Marriage Will be Saved by Marriage Equality, not DOMA
A meteor is threatening to destroy the institution of marriage, but it isn’t marriage equality. And it isn’t the February 22 decision by federal court judge (and Bush appointee!) Jeffrey White that (1) sexual orientation is a suspect or quasi-suspect class deserving of protection from discrimination, and (2) that the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional because it serves no legitimate governmental purpose and demonstrates “a stark departure from tradition and a blatant disregard of the well-accepted concept of federalism in the area of domestic relations.”
Ironically, what may save marriage is a Supreme Court decision finding DOMA and all the state constitutional amendments barring marriage equality for gays and lesbians to be unconstitutional. That’s because it will give marriage a new constituency for the 1,138 rights, benefits, and privileges associated with marriage under federal law (to say nothing of the 400 or so state-level rights for each state, totaling over 20,000 rights for all 50 states and the District of Columbia).
The explanation starts and ends with the right to include a spouse in your health insurance.
The decision finding DOMA unconstitutional concerns Karen Golinski v. United States Office of Personnel Management (read it here). In 2008 Ms. Golinski, an attorney working for the OPM, married her lesbian partner of many years during the period that marriage equality was legal under California law. She then applied to have her wife covered under her health insurance. OPM instructed her insurer not to cover her wife due to DOMA, so she sued.
After Obama announced on February 23, 2011, that he had instructed the Department of Justice to stop defending DOMA because it is unconstitutional, members of Congress organized the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group (BLAG) of the House of Representatives to make the case in favor of DOMA.
BLAG attempted to defend the four governmental interests that Congress identified as the rationale for DOMA (from p. 26 of the decision):
(1) encouraging responsible procreation and child-rearing; (2) defending and nurturing the institution of traditional, heterosexual marriage; (3) defending traditional notions of morality; and (4) preserving scarce government resources.
How compelling was the evidence BLAG presented? One of its three references purporting to prove that same-sex parenting is inferior to opposite-sex parenting was an article from Slate.com, of which Judge White drily notes:
[It] is a three-page, non-scientific article by an author with no professional expertise in child development, published by an online magazine without peer review.
Really — that’s the caliber of authority BLAG asserted as sufficient for forcing gays into the hassles, obstacles, burdens, heartbreak, abandonment, and all-around destruction included at no extra charge in second-class citizenship. I am not making this up.
There’s more.
BLAG also submitted a piece by Prof. Loren Marks, about which Judge White blandly observed:
[His] critique is neither a study nor published in a peer-reviewed journal and its questionable analysis is based on outdated and selectively chosen data.
In summary:
The Court finds that neither Congress’ claimed legislative justifications nor any of the proposed reasons proffered by BLAG constitute bases rationally related to any of the alleged governmental interests. Further, after concluding neither the law nor the record can sustain any of the interests suggested, the Court, having tried on its own, cannot conceive of any additional interests that DOMA might further.
What DOMA does do is block same-sex couples from enjoying the 1,138 rights, benefits, and privileges the General Accountability Office reported to Congress are associated with marriage under federal law in reports submitted in 1997 and 2004. The following are some of the most important rights and benefits barred to lawfully married same-sex couples, who may not do or have the following:
– Include a spouse on their federal health insurance policy — which also means the same-sex spouse cannot continue employer-sponsored health insurance after the death or divorce of an employee;
– Take time off work to care for a sick spouse (as heterosexual spouses can under the Family and Medical Leave Act);
– Receive Social Security benefits on the death of a spouse (or ex-spouse) based on the marriage rather than his or her own earnings;
– Receive veterans’ benefits, including pensions, indemnity compensation for service-related deaths, medical care, nursing home care, the right to burial in veterans’ cemeteries, educational assistance, housing, assistance in borrowing for housing and preferences in hiring for federal employment;
– Transfer property from one spouse to another (or to a former spouse in the event of a divorce) without any recognition of gain or loss for tax purposes;
– Receive a spouse’s federal retirement annuity after the death of the spouse;
– Receive the death benefit of a public safety officer killed in the line of duty — this means being denied up to $100,000;
– Receive augmented compensation for work-related injuries;
– Receive per diem allowances or subsistence payments in connection with a spouse’s government-ordered relocation;
– Be included in the order of precedence for receiving final paychecks and life insurance benefits when the federal employee or service member died without designating a beneficiary;
– Provide a path to citizenship for an immigrant spouse;
– File jointly for bankruptcy protection;
– Enjoy protection from the due-on-sale clause of a mortgage when transferring residential property from one spouse to another;
– Be entitled to copyright renewal and termination rights as the widow or widower of the creator of a copyrighted work.
The Left, which includes this author, just cannot seem to win at the ballot box. So, they once again, as they have for the past few decades, seek to win through judicial activism. Like the author, they then try to convince the populous that they had some sort of moral authority allowing them to deprive you of your right to self government through democratic and representative institutions.
The author would like to portray this as a fundamental right. People have a right to choose everything else that is absent from the constitution for themselves. Funny, the Constitution is rather silent on your new found right.
Never mind that this is an innovation that has never been contemplated with regard to marriage in history (prior to the modern progressive movement).
I am furthermore getting sick of the homosexual movement attempting to coop the conservative movement.
Recent polls suggest that the tide is dramatically turning in favor of marriage equality. 59% in California favor marriage equality according to recent poll. If they had a vote today for marriage equality it would pass. What would you say then? My guess is that you would then turn to the courts. The mechanism you now deride. LOL. But really, constitutional rights are not predicated upon public opinion. This is why foes of marriage equality will lose in the end … and they know it.
“If they had a vote today for marriage equality it would not matter one way or the other thanks to liberal judges.”
Quote edited for truth. They had votes in Cali already. Two of them. Marriage “equality” was voted against in both then overturned by judges.
So right away the voting process has been made irrelevant because only one decision (of the two choices) will not be struck down by the Cali judges.
Polls of course can be constructed to provide the “answers” which support the talking points of the partisans who hire the pollster. In fact they are regularly so constructed.
Is there any reason not to dismiss, or at least suspect, the poll cited by Cynical Wonder as just that sort of thing? Is there any reason not to suspect that the poll cited by Cynical Wonder is not a device to give an aura of legitimacy to what is in-substance anti-democratic activism by the the courts? Is there any reason not to suspect that the poll Cynical Wonder cites was but a device to provide a politically convenient talking point: “If they had a vote today for marriage equality it would not matter one way or the other thanks to liberal judges”?
One would like to think that we have elections for a reasons and that one of those reasons would so that we could have “fair and valid polls that would count”.
I was simply mentioning the poll to demonstrate how public opinion is changing on the matter but, ultimately, polls do not matter, nor does public opinion when it comes to civil rights. Marriage is a civil right and has been determined as such by the courts going back, what, 40 years? You have a misunderstanding as to how the branches of government work and also of checks and balances. The people can certainly have a vote on anything they like. However, if the result of that vote conflicts with the U.S. Constitution (more specifically the 14th Amendment) then the courts are there to put a check on the vote the people made. I would suggest you google “Marbury v Madison” to understand the extent of the nature and purpose of our judicial system of checks and balances.
Marriage as a functional and essential institution has been dead for so long that Yockey argues without irony that it is actually about “rights, benefits, and privileges”. Gee, if that is what marriage is about, I wonder why people in droves are avoiding it, to society’s easily demonstrated detriment. It has been dead so long that the killers are beginning to win the battle to pound the final nail into the coffin in opinion polls, as fewer and fewer people actually remember marriage as something whose essential attribute was obligation, not “rights, benefits, and privileges”.
The fundamental transformation of America proclaimed by the Puppetmasters-in-Chief has reached critical mass from which there is no turning back. The homosexual “rights” agenda is a small part of a strategy to create chaos in our society. As Lucifer is the dedicatee of Alinsky’s book (that’s right, don’t blame Satan on Santorum), this is not surprising. Life can be hard, cruel and unfair in the best of times. I wish Cythnia Yockey and her father well. All of us age, get sick, lose our jobs, suffer loss and personal tragedy and all the other evils flesh is heir to.
Who among us has the time, energy and capability to reason through to the fundament of our country, as expressed in the first sentence of the Declaration: “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”? The blizzard of crimes, lies, regulations and all manner of interference in the lives of citizens being perpetrated by the present government has created a “whiteout,” a blindness in our thinking. The majority of us are grasping at whatever comes close to hand, and try to find safety in it. It is only natural, when society has entirely broken down, to try and fix the one little part most essential to our self, our identity. The result is frustration, anger and the libertarian mode of dealing with things: just leave me alone.
I believe that, along with black Americans, homosexuals have been the most abused by the Marxist ideologues in control of our nation You try bearing the brunt of the left’s machinery of power and you might turn out to be a pretty useful idiot too. But we must not give up the fight. With Charity for all, and Malice toward none we must resist unto death.
and die you will …
Your demographic, that is. It’s dying off. Most young people of today do not share your conservative views. As people like you die off you are being systematically replaced with people who hold different views. Time is on our side. All we have to do is wait you out. That’s all. Nature will take care of the rest …
Yes, nature will take its course.
Decay, unsustainable debt, crime, chaos, loss of freedom, and the destruction of the greatest civilization on earth…
The inevetabe, natural course when the likes and attitudes of the Cynical Wonders outnumber the likes and attitudes of the Prothonotary warblers.
“…to fundamentally transform…”
Darwin was right….without God, we’re screwed.
I really don’t care either way. Sincerely, who cares?
The Gay Marriage thing is essentially a rook, a scam designed by cruel, brilliant and likely straight Divorce Lawyer.
And it was amusing when another commenter, Cynical Wonder(?), invoked “Nature” to back up their argument.
But really, constitutional rights are not predicated upon public opinion.
That’s correct and it’s something that the Left has a nasty habit of forgetting/ignoring. Go preach it to your fellow Leftists, since you’re all about protecting the Constitution.
Only a proponent of a “living and breathing” Constitution would cite an 1868 amendment (written and ratified for the expressed purpose of guaranteeing that recently emancipated slaves would be assured of their rights) to justify fiat acts of activist judges striking down laws to create a new set of rights. Rights which have, for almost 150 years remained undiscovered.
Please do not insult our intelligence. Everyone knows that the creation of new rights by judges is in every meaningful way illegitimate. People are waking up, at least to a degree, to the danger that those (like you) create to liberty and the rule of law, by shredding the only document that is designed to limit government.
Remember this also, what the judges giveth, future judges can taketh away. I’m just waiting on a few more Scalias to arrive.
The Left lost the economic debate, Keynesianism is a crock.
The Left won the culture wars, no one has right to stop anyone else from having a good time.
The left – including the author of this marriage hit piece – does not recogize any such loss on the economic issue – Keynsian economis is a joke (works fine with termites, ants and bees)
“The following are some of the most important rights and benefits barred to lawfully married same-sex couples, who may not do or have the following:”
Well I went through this list and guess what, I found no “rights” at all. All I found were privileges, all of which could be provided to gay couples by legislation and a few of which IMO should not be provided at all but do have popular support.
I hate to go off track here, but for a look at what libruls think of as rights, you can’t do better than take a look at a real nitwit of a Georgetown law student:
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2012/03/01/left_freaks_out_over_my_fluke_remarks
No sexism to see here folks.
sexism…the new racism. Take the PC crap to another board.
So then there is no Constitutional right to be heterosexually married either, and any State or the Federal government is free to revoke all privileges currently afforded to married people.
That should work out well.
Perverted sex is attractive only to sex perverts. Homosexual alliances are condemned by God, and promoted by perverts. In the OT such were executed. In the NT they are promised eternal and terrible punishment.Gods position is clear. Are we with Him, or against Him?
America is a great country in that people are free to practice their beliefs as they see fit. While I respect your right to do so, that right ends where another persons body or life begins. We are a nation of laws. Those laws are derived from the U.S. Constitution. Judges interpret the law. Often we don’t like what the judges have to say but because we are Americans we respect the law and obey it. Otherwise, the consequences are often not pretty. Your magic sky fairy does not trump the law.
Sure Like the plagues of STDs that we have today are in no way related to the acts of which your “good fairy” warns.
Yes Cynical Wonder, I understood that you mentioned that poll so as to demonstrate how public opinion is changing on the matter. I questioned your poll because GLBT activists regularly roll out conveniently timed but dubious push-polls and aggi-prop “studies” to further their cause. It is unclear to me whether or not your poll measures any real change in public opinion. One may note that you did not address any of my express concerns about your poll.
Yes Cynical Wonder, I do indeed understand how the US Constitution works, thank you. As a matter of fact, neither the Founders, the proposers nor the ratifiers of the US Constitution, Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment intended any of those documents to make “Gay Marriage” an Constitutional civil right. Perhaps to the man they would have found “Gay Marriage” to be preposterous and in many cases they would have found it to be repulsive. You can pretend Mr. Cynical Wonder that “Gay Marriage” is a Constitutional civil right, but you are only pretending.
