Posted on 11/08/2004 12:52:44 PM PST by stompk
Better to focus on the negative effects of government having ANY role in defining/registering/licensing personal relationships.
Better to privatize Social Security, and let each person who earns benefits make their own decision about who gets the leftovers (and make sure the size of the leftovers is a fixed amount).
That would be my choice. I am and always have been self employed managing my own retirement accounts. IOW, I walk the talk. But its not going to happen in the next century if ever. Therefore my points are valid.
So why should society be responsible when most man-woman couples are apparently too stupid to tend to these matters in advance, and it is therefore presumed that the government has to hand them an adhesion contract to take care of things? Are heterosexuals stupider than homosexuals?
THE SECULAR CASE AGAINST GAY MARRIAGE
Adam Kolasinksi
Homosexual relationships do nothing to serve the state interest of propagating society, so there is no reason to grant them the costly benefits of marriage.
The Tech, Volume 124, Number 5 Tuesday, February 17, 2004
The debate over whether the state ought to recognize gay marriages has thus far focused on the issue as one of civil rights. Such a treatment is erroneous because state recognition of marriage is not a universal right. States regulate marriage in many ways besides denying men the right to marry men, and women the right to marry women. Roughly half of all states prohibit first cousins from marrying, and all prohibit marriage of closer blood relatives, even if the individuals being married are sterile. In all states, it is illegal to attempt to marry more than one person, or even to pass off more than one person as one's spouse. Some states restrict the marriage of people suffering from syphilis or other venereal diseases. Homosexuals, therefore, are not the only people to be denied the right to marry the person of their choosing.
I do not claim that all of these other types of couples restricted from marrying are equivalent to homosexual couples. I only bring them up to illustrate that marriage is heavily regulated, and for good reason. When a state recognizes a marriage, it bestows upon the couple certain benefits which are costly to both the state and other individuals. Collecting a deceased spouse's social security, claiming an extra tax exemption for a spouse, and having the right to be covered under a spouse's health insurance policy are just a few examples of the costly benefits associated with marriage. In a sense, a married couple receives a subsidy. Why? Because a marriage between to unrelated heterosexuals is likely to result in a family with children, and propagation of society is a compelling state interest. For this reason, states have, in varying degrees, restricted from marriage couples unlikely to produce children.
Granted, these restrictions are not absolute. A small minority of married couples are infertile. However, excluding sterile couples from marriage, in all but the most obvious cases such as those of blood relatives, would be costly. Few people who are sterile know it, and fertility tests are too expensive and burdensome to mandate. One might argue that the exclusion of blood relatives from marriage is only necessary to prevent the conception of genetically defective children, but blood relatives cannot marry even if they undergo sterilization. Some couples who marry plan not to have children, but without mind-reaching technology, excluding them is impossible. Elderly couples can marry, but such cases are so rare that it is simply not worth the effort to restrict them. The marriage laws, therefore, ensure, albeit imperfectly, that the vast majority of couples who do get the benefits of marriage are those who bear children.
Homosexual relationships do nothing to serve the state interest of propagating society, so there is no reason for the state to grant them the costly benefits of marriage, unless they serve some other state interest. The burden of proof, therefore, is on the advocates of gay marriage to show what state interest these marriages serve. Thus far, this burden has not been met.
One may argue that lesbians are capable of procreating via artificial insemination, so the state does have an interest in recognizing lesbian marriages, but a lesbian's sexual relationship, committed or not, has no bearing on her ability to reproduce. Perhaps it may serve a state interest to recognize gay marriages to make it easier for gay couples to adopt. However, there is ample evidence (see, for example, David Popenoe's Life Without Father) that children need both a male and female parent for proper development. Unfortunately, small sample sizes and other methodological problems make it impossible to draw conclusions from studies that directly examine the effects of gay parenting. However, the empirically verified common wisdom about the importance of a mother and father in a child's development should give advocates of gay adoption pause. The differences between men and women extend beyond anatomy, so it is essential for a child to be nurtured by parents of both sexes if a child is to learn to function in a society made up of both sexes. Is it wise to have a scoial policy that encourages family arrangements that deny children such essentials? Gays are not necessarily bad parents, nor will they necessarily make their children gay, but they cannot provide a set of parents that includes both a male and a female.
Some have compared the prohibition of homosexual marriage to the prohibition of interracial marriage. This analogy fails because fertility does not depend on race, making race irrelevant to the state's interest in marriage. By contrast, homosexuality is highly relevant because it precludes procreation.
Some argue that homosexual marriages serve a state interest because they enable gays to live in committed relationships. However, there is nothing stopping homosexuals from living in such relationships today. Advocates of gay marriage claim gay couples need marriage in order to have hospital visitation and inheritance rights, but they can easily obtain these rights by writing a living will and having each partner designate the other as trustee and heir. There is nothing stopping gay couples from signing a joint lease or owning a house jointly, as many single straight people do with roommates. The only benefits of marriage from which homosexual couples are restricted are those that are costly to the state and society.
