couples had fallen to barely 51% of U.S. households, with a full 5% drop in new marriages between 2009 and 2010 alone. The data for 2011 aren't in yet, but if that decline continued last year, less than half of American adults are in a legal marriage now. Is marriage going the way of the electric typewriter and the VHS tape? Not exactly. The decline of marriage seems especially dramatic in comparison to the way things were 50 years ago. In 1960, almost half of 18- to 24-year-olds and 82% of 25- to 34-year-olds were married.
NEWS
June 29, 1987
Johnny Carson and Alexis Maas, a woman he met on a beach two years ago, were married in a secret ceremony June 20, the comedian's fourth marriage, a spokesman for Carson said today in Los Angeles. The 61-year-old host of television's "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson," and Maas, a former employee of a stock brokerage firm, were married in a quiet ceremony at Carson's Malibu beach home, Carson's spokesman Jim Mahoney said. Mahoney said Maas is "about 35."