“The Left, which includes the author…”
What, ho, yon Ausonious, thou ist now the grand definer of right and left. A woman who is a fiscal conservative and an advocate of a strong defense is now proclaimed by you to be Left. Why? Because she disagrees with you on this issue. Those who invoke the classics should be above pitiable ad hominems.
“new constituency in lesbians and gays willing to fight hard for its well-being”
And yet if they are allowed then it’s well-being is already taken a faceplant.
I’m not into blowing off my foot to save myself from a broken toe. There are plenty of reasons to repeal Obamacare already without alienating social conservatives.
No.
Just what PJM needed…a homosexual Ruben Navarrette.
Ed, ome of us suppose that they already have one.
There is aleardy equality: you get exactly the salme benefits when you marry a person of the opposite sex whether you are straight or homosexual. Society gets no benefit from gay unions so ity has neither the duty nor the right to sopend a single cent from tax payer’s money in protecting gay marriage. Let’s tem live lmike they want but keep theit hands off my wallet.
Of course society gets a benefit from a gay union. The same benefits you get from a heterosexual union:
Less promiscuity means less chance of spreading STDs.
Scientific studies have confirmed what was already common knowledge: Being in a committed relationship with a person is not only psychologically healthier but physically healthier, meaning lower national health care costs. And where straight folks are concerned, just cohabiting is not considered as committed as signing that marriage certificate, because that represents a formal commitment with your signature on it. Why is that any different for gay folks?
Society has created numerous benefits for marriage because we believed it was worth something: Filing joint tax returns, receiving Social Security or Federal annuity benefits after the spouse dies, etc. Why are those good things for straight folks but bad things for gay folks?
I live in MA, where we’ve had gay marriage now for several years. It hasn’t caused ANY problems whatsoever for those of us who are straight. Straight folks are still getting married–in churches–and having kids, and all the rest of it.
Where’s the logic in saying that heterosexual men and women are worse off being married, but gay men and women are better off not being promiscuous?
I’m not a Christian. I’m a Deist.
Can someone come up with an argument against gay marriage that is NOT based on the Bible?
No successful culture has ever endorsed “gay marriage”. At best, homosexual relationships have been tolerated, but never given the legal, cultural, or social status of straight marriage.
Furthermore, there has been no effort to actually persuade the voting public to vote for “gay marriage”. Instead there have been campaigns of bullying, slander, and the destruction of the rule of law by having self-interested judges impose their wishes on the public. Look at the Illinois “civil unions and religious freedom act”, which contrary to its title is being used to punish churches who do not discard their beliefs and approve of “gay marriages”. The behavior of the gay marriage movement have turned me from someone who would have voted for, into someone who will oppose.
The day you are old and you are trapped in a burning house let the sons produced by homosexual unions come to your rescue. That is what you deserve for your stupidity and your sanctimunousness.
I don’t think “produced” means what you think it means.
“[Legalization of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts] hasn’t caused ANY problems whatsoever for those of us who are straight. Straight folks are still getting married–in churches–and having kids, and all the rest of it.”
I’d be extremely surprised if your statement is true in the long run — and even in the short run. Statistics in European countries where same-sex marriage was recognized much earlier suggest the opposite of what you assert.
And even if your statement about Massachusetts’ experience is correct in the short run, time has shown that legal changes that are inherently destructive to the family usually take a generation or 2 to show their full force.
Accordingly, your assertion in 2012 that legalization of same-sex marriage in MA isn’t causing “any” problems is really just wishful thinking.
And wishful thinking is an extremely poor basis on which to build social policy.
JPL17, please spell out exactly what the problems are. I don’t mean artificial ones like the creation of a new protected class. Tell me about kids and families. How exactly will they suffer?
Often I think a lot of these people who are against marriage equality just need something to do. Their reasons have all been dismantled, from a legal perspective that is …
Society, that is you and me, neeed people having children in order to perpetuate itself, that is we bit have have an interest in there will be firemen or doctors when we are old. That is why, society, that is you and me, has an interest in protecting the kind of unions who can produce children.
But can you tell me in the name of what, the state that is you and me should spend a single cent protecting homosexual unions? Unlike heterropsexual unions they are a purely private matter with no collateral effects. If they want to live together it is their business and the state should not interfere but that is all.
Also if you say the state should protect gay unions (that is have gay marriage) then in the name of what do you ban incestuous ones? You cannot invoke the utility for society since you accepted homosexual marriage and we both agree ban should not be based on religion grounds. So what you do?
BTW. Following Dorian tradition of miliatary homosexuality every young spartan was supposed to be “initiated” by an older man and every thirty odd man to “initiate” a late teen oe. Despite this and the fact Spartans had never head about that Bible thing Sparta didn’t have a gay marriage.
Legalizing gay marriage will reduce the birth rate? That’s your argument? Men will marry men instead of women they can have children with?
Don’t you see how ridiculous your arguments sound?
Are you stuck on stupid?
I told nothing about gay marriage and birth rate. I told about heterosexual marriage and bitrh rate plus the fact that the state has no right to spend money, my money, on protecting gay unions for reasons I am tired of repeating. If you still haven’t understood try to find someone with an IQ higer than 50 to explain them to you.
Uh, JFM?
I agree with the ideas behind your argument, but you might want to rephrase the IQ sentence, and check spelling before you hit “submit comment”.
Society, that is you and me, neeed people having children in order to perpetuate itself, that is we bit have have an interest in there will be firemen or doctors when we are old. That is why, society, that is you and me, has an interest in protecting the kind of unions who can produce children.
I can only translate this as “We need to protect straight marriage or the birth rate will fall.” And there’s some sort of implication that allowing gay marriage means we’ll no longer protect straight marriage — that it’s an either/or situation.
Stuck on stupid.
Definitely. I will try to reexplain it.
Marriage= State giving leagl protextion to a union.
Legal protection costs money.
State has no right to spend tax payer money unless that union provides some benefit to society.
Heterosexual union provides children and these are necessary for society survival = State has the right to protect it (ie marriage) and I agree on paying taxes because I don’t want
to live in atime where
Homosexual unions provide benefits to the couple but none to society (no collateral effects) => State has no right to put its filthy paws in my wallet to protect them (ie no marriage). They are free to live like they want that is all.
Is that simple enough for you or do you want l
Regarding subsidies:
If you put solar panels on your roof, you get some of my money
If you go to war for the United States, you get some of my money
If you grow corn instead of wheat, you get some of my money
If you buy a Chevy Volt, you get some of my money
If you reach the age of sixty-six, you get some of my money
If you spend more than $4800 dollars on out-of-pocket money on medications, you get some of my money
If you marry with the intention of raising children, you get some of my money
If you stick your genitals up against similar sets of genitals, you get some of my money.
When does it end? We do not owe homosexuals any special privilege. Homosexual rights is just another Cloward and Piven nail hammered home by hammer and sickle wielding Alinskyites. Please re-frame the discussion to take account of the victims being created by subsidies. Then relieve the victims of the silliest of them. I do not want to be manipulated by other people’s genitals. Sue me!
#JFM
Dude, I can’t tell if you’re drunk or what, but you can’t key/spell for sh!t. Your arguments are rambling & incoherent to say the least. Get it TOGETHER, for heaven’s sake, before you start having diarrhea of the mouth on ANY forum.
Sparta also had eugenics-based reproductive practices, including infanticide and wife-trading.
Does that mean we can embrace those as well?
As for how you can ban incest when you do not ban homosexuality, the answer is very simple.
Marriages between relatives who are too close carries too great a chance of coercion in establishing the relationship, which is typically done to maintain control of family property. This is frequently exacerbated by age differences, and made even worse by supervisory relationships.
Combined, they reach a point where it is functionally impossible to trust any assertions that the relationships were not coerced, making the related contractual relationships impossible to sustain.
I never said I advocated implementing any of Sparta’s institutions and practices in our sociery. I thought it was crystal clear why I told abou Sparta: beacuase it was probably the most gay-friendly society in history, one where a homsoexdual experience was more or less mandatory. And it had no gaya marriage. Neither the Roman Empire despite the fact Hadrian openly lived with his male lover and this was no problem to its subjects.
For incestuous marriage, once you forsake utility to society as criteria for marriage then state no longer can deny it. In France for instance incest between consenting adults is not illegal. Your neighbours will think you are sick but the cops will not come to arrest you for it. What is illegal is celebrating marriage between close relatives: State is saying: “who you live/f..k with is your business but I will not provide protection or advantages to your union”.
Except Sparta did not actually promote gay relationships, it just promoted a form of ritualized homosexual bonding while actively destroying the “standard” marital and family relationship.
As such it becomes a useless example without the overall context.
The same applies to general Greek pederasty, which stressed strict age limitations on such relationships.
Of course the general Greek standard becomes upset with the Sacred Bands, but I suppose we have to overlook that.
The Romans are different as they continued to outlaw homosexuality in several contexts, while being forced to accept it among its rulers. Several other Emperors with male lovers were significantly less tolerated by history, so again we have a problem with using it as a general example.
As for incest, you continue to focus on this “utility to society” model.
Aside from opening the door to other things being subject to the same standard, like say perhaps your ownership of a gun, your income, your spending, your healthcare, or even your rights in court, it remains that marriage can be predicated on other models, and so avoid the problem of opening up that can of worms altogether.
Yes. Religion never has to enter into the argument.
1. The state sanctions marriage, and always has, in order to establish a legal bond between the biological (or legally adoptive) father in order that the state not become responsible for the child. This follows natural law in which all mammals mate with the opposite sex to reproduce. Marriage has always been regulated by the state. Consanguinity, age, other restrictions have applied. Yes, race too, but that was only in a few states which specifically made laws forbidding only black/white marriages. Whites went on marrying Asians and American Indians, s well as blacks in the states that did not forbid it. Eliminating the racial barrier to marriage does not change the definition of marriage the way permitting two members of the same sex to marry would change it.
2. The biological purpose of sexual attraction is perpetuation of the species. To the extent that a person is attracted to any one (or thing) other than the opposite sex with whom it is naturally possible to procreate, that person’s desire is biologically abnormal. It makes no sense to validate abnormal relationships.
3. Satisfaction of every human desire cannot become a civil right or chaos will result. If it can be legal for two men or two women to marry, why not three or more of any gender, age, or relationship variety? In the Netherlands, which I believe was the first country to legalize same sex marriages, 3 people were recently permitted to marry – a man and two women. Polygamy, polyamory, and every other imaginable relationship will ensue. Why is it not a violation of my civil rights if I want to marry two people, or more? What happens to the children in group marriages? Will the father know who his children are? Will he support them, financially and emotionally? What about age of consent? Should a man of 40 be able to marry a boy of 16? The age of consent in many states is 16, or less.
4. If it’s all about “benefits,” let’s say I wish to make my sister (or brother) the recipient of my pension’s survivor annuity. Can I marry her (or him) to achieve that result? If not, why not? Are my civil rights (or hers) violated if the state says no?
There are many reasons to prevent homosexuals from marrying, but we are not allowed to debate them. Anyone who brings such arguments forward is immediately shouted down as a bigot. If arguments cannot be made against a given policy then it would be no surprise if the policy eventually gains approval. Homosexuals and their advocates know full well that this is the case and that is why they stifle debate.
However, it is interesting that even politically correct types experience “the wisdom of repugnance” for homosexual acts. I’ve had several experiences where when I revealed my true feelings, they felt free to reveal theirs. That’s probably why 37 states voted (each vote being private) to prevent same sex marriages and yet “polls” show otherwise. Put it to a vote, allow free and open debate, and see what happens.
Dear Sin, The statistics you are quoting all apply to those in normal marriages. There is absolutely no data that the same benefits would apply to perverted relationships. In addition, gay men are not monogamous, either outside or within “committed” relationships, so your statement that STDs (i.e., HIV/AIDS) would be reduced is unfounded. In fact, further normalizing such behavior by giving it the imprimatur of marriage would make it more acceptable, thereby promoting more of it which would lead to a greater incidence of HIV/AIDS and all the other STDs attendant with unnatural sexual behavior.
Here is just one non-Biblical argument for opposition to destroying marriage (i.e., gay “marriage). It is against the law for gay men to give blood because their unnatural sexual behavior is so dangerous that even one such sexual encounter presents a high enough risk that a gay man’s blood could pollute and corrupt our blood supply. Why would a society (or a species) want to normalize and promote such dangerous behavior?
As far as most of the rest of the country is concerned, everything is not okay in MA.
In response to your doubts on my homosexual “marriage,” I’ve find some astonishing statistics that should help you.
