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60%
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Att. General
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40%
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DEMOCRATS
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DEMOCRATS
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June 16, 2007 09:31 AM UTC
26 Comments
at least twice. Maybe. Sort of.
As to marriage, why, look at all the marriages in the Bible:
Adam and Eve, nope
Kind David, nope
Joseph and Mary, nope
Jesus, nope
Having debated with the “Focus on YOUR Family” crowd for many years, I believe I am familiar enough with their position to articulate it fairly.
The central proposition of the Focus crowd is that the family is the essential building-block of society, and anything that weakens it is ultimately deleterious to society. As one wag quipped a long time ago, Kurt Cobain is what happens when divorce meets guitar.
And I can’t contend that that position is entirely devoid of merit. Studies show that children develop better when living in intact two-parent households. To say that divorce has had a corrosive effect upon society is admittedly a post hoc ergo propter hoc argument, but there is some intuitive sense to it on the face of it despite the admitted lack of proof. The price children pay for acrimonious divorce and absent parents is enormous, and has lasting effect. One in three children born in America are born to unmarried women (in Chicago, over three-quarters of African-American births are non-marital http://www.chicagola…), and that proportion is rising.
To countenance same-sex marriage is to reduce marriage to the status of mere contract (which in truth it is, as the State has written a default contract). In turn, it cheapens it even more than no-fault divorce, as children learn that contracts are made to be broken. And while society hasn’t fallen apart as a direct and immediate result of the furtive experimentation we see in a few countries, it is impossible to fully assess the long-term effects of these experiments.
Can we afford to accept the potential risk to society this brave new world will bring? [I say we have to, because that is what the Bill of Rights demands, but as long as there are those of you out there who don’t believe that it must hold sway, I suppose that that is negotiable.] You can certainly make a credible argument that we cannot.
Were so delighted that you are able to compensate for your personal shortcomings and humiliating failures in life by using as much gratuitous Latin and as many unnecessary polysillabic words as possible in your posts here. Puff up that little chest of yours, you would-be lawyer, you!
ex aequo et bono Just joking. Actually, I make up for my inadequacies by using this lovely green font. Next week, I may change to purple to get in touch with my feminine side.
Cuervo, Yev, Aristotle, Car, OQD, Nemesis, Calamity Jane, and countless others, are all just one righteously vanquished enemy from your past, a corrupt judge who would go to this much trouble to swat a fly, or a televangelist that barely noticed your existance. I’ve been planning this for months, setting up user accounts on this site before you did in anticipation of your arrival. You got me, Kenny-boy. I can’t fool you.
Opppps! You’ve been outed, Everyman.
Your ID is 6504, which means that you just got here. While Yev, Ari, CAR31, and OQD are undoubtedly real and distinct persons with their own substantive takes, the ones I fairly accuse of being sockpuppets (e.g., “ColoradoKid” (user ID: 6458), “TheJudicialConspiracy” (user ID: 6468), “Fox Mulder” (user ID: 6469)) are all one-trick ponies, who have one and only one take.
I’ll have more to say in a separate diary entry.
Of course, as always, you miss the point: What frikkin’ difference does it make? There are scores of REAL PEOPLE who have banged their heads against the wall trying to hold a mirror to your unflective self, to no avail.
I appreciate Rio Grande playing the Devil’s Advocate for F.O.T.F. Recognition of same sex marriage doesn’t weaken the family as much as modify (IMHO, for the better) the definition of the family.
At common law, husband and wife were joined as one, and it was the husband who was THE ONE. We’ve moved away from that part of the definiton of marriage in the last 100 years in this country (again, I think for the better).
Historically, marriages were arranged, often for financial reasons (a/k/a brides were essentially bought and sold, althouh few would word it so coarsely).
In the cases of royal wedding in medieval times, the marriages were often for national security, not necessarily for procreation let alone for love and affection (think about Henry VIII and Anne of Cleaves).
For much of history, plural marriages were recognized and encouraged in most cultures while inter-racial mariages were not. We’ve move away from those two components of what constitutes a “family.”
Granting legal recongition to John and Mark who are in a committed relationship does nothing to undermine most heterosexual marriages (one exception: it just might give Ted Haggard pause to think about divorcing Gayle and trying to take up with Mike Jones, but that’s another matter).
What it does do is foster mongamous, committed relationships in a community which can use more of such relationships.
Finally, and I’ve shared this before, there is a major economic component which economic conservatives should find attractive. Same sex marriage gives to the members of the same sex relationship all of the right as well as RESPONSIBILITIES which an opposite sex couple has. That means financial obligations will generally be joint, much as a wife is generally on the hook financially for her husbands debts, and vice versa.
In the age of HIV/AIDS and ever increasing co-pays and deductibles for those fortunate enough to be able to afford insurance, the joint responsibility side of the same sex marriage equation should have some appeal to corporate American.
That’s probably why more and more Fortune 500 companies ae offering D.P. benefits to same sex couples.