Some argue that the link between marriage and procreation is not as strong as it once was, and they are correct. Until recently, the primary purpose of marriage, in every society around the world, has been procreation. In the 20th century, Western societies have downplayed the procreative aspect of marriage, much to our detriment. As a result, the happiness of the parties to the marriage, rather than the good of the children or the social order, has become its primary end, with disastrous consequences. When married persons care more about themselves than their responsibilities to their children and society, they become more willing to abandon these responsibilities, leading to broken homes, a plummeting birthrate, and countless other social pathologies that have become rampant over the last 40 years. Homosexual marriage is not the cause for any of these pathologies, but it will exacerbate them, as the granting of marital benefits to a category of sexual relationships that are necessarily sterile can only widen the separation between marriage and procreation.
The biggest danger homosexual civil marriage presents is the enshrining into law the notion that sexual love, regardless of its fecundity, is the sole criterion for marriage. If the state must recognize a marriage of two men simply because they love one another, upon what basis cant it deny marital recognition to a group of two men and three women, for example, or a sterile brother and sister who claim to love each other? Homosexual activists protest that they only want all couples treated equally. But why is sexual love between two people more worthy of state sanction that love between three, or five? When the purpose of marriage is procreation, the answer is obvious. If sexual love becomes the primary purpose, the restriction of marriage to couples loses its logical basis, leading to marital chaos.
Adam Kolasinski is a doctoral student in financial economics.
"Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it; those who fail to learn history correctly -- why, they are simply doomed."
Don't change the subject. My comment ("society is not responsible") means: WHY SHOULD WE BE REQUIRED TO RE-DEFINE MARRIAGE for every whim or perversion.
Tell them that if they believe in evolution, then homosexuality is an exception to the rule.
Marriage is between a man and a woman.
Tell 'em to invent a new word.
I'll tell you what my gay brother said. The gay lifestyle is not a monogamous one. He would have had 4 divorces by now. Why tie up courts with silly crap that should have never happened to begin with? My brother is against gay marriage. He also thinks that gay marriage is a way to force people to ligitimize homosexuality. It makes it more acceptable. And it is a slippery slope. 30 years ago we were told that abortion would NEVER be used as birth control. Once gay marriage is accepted and normalized, pedophelia is not far behind. He's against pedophelia and has given up the gay lifestyle, lives alone and no longer "dates".
1. The impact - or at least strong correlation - between state-recognized gay marriage and the decline of traditional marriage is well documented in the countries that have already crossed the line such as Sweden and the Netherlands.
2. Gay marriage advocates are asking us to take a 30-year old theory (i.e., gays are ok and it's genetic anyway) legitimizing behavior that has been condemned by every civilization and every major religion over 6000 years of recorded history. Your advocate will point to the greeks - "well, the greeks were homosexual. Just look at Socrates (who Plato has lusting after a young boy in one of the dialogues), Alexander (who Aristotle apparently lusted after), Achilles (who got all upset over the death of his (probable) male lover (but possibly just shield-mate) Patrochlos), and Sappho (an apparent lesbian from Lesbos who wrote the only female-authored fragments of poetry we have from ancient greece). The correct response is that the totality of the evidence says that homosexual behavior was just as sidelined back then as it is now. Roman poetry (I want to say lucretius, or mayby cattulus) mocks the pretty boys, male prostitutes, etc. pretty heavily. The next response is to say that most of those who are recorded in literature as practicing homosexual acts were aristocracy. Civilization is not built on or continued by aristocracy.
3. The gay marriage argument goes: Two people who love each other should have that union recognized by the state. (a) The state has been in the business of recognizing, legitimating, and subsidizing marriage only for the last 150 years or so. Before that, it was essentially up to the parties and their church to decide whether they were married. Outside of christendom, I doubt that it was any different. (b) I don't know about you, but I really don't want the state regulating on the basis of "love." The only reasonable justification I've ever heard for the state regulating and subsidizing marriage is to promote the continuation of the state (i.e., kids). No matter what the technology, gay couples don't tend to be effective kid-producing machines. Thus, the only justification is that they love each other. The state should never, never, never regulate love. For further support, talk to Winston & Julia from Orwell's 1984.
4. There's a separate civil rights argument based upon the proposition that homosexual behavior is genetically encoded. No peer-reviewed study supports this. Every study that purports to do so has been discredited. If it's a lifestyle choice, there's no legitimate civil rights discrimination argument.
In all fairness, these rarely work with anyone, much less homosexual couples. Hospitals routinely ignore them and getting it validated can take legal dollars a grieving family may not have to spend.
"Society" wasn't responsible for defining it in the first place. "Society" took notice of what most people were already doing on their own initiative, and then through government, decided to start defining it. Just go back to noticing what most people are doing, and everything will be fine. The mix will shift a bit from it was 100 or 50 or 20 years ago, but that's not a problem. What we need to focus on is getting government out of the business of subsidizing people, so that lifestyles which get bad results are paid for by the private citizens who made the bad choices -- not by everybody who made good choices.
This post on another thread is a wealth of information!
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1275132/posts?page=42#42
As to the rest of your "L" notions, I just don't have time to waste of silly reindeer games.
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