The homosexual lifestyle is very detrimental and filthy, and the further embracing of it will only hurt the family and our children more.
I will bring forth evidence on the unnatural causes and origins of homosexuality.
This is an excerpt from an article:
“Let’s rewind and go back to former Congressman Robert Bauman, who in poignantly describing his internal struggles against his homosexual compulsions confided that he had been sexually seduced when he was five years old by an older boy.
Did that experience have anything to do with Bauman’s future homosexuality?
There was a time when psychiatry, psychology, religion, and common sense all said “yes.” In fact, sexually abused young males are “up to 7 times more likely to self-identify as gay or bisexual than peers who had not been abused,” concludes the peer-reviewed 1998 study, “Sexual Abuse of Boys,” by William C. Holmes, M.D. and Gail B. Slap, M.D.
On that topic, a reader recently wrote to me: “We are a family of eight siblings and the oldest is gay, and has lived with the same partner for 41 years. At various times, my siblings and I have tried to discover why he is gay and none of the rest of us are. We finally found out through an older cousin that my brother was repeatedly sexually molested when he was six years old by a 19-year-old man.”
Even Kirk and Madsen, who advise activists to claim they were born homosexual, know better. “We argue that, for all practical purposes, gays should be considered to have been born gay,” they write, “even though sexual orientation, for most humans, seems to be the product of a complex interaction between innate predispositions and environmental factors during childhood and early adolescence.”
If “environmental factors” are involved – and everyone knows they are, whether or not they publicly admit it – why then advise homosexuals to claim they were “born gay”?
“To suggest in public that homosexuality might be chosen,” Kirk and Madsen explain, “is to open the can of worms labeled ‘moral choices and sin’ and give the religious intransigents a stick to beat us with. Straights must be taught that it is as natural for some persons to be homosexual as it is for others to be heterosexual: wickedness and seduction have nothing to do with it.”
Unfortunately, with all the brainy marketing behind the campaign to mainstream homosexuality, what’s been swept under the rug is the recognition – once commonplace in America – that flawed early relationships or sexual victimization can put a child on the road to homosexuality.
Children are exquisitely impressionable, so much so that sexual seduction or assault is a major trauma that can, and often does, reprogram the victim’s identity – his view of who and what he is. While the Holmes and Slap study confirms this, the point is self-evident: our prisons are full of child molesters who were molested as children and batterers who were battered as children.
What about the twelve-year-old who molested Bauman? What caused him to sexually seduce a five-year-old boy? No doubt he felt a strong compulsion to do to a new kid what had been done to him. But why?
An innocent young child has a “bright light” quality that feels mysteriously threatening to those in the grip of corruption. In fact, many see this dynamic at the core of a great deal of child abuse.
To the person who’s already been “converted” and is acting out the homosexual “lifestyle,” it’s deeply satisfying – far beyond mere sexual pleasure – to “initiate” an innocent person. Doing so serves to anesthetize his own conscience and assuage his inner conflict by destroying the innocence of another person, since that innocence tends to make him aware of his own corruption.
There was a time when most Americans knew that homosexuals were not “born that way” but rather had their normal gender-identity development disturbed and redirected through early childhood experiences.
There was a time when we recognized on some level that unhealthy relationships with mothers and fathers could cause girls and boys to grow up with gender confusion – just like emotionally devastating traumatic experiences of molestation – if not dealt with properly. ”
Next source:
Sexual abuse
Childhood sexual abuse is well attested to demonstrate a correlation to the incidence of homosexuality among those affected by it. A large national survey of almost 35,000 Americans showed that more than three times as many men and women who had been sexually abused as children became homosexuals, versus that of heterosexuals.[15][16] Another study reported that 58 percent of male adolescents who later became homosexuals suffered sexual abuse as children, while 90 percent who did not suffer sexual abuse identified themselves as heterosexuals.[17] In addition, 43 percent of male homosexuals reported sexual activity with another male during the ages of 10-12, versus 9 percent of heterosexuals.[18]
Parental relationships with offspring
The psychoanalytical theory is the historical position, which implicates a detached, rejecting or absent father, often along with a close bond to the mother, as working, on the conscious and unconscious level, against a secure sexual identity. Also contributing to this can be a mother who has animosity toward the father, or men in general, and who works to present him negatively, and to make the child side with her.
One of the earliest studies supporting this position was that of Irving Bieber and associates.[11] Comparison of 106 homosexuals with 100 male heterosexuals showed that mothers of the former had enmeshed seductive type relationships with their sons, while their fathers were detached, distant or rejecting. This study was contested by some who charged the researchers with bias, but a further study by Ray B. Evans, which also compared homosexuals with heterosexuals, reported similar results, this time among self-identified homosexuals who had never sought treatment.[12]
Based upon his work with 200 male homosexuals, Gerard van den Aardweg stated that 79 percent described their mother as “overanxious”, or “overconcerned” about them; their safety, health, and being overly sentimental when they met with some hardship, as well as manifesting other aspects of over-mothering. In addition, in 71 percent of homosexual cases, “the most important factor was the father’s detachedness or nonparticipation in the son’s upbringing. The fathers of 38 percent of the men were so hypercritical that the sons were made to feel either rejected and/or inferior. [13]
Another study of about 1500 homosexuals showed much less influence by the mother, while far more reported an unaffectionate or detached father, and approximately half of homosexuals reported they had negative feelings toward their fathers, versus 29 percent of heterosexuals.[14]
While these factors are conducive to homosexuality, it should be stressed that these do not ensure that children raised this way will become homosexual, nor are these factors alone in influencing it.
In conclusion,
You might wonder: Where and when will this “gay rights” public relations steamroller stop? The end game is not only to bring about the complete acceptance of homosexuality, including same-sex marriage, but also to prohibit and even criminalize public criticism of homosexuality, including the quotation of biblical passages disapproving of homosexuality.
In other words, total jamming of criticism with the force of law. This is already essentially the case in Canada and parts of Scandinavia. “Why?” you might ask. “I thought gays just wanted equal rights and to be free to do what they want in their own bedrooms.” No, they’ve had that for years.
Their campaign will not end until Christians and other traditionalists opposing homosexuality are shut up, discredited, and utterly silenced – and all because of a little factor we’ve forgotten about in our cleverness, namely this: In truth, there is something wrong with homosexuality.
Simply put, it is unnatural and self-destructive – just as Western civilization has long understood it.
Kind Regards,
Vitaliy Stepanyuk
Outside of the fact that you believe society gains no benefit from marriage equality, it is really none of your business what two people of the same sex decide to do with their lives. Them getting married will not impact your life one bit and it will not cost you one red penny, so relax and mind your own business. I am so tired of these busy body big government conservatives meddling in everybody’s personal lives.
It is not my business to decide what they do with their lives (ie live together) but it is my business to decide about how my taxes are spent;
This proposal ‘saves’ marriage against the threat of Obamacare. The easier solution, which also solves a broad array of other problems, is to get rid of Obamacare.
The author describes herself as a ‘fiscal conservative’. However, her proposed solution is based on establishing a larger cohort of citizens on the government dole. How is that ‘fiscally conservative’?
Changing marriage laws to include homosexuals is not expansion of a venerable institution, it is a redefinition of it. Once redefined, will it mean anything beyond a financial contractual relationship? (The authors thesis suggests that end.)
Is there anything in the argument for gay/lesbian marriage that does not apply equally well to polygamy?
sinz54: A reduction in the STD rate could also be achieved by a return to social mores that viewed promiscuity as wrong. Why would that be a bad thing?
“Is there anything in the argument for gay/lesbian marriage that does not apply equally well to polygamy?”
Yes. Marriage is a life-long commitment (recognized by the state and/or religious entities) that takes place between two consenting adults.
“Is there anything in the argument for gay/lesbian marriage that does not apply equally well to polygamy?”
Yes. Marriage is a life-long commitment (recognized by the state and/or religious entities) that takes place between two consenting adults.
———————————————-
Alrighty then: Is there anything in the argument for homosexual “marriage” that does not apply equally well to incest (providing both persons are legally adults)?
Once again, the prevalence of coercion in cases where various forms of incest (uncle-niece, aunt-nephew, first cousin) are generally accepted.
This is made worse by age and supervisory relationships, and worse yet when maintenance of family property is added.
There is nothing discriminatory in not recognizing unconscionable contracts.
There is also the state’s interest in not having inbred/low IQ offspring. (coughunlessyouwantmoreDemocratscough)
We’re seeing that now with all the Muslim kids on the short bus around here. I wonder what it looks like in Dearbornistan?
The state has no interest in establishing eugenics-based criteria for permitting reproductive rights.
The state can support databases to assist in avoiding relationships that are too close, or present other genetic dangers, if the parties care. Some Jewish groups use those to prevent passing along some conditions, and Iceland has its own database because of its restricted population pool.
Being able to actively declare certain reproduction illegal is not a safe power to place in the hand of government.
It also happens to lose any meaning in the context of homosexual relationships, and thus becomes difficult to sustain in such discussions.
“between two consenting adults”. The gay marriage argument is that the gender of the adults does not matter, because the people involved do not want it to. Any additional arguments are merely dressed-up versions of that (‘we have a right to!’ is no more than ‘we want to’) since there is no further moral/ethical basis for the statement. By extension, the number of adults should not matter either if the people involved do not want it to.
Yes there.
As a contract, marriage must exist on an equitable basis.
If there is coercion on the part of one party, then the contract is not sustainable.
With polygamy, one party can too easily coerce the other party into acceptance, typically threatening to divorce the other party if they do not agree, and to place the negative social responsibility on that other party.
Further, an equitable division of marital assests is easily subverted, both during the marriage and with inheritance.
These factors are way too ubiquitous with all instances of polygamy to be treated as anything but the default, and thus polygamous contracts cannot be reasonably sustained.
Many two-person marriages currently could not be considered ‘equitable’ as you have defined it. Arranged marriages, which creeping sharia will certainly give us, is only the most egregious examples of this. Consider John Kerry – his wife has all the money, which he clearly desired (needs?) intensely. Consider any of the many philandering/alcoholic/whatever celebrities whose spouses are stuck until the celebrity does something sufficiently public to enable a large divorce settlement. The potential for ‘unequal’ status in the relationship is thus a functionally meaningless argument against polygamy.
More vital to the discussion, though, is that it is meaningless as a matter of law.
The point holds – legal acceptance of gay marriage necessitates legal acceptance of polygamy.
And indeed sharia is a prime example of the problems with polygamy and incest.
And yes, arranged marriages in general are a problem, and serious consideration should be given to treating them differently when they wind up in court.
As for Kerry and his wife, unless you have some evidence that one was coerced into marrying the other to gain access to the money or political prestige, then the example is not valid.
So no, allowing homosexual marriage does not require allowing either polygamy or incest as a matter of legal equality.
Actually not sure a federal DOMA is a good idea, but a couple random related thoughtsthoughts:
1) ‘Equal protection’ is supposed to be some kind of self-evident slam dunk here, but one can’t discuss ‘equal rights’ with respect to something without examining the fundamental nature of the thing in question.
Example?
No one makes an equal protection or ‘fairness’ argument for giving blind people driver’s licenses. It is not obvious that a civil marriage license is categorically different.
2) The high straight divorce rate is frequently cited as a counterargument to concerns about same sex marriage further weakening the single most fundamental social institution (and the nuclear family. which is also *the* critical non-state actor).
But that is nonsense too — citing the *success* of liberal efforts to water down and diminish marriage a generation ago (which we know how that has worked out) is hardly evidence for furthering the process now.
3) Why is the sacred-to-liberals ‘precautionary principle’ never applied to their social engineering efforts?
As we have recently seen, no right guaranteed by the first amendment is any bar to liberals, who will gladly outlaw churches that refuse to perform same-sex marriages. It will be called discrimination, and they will have their tax-free status removed, and their ministers will lose the legal authorization to perform the ceremony of marriage. Do not tell me this is nonsense; all of this current controversy would have been considered a joke twenty-odd years ago.
It’s already happening–several judges have forced churches to perform ‘gay’ marriages. If this movement existed to create state unions that had all the rights accorded married couples it wouldn’t have nearly the opposition. The problem is that the GLBT agenda is to force everyone to accept their beliefs over religion, philosophy, or whatever. The purpose is to force beliefs on the rest of us, period. That is the beginning and end of the debate. It has nothing to do with equality, and everything to do with the wished-for tyranny of a tiny minority. Just as ObamaCare demands that Catholics abandon their religion and pay for what the government orders, the GLBT movement is a religious crusade, a theocratic tyranny in embryo. Freedom of conscience is the bedrock of all other rights and liberties; it’s hardly surprising that the left is trying to destroy it, but then why should anybody have different beliefs than theirs, which are obviously right and superior to everyone else’s? Amazing how the ultimate bigots constantly accuse others of bigotry.