[My primary target in televangelist investigations was James Dobson. Here’s a classic from Rolf Zettersten, one of his vice-presidents:]
What exactly constitutes ‘allowing gays in classrooms for the purpose of recruitment’, anyway? The Focus people didn’t answer that question when I put it to them, so we are left to muse at the endless possibilities. Did they prance around the halls in high heels? Did they hang up their recruitment posters in the school cafeteria on “Career Day”? I can just see them now: “Uncle Bruce wants YOU!“
Here’s the payoff pitch:
Not ‘objective journalists’, mind you, but ‘missionaries’. Men with a purpose, and it isn’t to accurately report the news.
This was copyrighted in 1990. I saw FAUX News coming almost before Murdoch and Ailes did.
In 1978, California voters were presented with something called the Briggs Initiative on Election Day.
The Briggs Initiative can best be described as Amendment Two on steroids. It didn’t just permit the firing of gay or lesbian schoolteacher, it would have REQUIRED that they be fired for no reason other than their sexual orientation.
One of the opponents of the Briggs Initiative was former California Governor Ronald Reagan.
Here’s a radical solution: teachers (straight or gay) who prey on their students should be fired. Teachers (again straight or gay) who do not prey on their students and are otherwise competent should not be fired.
Speaking of Ronald Reagan, I recall that in the late ’80’s, while Dad was slowly learning how to pronounce the word A-I-D-S (primarily by being shamed into it by Elizabeth Taylor), Ronnie Jr. did some public service ads wherein he demonstrated how to put a condom on a banana.
Their children are gay but still, they would insist that they be discriminated against on the grounds that they are gay.
I’m going to take something Rio said out of his context because by itself it’s a variation on a refrain the social cons use over and over:
What the cons usually say is that “every child needs a mother and a father” – something someone for the Concerned Women of America said (or shrieked) to Dan Savage’s face once, which inspired his series of posts at Slog with that same title, in which he relates a news report of some truly horrendous child abuse committed by straight parents. (Dobby once defended the Ref I defeat and marriage amendment passage using these terms and I responded by linking some of these stories.) The point is that children don’t need a mother and a father as such – they need truly loving and caring parents in a stable relationship. Gay couples who have reached the point of wanting children, and going to the extraordinary lengths they’d have to go to have kids, will fit that description nearly 100% of the time.
When you listen or read the social con’s argument it doesn’t take long to find that every claim, every bit of evidence they can offer, is logically baseless. Even when they point to their faith – let’s look at the Bible and it’s famous denunciations of homosexual sex – you can point out passages that just as strongly condemn fornication (that’s any sex outside of marriage, even between a man and a woman) and the eating of shellfish, things we take as everyday, normal, and not evil activities. (I’m missing the link now, but there was a long term study that found that well over 90% of Americans had sex outside of marriage, so that’s going to include a lot of church-going social cons.) So why the strict reading of Leviticus when it applies to some prohibitions while utter disregard is the rule for others?
You’re left to conclude that their position is nothing but irrational emotion. They don’t like gays, they don’t want them around, they want them not to exist; they fight not just gay marriage but any and all gay rights for this reason. Because giving the least inch, whether for something like outlawing discrimination in the workplace or housing or corporations granting partner benefits to unmarried and/or same sex couples, means accepting gay people in our everyday life. As our dearly departed Gecko showed, that’s just too fucking much for them. Rio had earlier referenced SF gay rights parades as “forcing their lifestyle,” but for your typical social con just seeing two men holding hands in public is “forcing their lifestyle,” and don’t even think about a quick and chaste kiss.
I trust that these prejudices will pass in time. I don’t believe we’re hard wired (as Rio has said elsewhere) to find homosexuality repulsive, I think that’s a learned response, just like most of our other irrational fears (thanks mom, dad, and society for those). You can overcome that sort of thing and the changing opinions show that straight America is coming around. Like Savage says, it’s why the social cons went around enshrining their prejudice in state constitutions across the country, including ours. But ours is a nation founded on the notion of equality and the actual definition of equality under the law has slowly but surely been extended to everyone. Gays and lesbians will be no exception.
I have no opinion on the gay marriage debate –I haven’t thought about it enough or analyzed the issues to form an opinion.
That said, I disagree with a few of your contentions. In another of my recent diaries, Fatherhood and social policies in Colorado, I offered my opinion on the importance of fathers. I supported that opinion with only a fraction of the studies and empirical evidence that I’ve gathered over the last few years (I didn’t want to bore readers with reams and reams of study results). Bottom line is that, “every bit of evidence that [I have] offer[ed] is” not “logically baseless,” as you said.1
However, while this view, apparently, qualifies me as a “social con,” I am not intolerant of gays. I need not provide any specific details here but, I have given support in my personal life to others in GBLT circles. Moreover, I am not only not religious, I am agnostic.
It is, however, my opinion that children do need a mother and a father both, because those roles are different, yet complimentary. A mother and a father have unique contributions and emotional investments to make to their children’s developmental needs and, thus, children benefit from the different experiences and interactions that they receive from a mother and father. It seems folly to me that we should perceive no logic in the fact that it requires a man and a woman to procreate. To think otherwise is to reduce the role of the male contributor to a financier and sperm donor.
