I didn’t get the impression the author necessarily thinks this is bad, but thinks a this new concept of marriage led people to think that hey, why not gay marriage, too?
It’s otherwise a good article, but I disagree with his assertion that marriage went from “duty” to “means of self actualization”.
Across time and cultures, marriage guaranteed a child’s right to both biological parents, and guaranteed both biological parents rights to their children, and with those rights went responsibilities. In addition, it allowed for a healthier and more orderly, prosperous, stable and peaceful society. In societies where faithful monogamous marriage was the norm, even more so.
Enter The Pill and the Sexual Revolution (which would have been impossible without The Pill). Suddenly, sex no longer meant babies. Nearly all women of reproductive age were and are chemically sterilized. But The Pill wasn’t perfect, so we had to legalize abortion as a backup. We came to believe sex should be consequence free, and this was some sort of bizarre right, even a “human right”.
There’s more, but many of us basically began to redefine marriage as something two people who had the hots for each other did for as long as the hots lasted, then no-fault divorce. We’d already decided children don’t need both biological parents and championed single mothers as heroines. Never mind this led to poverty and troubled kids. All that mattered was what adults wanted and their “human right” to pursue sexual happiness. Before long, this “right” extended to the right to do whatever with whomever wherever and whenever and seemed to become the #1 Basic Human Right.
Marriage was already eroded by The Sexual Revolution, the new “human right” and no-fault divorce. Children’s needs and rights had already been discounted. When the gays began to push for their “human right” to marry in an effort to normalize homosexuality, lots of people just went, well, hey, why deny their them their rights?
Here’s the thing, though. Legalization of same sex marriage broke that last link between marriage and biological children. And with it the rights and obligations that went along with it. True, we already had single mothers and irresponsible baby daddies. We already had the commodification of children, with abortion on demand, single women ordering from sperm banks and gay men renting the wombs of Third World women.
But once that “right” has been enshrined in law, turning back and restoring marriage (and the rights and responsibilities of biological parents and children it guarantees and enshrines) to its proper and healthy place as an institution becomes much, much, much harder.
“I didn’t get the impression the author necessarily thinks this is bad,”
Today, however,
She should of stuck to today’s facts and avoided philosophy and history.
In one point she mentions that in the past homosexuality was hidden.
The she says female homosexuality was virtually non-existent.