The author makes a great case for ending the practice of employment based health insurance. It is nonsensical that free people cannot purchse health insurance for a family member, loved one, acquaintance, or complete stranger providing they qualify for the insurance. Though one example, probably most of the “rights” married couples have, ought to be de-linked from the institution of marriage. I think we should keep the government out of our bedrooms, (and most other rooms) but that we all (particularly homosexuals and elected representative) should keep our bedrooms out of the public square.
As long as churches are not forced to perform gay marriages if it goes against their beliefs, I have absolutely no problem with gays getting married.
But I don’t trust this administration not to force churches to do ANYTHING. Obviously. That’s my only problem.
Though I’m a Christian, I’m a libertarian, and I believe in freedom for all. But the moment you force someone to violate their beliefs, you cease to have my support. I would be liberal but for their insistence on forcing their morality through law. I would be somewhat more social conservative if it weren’t for their insistence on forcing their morality through law.
The government should just stay out of people’s business, period. Perhaps all of the rights conferred by marriage should simply be repealed. Wouldn’t that solve everything? What would be the point of legal marriage then?
Then marriage could go back to being what it began as. A religous sacrament and a cultural ceremony.
No one cares what religious sacraments and cultural ceremonies other people do. At least, no one should.
Calling marriage just a religious ceremony is grossly incorrect, ignorant of history and the intersection of human culture and evolution.
It is all about the cultural reinforcement of the underlying [mostly] monogamous biology. Marriage is ultimately about paternity (exclusivity) and the related paternal investment, plus inheritance/property, which all result in more prosperous, successful offspring, hence more successful families and communities.
EVERY society thru human history has had the larger community take an interest in this, whether tribal or with formal ‘government’.
Too pretend otherwise is foolish.
Golly, but doesn’t this have a familiar ring to it?
“Under my plan, if you like your “marriage” you can keep it.”
Where have we heard that before?
“Perhaps all of the rights conferred by marriage should simply be repealed.”
A stunning comment.
The very possibility that a “right” could ever “repealed” is alien to all that America stands for. “Powers” can be repealed; “privileges” can be repealed; “laws” can be repealed; “amendments” can be repealed. “Rights” can be denied, infringed upon, subordinated, or surrendered, but they cannot be “repealed”. Some serious mental housekeeping is in order here, Mr. Fisch.
Perhaps rights was the wrong word, yes.
All of the legal “rights” listed in the article have been given by laws, set up by the government and legal system to build up the institution of marriage. They aren’t natural, as the rights to life, liberty, self-protection, etc.
If I could, I would edit my post to say “priveleges” instead.
Would that satisfy you?
I would say that “privilege” is also insufficient, Mr. Fisch. I think the word you are looking for is “promotion”.
Driving is a “privilege”, but without a driver’s license proving that the “privilege” has been granted, the government can, and will, stop you from driving; either by financial penalty, confiscation of the car, or by incarceration. Government does not promote the privilege to drive with laws that favor driving; to the contrary, it adds more obligations to government. Drivers must carry liability insurance, register and maintain their vehicle, and surrender some of their individual rights while driving.
Marriage however, is a “right” protected under the first amendment’s free exercise clause. Government protects the right to marry, and instead of adding more obligations to government and infringement of individual rights for exercising the right, as it does with the “privilege of driving”, it instead “promotes” the institution of marriage with various favorable laws. Although the government issues a “marriage license”, the license itself is not “permission” to exercise the right, it rather “validates” the marriage as eligible for advantages afforded by the government’s “promotion” of a traditional marriage. The government will not “stop” your marriage without a license; Government will not penalize you financially, it will not confiscate your property, and it will not incarcerate either you or your spouse in the absence of a marriage license. Government can at most only withold it’s recognition of the marriage as legally valid, and deny the “promotions” of various favorable laws accorded to a valid marriage.
A successful marriage, as a rule, leads to the creation of a family and, as a stable family is the both the bedrock of a sustainable civil society and the preferred social structure for reproducing the next generation of productive citizens, government has a compelling national interest in promoting it. Although it may be that a stable family can also result from a gay union, and also can create an environment for raising children to be the next generation of productive citizens, most people suspect that is more the exception than the rule. Which is probably why most people also believe that there is not an “equal” compelling national interest in “promoting” gay unions.
Governments have an interest in having its citizens turn out well; citizens that turn out well pay more in taxes, have fewer social problems, etc. Society has learned over the centuries that “a marriage between one man and one woman” tends to produce the best children (future taxpayers). Children produced inside a marriage between one man and one woman are statistically more likely to finish high school, stay out of jail, stay out of poverty, and are less likely to abuse alcohol and drugs (and are also less likely to produce out-of-wedlock children). This means more taxes, fewer jails, fewer mental treatment facilities, lower welfare costs.
Children from widowed, divorced, never-married and same-sex-union homes are more likely to have the above listed social problems. There are of course children who turn out fine in every situation because some children turn out to be extremely resilient, and some parents in the less-successful family situations make valiant efforts to overcome the drawbacks of their status.
In addition to the above-mentioned problems, same-sex unions also do not naturally produce children (future taxpayers) so Lady Thatcher’s warning: “The problem with socialism is that eventually, you run out of other people’s money” is further exacerbated by “running out of other people”. The government has no benefit at all from encouraging same-sex unions, especially since (as several people above noted) we’d end up like The People’s Republic of Massachusetts (yikes) or the Netherlands: same-sex marriage DOES negatively affect marriage rates.
It comes down to this: proponents of same-sex marriage have severely overestimated the importance of their particular way of gaining genital relief. “But I get orgasms from other women” just isn’t a reason to mess up our marriage laws and the fabric of our society. Grow up and close your bedroom door.
Well written, thank you.
I might add as Romney said, “Obama is trying to be Europe, when Europe can’t even make Europe work.” Europe is dying. I hope we have enough wisdom to keep away from anything they do.
This issue is where I part ways philosophically with conservatives and many Republicans. I have never seen homosexuality as an issue and I don’t care one way or another if any of them wish to marry each other. I believe homosexuality is just another way of being human, as is any other sexuality between the two poles of hetero and homo. If no one is forced or manipulated into the behavior concomitant with this sexuality, and thus harmed, as in pedophilia, then I don’t understand the outrage. If there truly is a god somewhere who finds this to be a sin and worthy of some eternal punishment, then surely that’s an issue between homosexuals and their god. I suggest the rest of us tend our own gardens and save our outrage for something that causes real harm to other humans, such as sharia law, abortion and all forms of sexual predation. I know this attitude will doubtless draw fire, but that’s okay, I’m all grown-up; unload both barrels, if it makes you feel righteous.
Way to knock down those conservative strawmen and strawwymyn. But you didn’t actually address the conversation going on here.
Look,
it’s very simple, really.
Redefinition of marriage changes marriage so much that effectively marriage is destroyed for everyone.
Believe it or not, many of us “conservatives”, including Christian believers can live with the life-choices of homosexuals. We may disagree with those choices but as you point out, live-and-let-live is a 1st choice option.
Right up until the option changes from live-and-let-live to lets-redefine-marriage. And it is at that point, and on that point we draw the line.
No gay marriage in America.
Maybe you think you’re a gay conservative. But if you want to peddle gay marriage, especially in the face of a legal system that has done double-duty to find legal ways for you to have virtually all the benefits of marriage, you’re going to be left out in the cold; where you belong.
Bring on the amendment to the US Constitution. End the argument. Let America vote on the Amendment. There will be no gay marriage in America.
It is not yours to destroy.
I’ve said this before, so I’ll say it again.
The solution is an amendment to the US Constitution defining marriage as a union between one man and one woman.
You can dance around all the other “solutions”. Gay marriage is of course the least acceptable.
Nothing else is going to settle the problem.
I agree with your aims, Paul, but if we are going to need an Amendment to define a word that already has had a definition for well over 2000 years, we are going to end up with a very long Constitution. Anyway, the Left politicians would continue to violate their oaths of office and ignore the behemoth.
Gay marriage is just another Leftist mandate from a different angle.
http://bluecollarphilosophy.com/2012/02/gay-marriage-is-a-mandate-by-other-means-wake-up-conservatives/
If gay marriage becomes the law, there will be serious consequences for churches, pastors, and businesses who stand for their convictions that homosexuality is a sin. This is an attempt to force Liberal Dogma and conformity on the rest of us. Better send out the thought police after gay marriage becomes the law of the land.
if john bowlby is correct, and i don’t have any reason to think otherwise, exactly the reasons you listed are exactly the reasons homosexual unions were barred by the state: transfers of property between healthy grownups in near perpetuity. eventually, you’ve got foundation-level millions of dollars, and no taxes.
spouse one marries a younger man and transfers property. spouse 1 dies of old age. Spouse 2 grows old and marries a younger man. Assuming all the players in this are working- why wouldn’t they- no kids- eventually you have a large pot of money that hasn’t been taxed in a century or so. That’s the monastery model, basically- or the Templars- oodles of cash piled up, no taxes, no children- no churn, basically. The state did in these enterprises, killed off their members and took all of the money. Nobody has ever explained how they won’t do that again.
Suze Orman is pretty straightforward about wanting to bequeath her fortune to her significant other, without estate taxes. The guy in Colorado is the same. Again, millions would be untaxed, un-handed off to children. It’s been tried before. It’s not a safe passage.
Suze Orman doesn’t want to pay the death tax. Well then. You know what, Suze? Neither do any of the rest of us.
So, rather than campaign against the death tax, you want to campaign for homo-marriage? So you don’t have to pay the death tax?
Good grief.
btw, I do want you to find someone you love, who also loves you. I don’t care what gender your partner is.
** btw, I do want you to find someone you love, who also loves you. I don’t care what gender your partner is. **
Dear ari,
Thank goodness you said this — it’s the only compassionate thing that’s been said in this entire discussion. I saw “Brokeback Mtn.” twice in the theater b/c it was a great film, not b/c I want to see a ‘homo’ movie. It was indeed about love so great it defied common sense and good morals or intentions. Humans can’t always help who they fall in love with.
Can we agree tho that we don’t want to pay for yet more entitlements? I don’t really think govn’t should be involved in marriage anyway, but I suppose there must be a way to sort things out (and traditional marriage seems as good a way as any).
I’d have no problem w/LGBT legal “unions”, to be differentiated w/marriage. I can’t imagine being w/my life partner for yrs. only to be turned away at the door of their hospital room when they’re in dire condition or maybe dying b/c we aren’t “married”. Of course, the same could’ve happened to my husband & me before we legalized, altho we’d been together for 7 yrs. (now married 4+, so almost 12 yrs together). Better still, we got married on a cruise outside of USA waters so the captain could perform the ceremony, and when I went to change my last name on driver’s license, Colo. would NOT recognize the marriage! I had to drag my husband w/me the next day to the bureau so he could sign an affidavit in the presence of a DMV official stating that we were “common law” married. Gee, I’m glad we spent energy, time and $$$ to be “legally” married in a romantic way, only to be told at age 50+ that the state will only say we’re shacking up.
But someone asked earlier to give some ‘good’ non-religious reasons why LGBT marriage isn’t in the best interest of society. First, men & women have diff. brains: men have more gray matter, women more white. Pls. note: I’m NOT saying one is better than the other; just diff. It only makes sense that to raise the best children (and yeah, I realize that’s *totally* subjective), one needs the input of both types of brains. Then there’s the very basic definition of life: what is the purpose of ANY organism? To REPRODUCE. Period. All we need do is think of the life span of, oh, say, flies. Most live like what, 5-7 days in the adult stage? They eat, breathe, drink, avoid predation so they can perform the most basic function of reproduction. LGBT couples further this biological imperative not at all.
I really don’t believe same-sex couples are abominations, horrid, or awful people. I believe we’re gonna find out as the genome project continues that there is something biological about this. I’m also not saying there is something inherently wrong about being homosexual; but it definitely isn’t the norm, and I think it’s a condition caused by something in the DNA getting mixed up. Yes, I think it’s a medical condition, and nothing that can be changed by therapy. It just SO flies in the face of biology that to my way of thinking it can’t be anything but an abnormality (I mean in the preference for one’s own gender, as this defeats reproduction completely, not that this preference is linked with being crazy!). Esp. once you factor in that human brains haven’t really evolved past where they were 50K +/- yrs ago. We’ve learned how to USE it better, but it hasn’t really changed.
Having gone on at length: I still don’t want to see LGBT ‘marriages’. Legal unions, yes, but not marriage. On the other hand, I don’t want to see DOMA made into a Constitutional Amendment. I’d tell legislators PLEASE don’t mess w/our Constitution! (see: prohibition, and what an absolute failure that was, and why — unintended consequences, that no one can ever accurately predict before doing something)
In other words ….