I want to support this notion with a corollary: Some readers here, who are male or support gay marriage usually thinking (perhaps subconsciously) of it in the context of two men ought to find themselves in conflict with the females, who support gay marriage but, usually think of it in the context of two women. Why? Many of the latter subscribe to feminist ideals, no doubt. The idea of depriving any child of substantive contact with women during formative years is probably offensive to them. Conversely, the idea of raising a child in its formative years with little or no substantive contact with men should seem equally as unfitting. The way to achieve balance, of course, is to raise a child during its formative years with one man; one woman; an extended family; and relative consistency.
This isn’t to say that a child brought up in a home with two men or two women couldn’t be well adjusted (`though I would expect a good majority not to be well adjusted or to have biases that result in social hardships later in life). However, it seems that, in order for supporters of gay marriage to sell their message, they must do so by denigrating the “nuclear family,” as dysfunctional or mythical. I doubt my daughter would agree that her bond with her father, which is entirely different in nature with her mother, is illusory.
1 Whether I’ve put forth the view out of emotion may be a different story –I’ve never said that I approached this subject objectively.
For the most part (Jim McGreevey and Ellen DeGeneres/Anne Hecht aside), I see the net effect of gay marriage on existing marriages and especially, the effects of divorce on children as minimal. It’s not like that many gay marriages would result in kids….
Ari: I don’t believe we’re hard wired (as Rio has said elsewhere) to find homosexuality repulsive, I think that’s a learned response
If you are a homosexual, you are apparently hard-wired to be attracted to the same sex, just as we heteros are hard-wired to be attracted to the opposite sex. This propensity might well lie on a continuum, where some experience revulsion and others can swing both ways. I am certainly inclined, as one who knew a gay child who grew up in the ‘hood (who was so different that he really couldn’t even fake being one of the guys), to deduce from that experience that many gays are just made that way. By contrast, I can also speak from my experience as to how I reacted to a man’s attempt to ‘pick me up’, or so it was.
It is said that a liberal is a person who often fights with himself, a conservative is a liberal who got mugged, and a libertarian is someone who got mugged by the government. To fracture Joyce, all we have seen is a part of us, and it is natural for us to fear what we don’t understand.
Back in the day, blacks lived in “their” part of town, to be “gay” was to be exuberantly happy, and “to Jew” was a verb. Muslims existed only in textbooks. The world has largely changed for the better since then; the benefit of direct experience tends to disabuse you of those learned notions (although I can report with confidence that the classic stereotypical “Jewish mother” is alive, well, and named Adrienne ;)). I would submit that tolerance is a learned trait.
Ari: Rio had earlier referenced SF gay rights parades as “forcing their lifestyle,” but for your typical social con just seeing two men holding hands in public is “forcing their lifestyle,” and don’t even think about a quick and chaste kiss.
Living in ‘Frisco during the ’80s was a little different, as it was not all that uncommon to walk into a public mens’ room and find two men in flagrante delicto. (The same can also be said for restrooms in Laguna Beach.)
That having been said, many religious tenets are just plain silly, and many religious zealots who focus on homosexuality tend to have homosexual leanings (which their religion has taught to be sinful), which some end up indulging in (can we say “Ted Haggard?”). I would submit that fhese are the people who fear gays the most, and that this is why.
Ari: But ours is a nation founded on the notion of equality and the actual definition of equality under the law has slowly but surely been extended to everyone. Gays and lesbians will be no exception.
You Dems think of “rights” as belonging to groups, whereas I and my colleagues on the Right think of them as belonging to individuals.
This is what makes me want to be a Republican some days….then I listen to the Evangenuts ranting about homosexuality, and I tell myself to stay unaffiliated.
But I’ll ask you this: do you not support right for individuals who are deprived of those rights because they belong to a certain group of people? Remember, the constitution begins with the words “We the People” not “We the Individuals.”
I actually believe that no man or woman should be beyond the law, and none should be beyond its protection (he merely says it in his vapid campaign speeches). Without equivocation or exception. And that goes as much for the people and the views I loathe as the ones I love.
That’s why I posted the story of the Canadians’ infringement of religious speech on my diary. While I openly consider most religious views as patently silly (and have had a running feud with the Focus crowd for more than two decades), I will come to their aid in a heartbeat.
“I actually believe that no man or woman should be beyond the law, and none should be beyond its protection…”
So how does that fit in here? Are we going on a tangent?
(and the often infernal inconsistency of Republican leaders), no tangent required or intended. My position truly is exactly as advertised, although I would be amenable to a law holding public officials liable for the greatest possible criminal penalty for crimes they commit, following the reasoning of Justice Brandeis:
You have a running feud with the focus people.., oh, my! But you’d come to their aid in a heartbeat! You’re just so…MAGNIFICENT!
settin’ on! To think, that someone has their hand up my…, Ohhh! It’s just too upsettin’ to think about!