WE HAVE TO DESTROY THE VILLAGE IN ORDER TO SAVE IT
Yeah, that’ll work
Marriage is not a right. Rights are inherent in the person and they are individual. Marriage is granted by the state to two people.
To sum up: Marriage is not a right.
Therefore, the courts have zero authority to enforce a change to the law in this case. If you want to change the law, change the lawmakers. If you want to change the lawmakers, change their voters.
A so-called “conservative” placing the authority to define and create rights into the hands of government, rather than accepting the rights as a function of individual worth, is not conservative at all, but rather a progressive statist who may happen to subscribe to the Austrian or Chicago School.
It is well-established by the Supreme Court that marriage is a right. Try to keep up.
It was “well established by the Supreme Court” that Dred Scott was property and a tomato is a vegetable, too. What’s your point?
That’s funny – I didn’t realize conservatives were into the Supreme Court deciding what is and isn’t a right.
Yockey is no conservative, despite what she calls herself.
Just because PJM does indeed publish some more-or-less conservative writers doesn’t mean that all, or even most, of the writers on the site are conservative. PJM is fairly middle-of-the-road.
If you want to find the real “dextrosphere”, it isn’t here.
That’s one of the reasons why I blog.
“Marriage” is a covenant, Jonk. A covenant cannot be “granted” any more than can a cell phone contract be “granted”. A marriage covenant, just as any contract, can only be freely “entered into” by eligible parties. The eligible parties of a marriage covenant are: a man, a woman, and God. Where advocates of “gay marriage” are intent upon replacing one or the other of the first two of the eligible parties in a marriage covenant, the radical left is intent in replacing only the third one. Replacing any one or more of the eligible parties with an ineligible party results in something other than a marriage covenant.
The same can be said of a cell phone contract; the parties who freely enter into a cell phone contract must be eligible to create one. The eligible parties for a cell phone contract require a cell phone company, a customer, and courts of law (to enforce a contract). Two customers cannot create a cell phone contract; a customer and, say, a teacher’s union cannot create a cell phone contract; replacing courts of law with a teacher’s union would only result in a contract between a cell phone company and a customer that is only enforceble if we drop after-school sports and the music program.
You’re missing the whole point. If it were just gays marrying because they convinced the legistlature to pass a law allowing them to do so, then you know what? People would care much less. But the real agenda for people who are pushing for gay marriage is to destroy marriage by legistlative fiat.
Polygamy will be next (its supporters already indicated as much) and then, presumably, incest as well. The same “arguments”: “IT’S! NOT! FAIR!” (stomp feet); “you’re just against incest with children because you think it’s icky, you evil judgmental man!”; “if you’re against polygamy don’t marry two women”; claiming anybody who points out the evils of polygamy is a “racist”, etc.
Gay marriage is just a tool. The real purpose is to establish as much as possible the precedent that the people are too stupid and ignorant and evil to be in control of their own lives and morals, it’s their betters — the judges that must do it.
Just like “Global Warming” and “Climate Change,” liberals rely on moving the target through terminology.
Now it’s “marriage equality.” The phrase “gay marriage” is suddenly outmoded. This is because we’re gearing up for the next thing in line: polygamy.
Polygamy is poison to civilization.
And once polygamy is in, how do you think the pedophiles are going to feel, what with being the last remaining taboo? They’re already changing their terminology to “inter-generational intimacy,” and getting themselves removed from the diagnostics manual. (Exact same script that the homosexuals followed.) We’re constantly told that homosexuals aren’t pedophiles any more than heteros, but gays are absolutely obssessed with teens who need their “help coming out.” Read some gay lit sometime. It’s all about teens and old men.
You can couch your defense of gay marriage in economic terms all you want, but it’s the mainstreaming of insanity.
Cynthia – The only way to “save” the institution of marriage is to get the government out of it completely. Sorry, but it’s the inevitable conclusion when you’ve ruled out all the other possibilities.
This.
Religions want nothing more than to end government regulation of the rights attending marriage because that will give them nearly absolute control of their followers. That’s because they can create a brand-new definition of marriage, as the Mormons have for their “temple marriage,” with all sorts of hoops people have to jump to qualify for it. It’s the requirements for temple marriage that make Mormonism a quasi-totalitarian government with taxing powers. By the way, are you OK with the Mormons defining all marriages by any other religion as inferior to their temple marriage and spiritually dead? They consider all other marriages than temple marriages to be civil unions. How do you feel about having a second-class marriage?
Catholics go at it from another angle by making divorce impossible for Catholics who wish to be in a Catholic marriage.
The one thing that is the foundation and support of religious freedom in the United States is that our secular government has control of the secular rights and benefits of marriage.
>>>>>>>They consider all other marriages than temple marriages to be civil unions. How do you feel about having a second-class marriage?
Who cares??? I couldn’t care less if Mormons define anybody’s marriage as “second rate”. Who forces YOU to define YOUR relationship as “second rate” just becasue somebody does? If someone thinks his wife is the most beautiful woman in the world and his children the most talented kids on the planet, do you demand he disown these evil beliefs because it makes you feel “second rate” about your looks, or your children feel less talented?
Anyway, about gay marriage, I think it’s simply not marriage. I fail to see why this means anything is “second rate”. It just means X isn’t Y. I might as well demand that fish be declared to be fowl so that fishermen won’t feel “second rate” when they compare themselves to falconers. Pointless.
“Catholics go at it from another angle by making divorce impossible for Catholics who wish to be in a Catholic marriage.”
You don’t know what you’re talking about. Gingrich and Ted Kennedy were both Catholic and “divorced” and “remarried”. Do you need more examples?
The Catholic Church doesn’t allow civil divorces to count for them, but they do have an annulment process.
Admission. I was schooled as a Catholic, albeit many years ago.
The Anonymous above is I.
Of course, you want to radically redefine an ancient institution to suit your beliefs and that’s cool because it makes YOU and your ilk feel better about your life choices. Meanwhile, religions are evil dictators for asking their followers to only enter into what they believe to be a sacred covenant only after some serious consideration.
Notice how these religions are only applying their standards of marriage to themselves, they’re not asking everyone else to change to suit them. (Don’t argue otherwise, plenty of atheists and agnostics also want marriage to only be between a man and woman – it wasn’t the churches imposing on the secular.) The LDS and Catholic churches aren’t going around dissing civil marriages. My folks are Mormon and none of their fellows are on their case about not having married in the temple. My friend’s husband is Catholic and I watched them marry in a courthouse without a fuss from his Catholic parents, who were also present.
Then there’s you and the rest of the gay agenda, who think you’re somehow superior to the majority of the population and have a right to force your beliefs down our throats so you can have your special rights.
You say you’re pro-rights, but that’s a lie (you have a serious hate-on for religious freedom, for one). You’re just pro-you and your homosexual lifestyle. If you feel the rest of the world needs to warp just to make you feel better about yourself then it’s you who needs to change, not the rest of us.
Not asking for special rights, asking for the same rights that heterosexual couples get. To say that homosexual couples want special rights is implying they want something above and beyond the rights that heterosexual couples have. Simply not true.
How is someone who supports gay marriage against religious freedoms? Which of your freedoms are being impeded upon?
You ARE asking for “special rights”, anonymous. You are demanding the state to change the meaning of “marriage” from the traditional definition of “a covenant between a man, a woman, and God”, to an altogether new definition of “a covenant between two people and the state”; not because government has denied you the right to marry according to the traditional definintion, but because the traditional definition doesn’t suit your lifestyle.
What right have you to make this demand?
“Not asking for special rights, asking for the same rights that heterosexual couples get. To say that homosexual couples want special rights is implying they want something above and beyond the rights that heterosexual couples have. Simply not true.”
Re-read the beginning of my comment, then read flyovermark’s reply to you. It is simply true.
“How is someone who supports gay marriage against religious freedoms?”
I was responding specifically to Yockey’s comment above in which she displayed a clear disdain for Mormon and Catholic religious practices. She is of the opinion that the churches are being totalitarian in preaching their beliefs on marriage and that they should be forced to cease. Which would be, of course, an infringement upon religious freedom. Therefore, Yockey is against religious freedom. While certainly not all homosexuals and gay marriage supporters think this way, many do.
“Which of your freedoms are being impeded upon?”
Various businesses have been sued because their owners refused to go against their religious beliefs to serve homosexual couples (Freedom of speech – impeded upon). Supporters of Prop 8 have been blacklisted, fired, and have had their home addresses displayed online by Prop 8 opponents so that they can be tracked down and harassed (Right to privacy, freedom of speech – impeded upon). Religious symbols (meaning those owned by citizens of faith) and structures have been destroyed or vandalized by homosexual activists (Freedom of speech and religion – impeded upon). I could find more, but I’d rather spend my time doing something else.
Simplistic nonsense.
Your same ‘logic’ could be applied to a blind person demanding a drivers license in the name of equality.
No, CY, “The one thing that is the foundation and support of religious freedom in the United States” is the First Amendment. Try to keep up.
Maybe it would be helpful for those of us trying to understand your point of view if you could articulate what you think is the basis in law and morality of human rights. Jonk and flyovermark (and others), above, make excellent points which you do not address in any but the most simplistic and superficial way. Granted, it is difficult (impossible) to advance baseless arguments in a cogent straightforward manner, but your article betrays no philosophical, moral, or even rational underpinnings for your beliefs. Or do you even care?
Forgive me for asking, but have you come to your own conclusions in thinking about these things? If you are not merely a policy wonk mouthpiece for the left, please give some indication of that. The sole gist of your article is to further the re-definition bait-and-switch, i.e.; stop noticing that there is no such thing as “gay marriage,” and then, as if there is such a thing, go get lost in bogus arguments about “marriage” equality. Keep saying it long enough and you just might manage to keep yourself convinced of what you think. Don’t stop the drumbeat in your head for an instant lest some clarity fall into the silence.
> By the way, are you OK with the Mormons defining all marriages by any other religion as inferior to their temple marriage and spiritually dead?
Yes. I am absolutely fine with the Mormons believing whatever they want to believe.
> They consider all other marriages than temple marriages to be civil unions. How do you feel about having a second-class marriage? How do you feel about having a second-class marriage?
I don’t have a second-class marriage. Neither the Mormons nor anyone else dictates what kind of marriage I have.
> The one thing that is the foundation and support of religious freedom in the United States is that our secular government has control of the secular rights and benefits of marriage.
There should be no such thing as “the secular rights and benefits of marriage.” As many in this thread have pointed out, including myself, the problem is this: You have a religious rite called marriage that binds two people in the eyes of God, and you have a legal contract called marriage that recognizes and bestows certain rights and benefits between two people in a civil context. Our emotional investment in the former makes it nearly impossible to think rationally about how we define the latter, based solely on the fact that they’re called the same thing. The fact that we tie certain rights and privileges to this sacrament—in name only—confuses the issue beyond any possibility for rational debate. If everyone had to eat a secular Communion wafer in order to register to vote, how many Americans would be denied the right to vote based on other Americans’ emotional protectiveness of the concept of Holy Communion? I’m guessing “many.”
No church should be forced to marry two people they feel are unqualified to be married on the basis of their sexuality, and no government body should be able to prohibit two people from entering into a legal contract on the basis of their sexuality. Get the government out of the marriage business, and get marriage out of the legal system; we’ll all be better off for it.
oy. mormons have two marriage types. one is a regular religious marriage. the second is a temple sealing. the temple sealing asserts that the couple will be married for all of eternity, in an eternally fecund union. after either of these, they go register their union with the state,= it’s called a marriage license- pay their fee, and go on their way. They aren’t necessarily co-ordinated. Polygamous Mormons have one state- registered union, and then multiple religious unions. I’m not sure when temple sealings come up. I don’t know anyone who’s had one. Someone in DH’s family has probably had one. My uncle, possibly.
Catholic sacramental unions are statements about the union of souls. After a Catholic union the couple then go registers their union with the state- it’s called a marriage license. Catholics assert that two souls have somehow become one, in the same way that Jesus, God and the Holy Spirit are one. They don’t believe that they can sunder this union, anymore than they can cut Jesus off from God. If two Catholics divorce, then, obviously, they are either in a state of sin and need to be brought back together, or perhaps that union of souls did not take place.
Some people head off to the justice of the peace. Around here, I can think of three unions like that. The JP could just sign the papers, or, most of them around here have a reading. It’s beautiful enough that couples get copies and embroider it and frame it. But- the main point is that document – a marriage license- that is registered with the state.
France has marriages and domestic partnerships. Straight people resort to the DP as often as gay couples. America has marriages and civil unions, in some places. It also has corporations, and business partnerships. We don’t confuse corporations and business partnerships. Why confuse marriage and DP?
Pagans, Hindus, Moslems, Japanese, have different marriage union rites. I’m willing to bet that Metropolitan Community Church has unions. What they all have is a notion of souls, and a form of alchemy. Each religion is pretty sure they are right, and that other unions are lacking in some fashion. States have registrations and fees. You can have a civil union. You can write end of life care documents. You can write wills. Major companies write insurance regs as they see fit. When I was full-time in retail, I could have insurance, but not my spouse. Do I need to write a law saying all insurance must recognise spouses, even for minimum wage jobs?
Gays should oppose Obamacare for the same reason anyone else does: it’s dangerous to their long-term health. It’s dangerous for their short-term health. It’s unconstitutional.
Mormonism actually did give rise to a theocracy on US territory in the past. Such is no longer the case. Other faiths have their own religious establishments in Utah, and individuals are free to join them or not, and get married within them or not, as they see fit. The “theocracy” argument is a straw man.
I say this as someone who heartily disapproves of Mormonism and of its most famous current exponent, Mitt Romney. I consider both to be frauds whose main purpose is to extract money from the unwary.
Gays are the salvation of marriage? Subversion would be more accurate.
The problem I see is that the state is involved AT ALL in sanctioning something called “marriage.” Marriage is a sacrament of most, if not all, religions. There is no state-sanctioned Holy Communion, or Baptism, or Last Rites, etc. So why marriage?
Clearly there needs to be some sort of civil contract that allows people to form a union for the sake of any number of legal rights and liabilities. Calling it “marriage” muddies the waters for almost everyone. No church should be forced to marry two people it doesn’t want to — and I don’t know anyone who suggests it should. But to refuse to acknowledge that these relationships exist, on a life-long basis, is in my opinion acting out of spite more than anything else. Frankly, the folks who want to equate gay relationships with polygamy, bestiality, and pedophilia sound like the right-wing version of the typical comments section at DailyKos: full of counter-productive vitriol and bile that only serves to confirm the worst stereotypes about conservatives in general.
I’m a small-government type. Call me a libertarian, whatever; I don’t care for labels. I want limited government, period. I want limited government involvement in business. And in how I spend my money. And in how I choose to arm and defend myself. And in what kind of lunch I send my children to school with. AND in who I, or anyone else, is allowed to seek their own happiness.
Civil unions for everyone. Get the government out of the marriage business.
Comment #24 is mine. I did not intend to post it anonymously, in the event anyone wants to accuse me of cowardice for not putting my name on it.
>>>>>>>Frankly, the folks who want to equate gay relationships with polygamy, bestiality, and pedophilia sound like the right-wing version of the typical comments section at DailyKos:
But you’re missing the point. I know many gay people and THEY are not pedophiles, zoophiles, or polygamists. But those who campaign for “gay marriage” DO want to equate them, because they want marriage to be destroyed — by judicial fiat. It is they, not homosexuals, who are pushing for polygamy and pedophilia to be the next in line.
>>>>But you’re missing the point. I know many gay people and THEY are not pedophiles, zoophiles, or polygamists. But those who campaign for “gay marriage” DO want to equate them, because they want marriage to be destroyed — by judicial fiat. It is they, not homosexuals, who are pushing for polygamy and pedophilia to be the next in line.
I’m not sure I’m missing the point, but I’m certainly missing yours. Are you arguing that the intended goal of anyone who supports gay marriage is to see marriage destroyed, with an eye toward legitimizing polygamy, zoophilia, and pedophilia in the long run? Are they twirling their waxed moustaches, tying women to railroad tracks, and cackling maniacally while they’re at it?
Consider the possibility that they may simply see this as a matter of individual liberty, and not a conspiratorial effort to obliterate society as we know it. Occam’s Razor points the way.
Fire burns, water’s wet, sand is dry: let me know when gay marriage rises to that level of Mother Nature.
You mentioned a meteor at the beginning: if a giant one hit, sand would still be dry, water wet and fire burn – the first things out the window would be feminism, gay marriage, vegetarianism and other cultural conceits that rise to the level of a fantasy reality doesn’t support – only the thin veneer of civilization enables this.
I always find all of this so amusing. Of course, a society should decide on what it allows and what it doesn’t. Yet, in the US the citizens vote on it and judges overturn it.
In the 100,000 years of human history no society has invested homosexual relationships with the same status as heterosexual relationships. It is true that different societies have looked upon homosexual relationships with differing degrees of approval or sanction, but never the same status. Yes, there are individual instances where the power/status of an individual forced others to accept his/her homosexual relationship, but that is different than a society accepting it for all.
It is also true that until the day before yesterday the sweep of history kept reducing the choices for the structure of marriage until in most cultures (and all truly modern ones) it was one man one woman and (hoped that) it would be one time.
So what in the course of human history happened that convinces anyone that homosexual marriage is a good idea? If homosexual marriage were a neutral or beneficial idea, then wouldn’t it have been tried before by another society? Humans have changed the structure of marriage over the millenniums and have never endorsed homosexual marriage. Doesn’t that tell us something today? Please don’t tell me, we are smarter than our ancestors. The thoughts we think today are the same thoughts our species has had since it began.
Now all of the above is not about homosexual sexual relationships. Many different societies have accepted, some even endorsed them. However, and unless you get this, there is no point talking about it further, sex is different than marriage. In the US today, we in fact live in a society that has very liberal views of homosexual sexual activity. Most people simply don’t care, it is your business, and you will bear the consequences whatever they turn out, if any to be.
That because no society has ever had such a liberal, Marxist-based, politically correct ideology that completely ignores reality whenever it can, as if that is the goal. That would make the part of America that subscribes to the tenets of the Democratic Party to be the most decadent in history.
This raises the question of what marriage is for in the first place.
Why is it in society’s interest to bestow 20,000 goodies on people who happen to like each other a whole lot?
I’ve seen quite a few arguments dismissing claims in support of the ideal of marriage as one man and one woman. Inlcuding:
Those aren’t valid reasons to restrict marriage, according to the court. Are they valid reasons to have marriage at all? How does essentially bribing people to marry help society, once these four interests are deemed not to apply?
In discussions of fairness and equality, why should the 20,000 privileges attached to marriage be available to some, while others who haven’t found a partner (maybe can’t find a partner) have to do without? In the absence of a societal interest compelling any particular form of marriage, what is the societal interest favoring the existence of such an institution at all?
Why would marriage survive as an institution unless it has intrinsic value to society? What point is there to getting married unless it is to have children and to support the family? People who think it is about the couple and not about the children are attempting to change the reason for marriage. If you think marriage is all about love (between the couple), I would say get real. Homosexuals keep pushing not to be accepted (which they are owed) but to be liked (which they are not owed). Marriage is not the solution to their basic problem.
Sorry most middle roaders like myself think this and the other “urgent” social issues are non issues. We’re dying from a (out of control spending/deficit) gunshot wound and worrying if our nails need to be trimmed. Almost ALL social issues are TRULY unimportant and TINY in the big world out there and those who concentrate on them are diminishing the support for the real issues that matter. This is a rabid minority fighting with an equally rabid minority and carrying the majority to defeat with them.
Especially those issues that only harm the individual concerned. Stick to the golden rule and away you go.
Win the election before a Democratic landslide creates a mandate for the horrific fascist changes some on the extreme left and their stooges REALLY want.
There is no such thing as “marriage equality.”
What the gay-rights activists are seeking is marriage equivalency—forcing the larger society to accept that same-sex unions are the same as opposite-sex unions; that the two are equivalent; and that, therefore, they should be regarded as the same thing.
The gay-rights activists know this is a lie, but they are hoping that their constant distortions of the language will be sufficient to put this fraud over on the larger society. In this, they may be correct; the populace has grown accustomed to acquiescing to PC nonsense because it ends up being just too wearisome to fight the endless yapping constantly.
Nonetheless, the history of the gay-rights movement has, until very recently, been a history of complete opposition to the existence of marriage, and dedication to its destruction. The manifestoes of the Stonewall era are uniformly anti-marriage, and the gay-rights movement remained vocally so for at least twenty years thereafter, if not longer. The push for marriage began around the time that it became more common to claim that homosexual behavior was not merely a “sexual or affectional preference,” as the activists originally claimed, but a hard-wired orientation. Listen to gay-rights activists, and you will begin to notice that they still argue both of these—the volitional “preference” and the non-volitional “orientation”—according to what better suits the political agenda of the moment.
Arguing “orientation” brings the activists closer to being able to claim that disagreement with their agenda of the moment is “invidious discrimination” akin to racial discrimination. The gay-rights movement has striven for years to equate itself to the black civil rights struggle—hence, the bogus equating of nonrecognition of, or prohibitions against, same-sex marriage with the anti-miscegenation laws overturned by the Supreme Court in the 1960s. There is, however, no equivalence; no equation.
The anti-miscegenation laws prevented men and women from marrying based upon the extraneous element of race, but there was at no time any contention that, as men and women, the would-be partners could not otherwise marry. The Supreme Court’s voiding of such laws merely removed an extraneous element. Same-sex marriage, by contrast, is the invention of a new sort of marriage—for not until modern times has anyone ever suggested that a marriage would or could exist between two people of the same sex.
In a classic Alinsky move, the gay-rights movement has personalized opposition to their would-be distortion of history and the legal system, and tried to make it seem as though people who oppose same-sex marriage hate Aunt Lydia and her companion Sybil, or that nice pair of young men down the block. Nonsense. If we’re talking about benefits, most people are willing to recognize that domestic partnership—”family”—benefits are appropriate for certain relationships whose participants cannot marry, and do not oppose them. What they do oppose is the gay-rights activists’ distorting of law and history, and being herded to the PC roundup by a bunch of Village People cowboys.
If the gay-rights movement wants the general public to receive its pleas with sympathy, it can start with coming clean about its anti-marriage history, and explaining just when, why and how the institution which the gay-rights movement was dedicated to destroying became the must-have jewel for that same movement.
My bumper sticker example is that giving homosexual couples ‘marriage’ licenses in the name of equality, makes almost as much sense as giving blind people driver’s licenses out of fairness.
A is not B
You obviously do not understand why marriage througout all of history has been between one man and one woman. With that total lack of understanding, you then decide to assert that you know the proper course of action in order to defend it and make it better. Thus, you must be a very very very liberal minded person. When I say liberal, I mean the most ignorant class of our current society.
The Goals of Communism, as read into the congressional record January 10, 1963, from “The Naked Communist” by Cleon Skousen
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as “normal, natural, healthy.”
Would anyone agree to removing the government entirely from the business of marriage? Let marriage be between a man, a woman, and God, performed in a church. The government will not provide any of the 1000+ laws/benefits/protections that it currently does, as the the marriage is only between the man, woman, and God. Instead the government can create a “civil union” or whatever they want to call it where any two people could go to the government and be granted certain rights such as tax benefits, death benefits, protected speech with the other person in the union, etc. A married couple could of course also have a civil union so that they could obtain the government provided rights. To divorce, a married couple would be required to dissolve both the marriage and the civil union as one is between two people and God and one is between two people the government.
While several people on this thread have raised the suggestion of “getting government out of the marriage business,” what that is, in the end, is a somewhat cowardly retreat; it is seeking to grant the current demands of the gay-rights lobby without having to endorse or pass judgment on them, while pretending to have not abandoned the basic moorings of Western civilization at the same time.
Then what about just removing the 1000+ laws that are only given to heterosexual couples? The biggest argument I hear against gay marriage is the bible, so why not remove any laws/rights/benefits/whatever that are not biblical?
Then what about just removing the 1000+ laws that are only given to heterosexual couples?
Why?
Give me a reason—other than the two-year-old’s “I wan’ it, wan’ it, wan’ it”—that those choosing a life of homosexual behavior have any claim to anything other than decriminalization of certain sexual acts.
Let’s take two people of the same sex who love each other. While I can agree with you that the lifestyle is wrong, should one be denied the right to plan their loved one’s funeral? Should they be denied the hospital visitation when the other is terminally ill? Should the things they say in private to each other not be protected so they can not incriminate the other? These are not things the bible says should be part of marriage, it’s something the government has said should be part of marriage.
You plainly have not read, or if read have not comprehended, my #30. So let’s make it simple for the comprehension-challenged.
I don’t give a shit about “people loving each other.” Marriage has a number of elements, of which “love” is only one.
If the society wants to give “family/domestic partnership” benefits to people in same-sex relationships, I certainly have no problem with that, and most people in this country don’t either. But the gay-rights activists want more; they want “marriage” because they do not care about the benefits; the benefits are only a blind.
Most states have domestic-partnership benefits—indeed, California had a comprehensive dp law which was “not enough” for the gay-rights radicals, which is why they pushed, and are pushing, for “marriage.”
Nope. Sorry. You want society to underwrite your lifestyle choice, there’s certainly precedent for that; hell, we pay for lots of baby-mamas too. Why shouldn’t the gays climb on the boodle bandwagon with the rest of the greedy leftists? But you don’t get to whine society into a different format.
As I understand it, a state’s domestic partnership laws mean nothing to the federal government and the laws they afford to married couples. I guess there could be two ways to handle that, either get a federal domestic partnership law or get marriage status in your state. On a similar note, if we give them the same rights but call it domestic partnership, how is that different than seperate but equal under plessi v ferguson?
I see, Anonymous, that you are committed to the bogus arguments that attempt to equate the special dispensations sought by the gay-rights lobby with the redressing of historical racial discrimination. There is no connection whatsoever between the two, despite the gay-rights lobby’s efforts to muddy the water in this regard for the last thirty or forty years.
Plessy v. Ferguson does not apply—sexual preferences are not on a par with slavery and racial discrimination. Even if one were to argue that there were some equivalency—an easily-exploded argument—it is the gay-rights lobby that has for years argued its difference and specialness. It is now trying to argue the opposite in order to grab the boodle, but that doesn’t make it entitled to get the boodle.
In the meantime, before the gay-rights lobby is listened to for any reason at all it must be made to account for its complete 180-degree switch where marriage is concerned. A “movement” born of the most hostile anti-social elements (Communist Party, New Left, Maoists, etc.) should be viewed with the deepest suspicion no matter how many neckties its frontmen wear.
The left including the author wants it both ways in the cultural war – the author wants any two consenting adults to be joined together and be legally defined as marraige without recognizing the defects of such a union on society as a whole.
The author seems to also want these unions to defy all natural laws and want to have the unnatural ability to have and raise children – that the author wants to express a non beliefe in a creator comes as no surprise but the Author also wants to ignore or profess a non belief in evolution – wanting to elevate her cause above any power that may attempt to defeat her. Figuratively the aothor and thousands like her want to elevate thier mindset to be the God (or gods).
People like this – are better know as Liberal fascists, sociaists and thier society inevitably leads to tyrrany.
Generally – those of mediocre intellect – such as the author – are even better known as Usefull Idiots – by the people that will acheive tyrranical status
I agree Cynthia, ObamaCare (and much of the leftist agenda) is definately a threat to the family structure more than gays are. There are legitimate concerns about gay marriage going too far that a procreative vision of marriage could become the new taboo and that religious concscience may not be protected. Otherwise there really is common ground to be found. We don’t have to share a religion, but we can learn how to agree to disagree. I would rather have a gay family as my neighbors than a bunch of frat boys or sorority girls.
We really should be building bridges between the fiscal conservatives and social conservatives. However the political correctness needs to be put aside if the conersation can move forward. There is no doubt in my mind that gay couples deserve the rights that you mention above. The problems arise though when we come to conflicting visions of marriage. Will we be allowed to distinguish between procreative and non procreative marriage? Will I be free to teach my values to my children or will the public schools mandate what is taught?
If the LGBT community will set themselves free from the claws of Planned Parenthood, then I will support their cause. PP distorts and controls the narrative. Are gays even allowed to be pro-life or does the sisterhood control them?
Yet another gay marriage manifesto from Ms. Yockey here at PJ Media. Guys, is this one-issue lady the only lesbian or gay conservative you could find to fill out your stable of commentators? By pushing Ms. Yockey’s perpetual whine for gay marriage, you’re not really helping gay and lesbian conservatives. Instead, you’re just perpetuating a stereotype.
Many of us conservative lesbians and gay men have more important things to ponder this election year than gay marriage. We really are multifaceted people. PJ Media, however, seems intent on reducing us all to two-dimensional political cardboard cut-outs.
see- that’s what’s frustrating. Bruce Bawer is about a genius when it comes to Aemrican religion. He’s also gay and married. He presents a remarkable case for “a place at the table” which is the title of one of his books.
I’m the librarian at a church library. They have a whole gay- rights section, since the elca lutheran church took about ten years to study if gays could be ordained as priests. It was a very narrow vote- 48/52- in favor. I still have questions, so do others. But- it’s our church. Apparently, we can change it. Who knew? I, personally, love the mental space that comes from willing to be too kind, and too wrong.
But in my readings- John Bowlby is a very nice young man, a historian with great credentials, handsome, young- I want to ask him if he’s met a nice young man yet- he keeps showing up two particular things: the pedophilia issue, and the money piled up in foundations. Neither of these have been satisfactorily answered by the gay rights groups out there, right now. NAMBLA keeps marching in Pride parades. For most people- the most valuable item in their house is their children. The gay groups had best explain how they aren’t ever again going to damage the most valuable creation in most people’s lives.
The Catholic Church tolerated damaged priests. Ten years ago, they came to reckoning. Now,to even serve juice at a VBS camp day, my friend, mother of four innocent children, has to undergo training on sexual abuse, on monitoring others, she has to sign up for criminal background checks. I have to have a background check to work with children at my children’s school. And- the building is set up so that every room has windows, two classrooms are connected, and the whole place has sight-lines- there are no corners, no locked rooms- nothing. Boy Scout leaders train in how to not mistreat their charges. They have two grownups at all times to monitor each other, basically.
Whatever else has happened- that has not happened in the gay rights groups. There are books about Kevin Jennings making school safe for predators.There are reports from the middle ages of pedophile priests getting their throats cut. Or hung, or otherwise tortured. I don’t see that not happening again, eventually, as long as there is any notion that anyone under 18 years of age is a person of seductive interest to a predator.
The accumulated piles of money- nobody has ever said that wouldn’t happen again. The templars got tortured, then looted. Henry whatshisnumber seized the monasteries’ wealth- usually the non-school ones. Francis did the same. Foundations in other European countries- de-funded, looted, etc. There isn’t an explanation of how these accounting practices won’t happen again. Chuck and Larry is supposed to be an out-there comedy. There are webposts where people debate this.
I don’t know that marriage blancs are the worst thing in the world- homosexual male unions have money. Homosexual female unions tend not to. I don’t know that they aren’t better off together, in polite fictions. I know Rita Mae Brown writes about this all the time- the unions tend to be better for all the parties involved. It’s a plot-line from a Susan Isaacs novel. I don’t know that it’s the worst thing in the world, a formal hypocrisy.
I have questions about neighborhoods. Lots of things are legal- and we don’t do them. Would my neighbors be required to have my gay neighbors over for dinner? My next door neighbors were gay. I kept talking to them- they’re my neighbors- and I’m clueless about out identity stuff, anyway. But the rest of the block- they became invisible. I think they might have had a better time by not being out. It wasn’t overt distaste- just, nobody would even say hello anymore. I know the same horror and shunning took place when a couple- the wife cheated on her husband. They had to change churches, jobs, everything. I don’t know that they didn’t move. There are bright lines of behavior, that aren’t listed as legally actionable, that social mores hold in place.
Its time to give it up, this is a losing issue for us. Gay marriage, like it or not, will be universal across the country within ten years. States that do not have legalized gay marriage will be viewed as backwaters. Leave social issues and let’s focus on economics, anti-regulation, free enterprise.
As if marriage was an institution that man created or can ever change.
Faithful and courageous RC’s will never ever accept gay marriage.
Pope Pius XI said it better than I every could.
“To begin at the very source of these evils, their basic principle lies in this, that matrimony is repeatedly declared to be not instituted by the Author of nature nor raised by Christ the Lord to the dignity of a true sacrament, but invented by man.”
“The evil of this teaching is plainly seen from the consequences which its advocates deduce from it, namely, that the laws, institutions and customs by which wedlock is governed, since they take their origin solely from the will of man, are subject entirely to him, hence can and must be founded, changed and abrogated according to human caprice and the shifting circumstances of human affairs”
“Indeed there are some who desire and insist that these practices be legitimatized by the law or, at least, excused by their general acceptance among the people. They do not seem even to suspect that these proposals partake of nothing of the modern “culture” in which they glory so much, but are simply hateful abominations which beyond all question reduce our truly cultured nations to the barbarous standards of savage peoples.”
Marriage is nearly dead anyway, its days numbered since government took it away from religion. Anyone who wants to get married now is simply fighting over who gets to sit on the deck chairs while the Titanic sinks.
Gay marriage is simply what a previous commenter suggested: a means for liberals to enforce their orthodoxy through the courts. As soon as it is legalized (and it will be) just watch for the “discrimination” lawsuits to begin. The opposition will be crushed under the weight of legal proceedings and damage judgements. As usual, the liberal trial lawyers will make millions yet go unmolested for taking without producing anything of value.
For this reason I’m against government-controlled gay marriage.
If marriage were still purely the domain of religion and gay people started their own or persuaded some of the religions to endorse gay marriage, then I wouldn’t have a problem with it. In that context it wouldn’t actually affect much of anything.
With the entanglement of marriage and law, gay marriage will be a means, not an end in itself.
Cynthia,
No matter how hard you try or what you’ve convinced yourself and others, the one thing I am absolutely sure you and your lesbian partner can not be is a man.
I’m sorry, but I can assure you that you relationship with your partner, while I am sure of a loving nature, is not comparable to the relationship I have with my wife and never will be.
I say that with the assuredness that natural laws, no matter how inconvenient, can not be redefined or broken. If the moral clarity of God’s laws is not convincing, and the biological fit to be ignored, think of it as two magnetic poles of the same polarity invariably repelling.
Hope that doesn’t offend as you seem the nice lady and I am glad you apparently vote correctly. But I for one, no matter what the courts rule, no matter the majority opinion, or changing social mores, or convincing of the U.S. courts, will never lend the acceptance to the proposals you seek.
Right you are Tex.
My relations with my wife produced another living being.
There is a reason marriage exists. To take an otherwise animal “itch and ooze” and make something respectable and holy. A sham marriage is not respectable.
An “open” marriage is not respectable. A gay marriage is not respectable.
To quote the author: “Ms. Golinski, an attorney working for the OPM…”
Yeah, aint she though!?! O.P.M (other peoples money)
How can you deny me bennies?
Thats why liberals go into government jobs.
Funny if it wasnt so sad
“a stark departure from tradition and a blatant disregard of the well-accepted concept of federalism in the area of domestic relations.”
Last time I checked, opposite-sex marriage WAS the tradition, and that same-sex marriage is still the departure occasionally imposed by politicians and judges, but rarely by the people. Oh, and about federalism and marriage: http://www.law.yale.edu/news/4174.htm
“[It] is a three-page, non-scientific article by an author with no professional expertise in child development, published by an online magazine without peer review.”
I don’t know about the study referred to in the case, but to so completely deride the underlying thesis is the height of unseriousness. First, there’s a pretty clear consensus that children suffer in the absence of either a mother or a father. Second, other studies have found unique, valuable qualities that each sex brings to parenting (for instance: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/badcatholic/2011/12/why-gay-marriage-is-a-bad-idea.html). Third, pro-same-sex parenting studies have been critiqued for various methodological flaws, like sample size, duration, and more. Fourth, it’s simple common sense – it takes one of each sex to create a child, but not to raise one?
“State level rights conferred on same-sex spouses with legally recognized marriages, which they lose under DOMA if they move to one of the 38 states barring recognition of same-sex marriage…”
Dubious use of the word “rights” aside, gay couples aren’t losing them “under DOMA.” They’re losing them under the laws of those 38 states, which DOMA merely protects. Do you believe in federalism or not?
Lastly, I was tempted to make a crack about yet another left-wing screed on a conservative website, but then I checked PJ Media’s About page, and found that the word “conservative” isn’t actually there. In that case, carry on.
Before I stop laughing, the author has to first demonstrate how pedophilia/pederasty and bestiality will never arise as the logical followers to her demanded homosexual endorsement from society.
Cynthia I commend you for writing this post and attempting to show others that you and your partner are first and foremost human beings. Shame on those who are still so intolerant.
Should someone then also be “tolerant” of boinking your 9-year old sister/daughter?
…or your dog, goat or cow?
If not, WHY not? Same logical argument.
You MORON.
Forgot to add to the list of perverts (homosexuals, pederasts, bestialists): BIGAMISTS.
sorry I am not buying it and you cannot make me buy it.
The last tenet of a dying society is tolerance. Look at the ancient Roman, Greek, Babylonian, whatever society, and rampant sexuality, homosexuality are the last thing before they get overrun.
The lavender mafia is all about the destruction of social mores and a destruction of any semblance of God, or any being that tells me what I can and cannot do.
The history and the writings of the homosexual movement is one of destroying the institution of marriage.
I am sorry Ma’am, but I will forever stand against you and all of the people like you, even if I have to go to jail for it.
I will be called a homophobe. No I am not, I am not afraid of you. You are wrong. Get over it. You are the one rebelling against the created order.
I will be called hateful. No I am not. I don’t hate you, I don’t agree with you. That is not hate, although the homosexual lobby has tried to make it so with their juvenile tantrums.
You do not have a “marriage”. Your relationship cannot produce a healthy productive citizen. Study after study has shown the children of these relationships have serious emotional and developmental issues.
So no, I don’t believe that forcing the rest of us to accept that you are calling your relationship with another woman a “marriage” is what will save “marriage”.
An appalling article, unbecoming of a site which usually makes a great deal of sense.
If some know-all judge can overturn millennia of normal standards, in flagrant disregard of the citizenry’s clear wishes (wherever they have been consulted)them America, and the rest of us
http://rossrightangle.wordpress.com/2012/02/15/obameron-axis-of-anglo-saxon-aberration/
may as well resign ourselves to the dissolution of Western civilisation -and I don’t use hyperbole here.
I think the quetion about allowing gay marriage should be put to voters in all states and the decision should be honored. There is no doubt in my mind that gays IN A RESPONSIBLE RELATIONSHIP should be granted the same legal benefits as the rest of us. Criteria for “a responsible relationhip” should be established but I don’t know who would be qualified to do so and it should be recognized that not all marriages are responsible relationships.
[I originally submitted this comment last night, but it seems to be stuck in the moderation queue; because of hyperlinks, maybe? Here it is without the links.]
“a stark departure from tradition and a blatant disregard of the well-accepted concept of federalism in the area of domestic relations.”
Last time I checked, opposite-sex marriage WAS the tradition, and that same-sex marriage is still the departure occasionally imposed by politicians and judges, but rarely by the people. Oh, and about full faith and credit – according to law Prof. Lea Brilmayer in the Wall Street Journal (3/9/04):
“Longstanding precedent from around the country holds that a state need not recognize a marriage entered into in another state with different marriage laws if those laws are contrary to strongly held local public policy. The ‘public policy doctrine,’ almost as old as this country’s legal system, has been applied to foreign marriages between first cousins, persons too recently divorced, persons of different races, and persons under the age of consent. The granting of a marriage license has always been treated differently than a court award, which is indeed entitled to full interstate recognition. Court judgments are entitled to full faith and credit but historically very little interstate recognition has been given to licenses.”
“[It] is a three-page, non-scientific article by an author with no professional expertise in child development, published by an online magazine without peer review.”
I don’t know about the study referred to in the case, but to so completely deride the underlying thesis is the height of unseriousness. First, there’s a pretty clear consensus that children suffer in the absence of either a mother or a father. Second, other studies have found unique, valuable qualities that each sex brings to parenting (for a good introduction, see a 3/9/11 post by Marc Barnes on Patheos.com). Third, pro-same-sex parenting studies have been critiqued for various methodological flaws, like sample size, duration, and more. Fourth, it’s simple common sense – it takes one of each sex to create a child, but not to raise one?
“State level rights conferred on same-sex spouses with legally recognized marriages, which they lose under DOMA if they move to one of the 38 states barring recognition of same-sex marriage…”
Dubious use of the word “rights” aside, gay couples aren’t losing them “under DOMA.” They’re losing them under the laws of those 38 states, which DOMA merely protects. Do you believe in federalism or not?
Lastly, I was tempted to make a crack about yet another left-wing screed on a conservative website, but then I checked PJ Media’s About page, and found that the word “conservative” isn’t actually there. In that case, carry on.
No one is asking the correct question, though some knock up against it tangentially. What is the consequence to a society that extracts its homosexuals from the reproductive population. As a homosexual, Leonard Bernstein had four children and loved his wife until he reached his sixties. Many homosexuals used to have children. There must have been some evolutionary reason that such people have remained within the general population. As a separate but equal society for homosexuals takes hold, there will be less mixing. No one wishes to know what such tolerance for homosexuality will foster within the gene pool, but we will indeed find out.
What a sickening and ignorant article. It makes me have second thoughts about being a PJM reader, this just ruined my whole evening.
The homosexual lifestyle is very detrimental and filthy, and the further embracing of it will only hurt the family and our children more.
I will bring forth evidence on the unnatural causes and origins of homosexuality.
This is an excerpt from an article:
“Let’s rewind and go back to former Congressman Robert Bauman, who in poignantly describing his internal struggles against his homosexual compulsions confided that he had been sexually seduced when he was five years old by an older boy.
Did that experience have anything to do with Bauman’s future homosexuality?
There was a time when psychiatry, psychology, religion, and common sense all said “yes.” In fact, sexually abused young males are “up to 7 times more likely to self-identify as gay or bisexual than peers who had not been abused,” concludes the peer-reviewed 1998 study, “Sexual Abuse of Boys,” by William C. Holmes, M.D. and Gail B. Slap, M.D.
On that topic, a reader recently wrote to me: “We are a family of eight siblings and the oldest is gay, and has lived with the same partner for 41 years. At various times, my siblings and I have tried to discover why he is gay and none of the rest of us are. We finally found out through an older cousin that my brother was repeatedly sexually molested when he was six years old by a 19-year-old man.”
Even Kirk and Madsen, who advise activists to claim they were born homosexual, know better. “We argue that, for all practical purposes, gays should be considered to have been born gay,” they write, “even though sexual orientation, for most humans, seems to be the product of a complex interaction between innate predispositions and environmental factors during childhood and early adolescence.”
If “environmental factors” are involved – and everyone knows they are, whether or not they publicly admit it – why then advise homosexuals to claim they were “born gay”?
“To suggest in public that homosexuality might be chosen,” Kirk and Madsen explain, “is to open the can of worms labeled ‘moral choices and sin’ and give the religious intransigents a stick to beat us with. Straights must be taught that it is as natural for some persons to be homosexual as it is for others to be heterosexual: wickedness and seduction have nothing to do with it.”
Unfortunately, with all the brainy marketing behind the campaign to mainstream homosexuality, what’s been swept under the rug is the recognition – once commonplace in America – that flawed early relationships or sexual victimization can put a child on the road to homosexuality.
Children are exquisitely impressionable, so much so that sexual seduction or assault is a major trauma that can, and often does, reprogram the victim’s identity – his view of who and what he is. While the Holmes and Slap study confirms this, the point is self-evident: our prisons are full of child molesters who were molested as children and batterers who were battered as children.
What about the twelve-year-old who molested Bauman? What caused him to sexually seduce a five-year-old boy? No doubt he felt a strong compulsion to do to a new kid what had been done to him. But why?
An innocent young child has a “bright light” quality that feels mysteriously threatening to those in the grip of corruption. In fact, many see this dynamic at the core of a great deal of child abuse.
To the person who’s already been “converted” and is acting out the homosexual “lifestyle,” it’s deeply satisfying – far beyond mere sexual pleasure – to “initiate” an innocent person. Doing so serves to anesthetize his own conscience and assuage his inner conflict by destroying the innocence of another person, since that innocence tends to make him aware of his own corruption.
There was a time when most Americans knew that homosexuals were not “born that way” but rather had their normal gender-identity development disturbed and redirected through early childhood experiences.
There was a time when we recognized on some level that unhealthy relationships with mothers and fathers could cause girls and boys to grow up with gender confusion – just like emotionally devastating traumatic experiences of molestation – if not dealt with properly. ”
Next source:
Sexual abuse
Childhood sexual abuse is well attested to demonstrate a correlation to the incidence of homosexuality among those affected by it. A large national survey of almost 35,000 Americans showed that more than three times as many men and women who had been sexually abused as children became homosexuals, versus that of heterosexuals.[15][16] Another study reported that 58 percent of male adolescents who later became homosexuals suffered sexual abuse as children, while 90 percent who did not suffer sexual abuse identified themselves as heterosexuals.[17] In addition, 43 percent of male homosexuals reported sexual activity with another male during the ages of 10-12, versus 9 percent of heterosexuals.[18]
Parental relationships with offspring
The psychoanalytical theory is the historical position, which implicates a detached, rejecting or absent father, often along with a close bond to the mother, as working, on the conscious and unconscious level, against a secure sexual identity. Also contributing to this can be a mother who has animosity toward the father, or men in general, and who works to present him negatively, and to make the child side with her.
One of the earliest studies supporting this position was that of Irving Bieber and associates.[11] Comparison of 106 homosexuals with 100 male heterosexuals showed that mothers of the former had enmeshed seductive type relationships with their sons, while their fathers were detached, distant or rejecting. This study was contested by some who charged the researchers with bias, but a further study by Ray B. Evans, which also compared homosexuals with heterosexuals, reported similar results, this time among self-identified homosexuals who had never sought treatment.[12]
Based upon his work with 200 male homosexuals, Gerard van den Aardweg stated that 79 percent described their mother as “overanxious”, or “overconcerned” about them; their safety, health, and being overly sentimental when they met with some hardship, as well as manifesting other aspects of over-mothering. In addition, in 71 percent of homosexual cases, “the most important factor was the father’s detachedness or nonparticipation in the son’s upbringing. The fathers of 38 percent of the men were so hypercritical that the sons were made to feel either rejected and/or inferior. [13]
Another study of about 1500 homosexuals showed much less influence by the mother, while far more reported an unaffectionate or detached father, and approximately half of homosexuals reported they had negative feelings toward their fathers, versus 29 percent of heterosexuals.[14]
While these factors are conducive to homosexuality, it should be stressed that these do not ensure that children raised this way will become homosexual, nor are these factors alone in influencing it.
In conclusion,
You might wonder: Where and when will this “gay rights” public relations steamroller stop? The end game is not only to bring about the complete acceptance of homosexuality, including same-sex marriage, but also to prohibit and even criminalize public criticism of homosexuality, including the quotation of biblical passages disapproving of homosexuality.
In other words, total jamming of criticism with the force of law. This is already essentially the case in Canada and parts of Scandinavia. “Why?” you might ask. “I thought gays just wanted equal rights and to be free to do what they want in their own bedrooms.” No, they’ve had that for years.
Their campaign will not end until Christians and other traditionalists opposing homosexuality are shut up, discredited, and utterly silenced – and all because of a little factor we’ve forgotten about in our cleverness, namely this: In truth, there is something wrong with homosexuality.
Simply put, it is unnatural and self-destructive – just as Western civilization has long understood it.
Kind Regards,
Vitaliy Stepanyuk
I hate to say this, but just focusing on popular culture of the last 100 years or so……..we don’t know what all homosexual people were like before now. We don’t. We had a European culture sequestering a big chunk of its population in “homosocial” settings: monasteries and convents. I’m not saying that they were all raging gays. I doubt they were. But- they weren’t sinking energy into physical satisfactions. Some were- like I said, there were evidences and trials of some monks pursuing young men- it’s the plot of the Name of the Rose.
We had an eastern culture, the Byzantine, and Chinese, and who knows where else- that had flourishing markets in eunuchs. Castrated before puberty- these guys weren’t interested in anything sexual. It was pretty common for families to cut up their second and third sons. They couldn’t inherit property, so they were cut and then put in government service. They couldn’t have children, therefore, it was supposed they wouldn’t have unsettling ambition. The Muslims had a whole devcirme- where they would decide amongst the peasants they would take. It’s what sparked the Greek rebellion- the local muslim ruler had let it out that he was interested in debauching a particular young man.
which means: we have no idea what a society with full, open homosexual participants looks like. I’m really serious about- I want Ms Yockey to meet a nice young lady and have a long, happy life with her. I’m also serious about not upsetting the current legal applecart. If John Bowlby is correct- he provides documents to go with his readings…if the major atheist and humanists are correct as well- then the building up of major pile of loot without children or other societal “dipping”- is a really dangerous arrangement for the holders of that fortune. We can talk about the Ford family, as distinct from the Ford foundation, or that odd, unstable family lingering on that island off the east coast….we don’t know what the Ford foundation will continue to do, or the Rockefeller social engineering foundation. We’re the West. And we have a President who is mighty inventive about extracting money, for one, and dreaming up unusual prison arrangements. I don’t know that such a foundation would not end up like the Templars- deaderndoornails.
And families: the story of the west isn’t just sparta and athens. it’s also Rome, Paris, Aachen, London. There are all sorts of ways to arrange families, perform weddings, have hand-fastings, set up private arrangements, have unusual emotional commitments. The most usual in the United States is the private, one man, one woman, presumable children to follow, not related adults, freely chosen by each other, union with the possibility of divorce. That’s the usual. It’s not the only version, not even in American history. We buy Oneida spoons, we buy amana radar ranges, we stay at Marriot hotels, we used to use web-design by that odd cult that killed itself, we buy newsletter formatting from some other cult, people still buy shaker-style furniture. None of them conformed to that model. They are still American.