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Locked on 02/14/2004 11:16:48 AM PST by Lead Moderator, reason:
Since discussion of the issues and article ended long ago, the rest of the discussion ends now. Those who were continuing the flame war consider this your warning- I don’t care who drew first blood. That was pulled and it should have ended it. Both sides were continuing it, and neither side has a single thing to whine about when I end up suspending of banning you. So don’t push it. |
Posted on 02/13/2004 11:22:02 AM PST by eccentric
A caller to Rush Limbaugh today (Friday) compared gay marriage to inter-racial marriage. While it is easy to take offense to the comparison (as Rush did), there is some truthfulness in it. For people of 50 years ago, who who not bigots, what was their major objection to inter-racial and even inter-cultural marriage? What was the first concern they expressed to their children when faced with this possiblity? "What about the children?" And years ago, and in someways, even today, this is a very real concern. Children in inter-racial and inter-cultural homes had a much more difficult social situation to deal with.
And that is what the push for legal homosexual marriage is all about: the children. When Heather has 2 mommies, both mommies want equal standing in custody, school, medical care.... When Heather wants an abortion ---no, strike that. She wouldn't go to mom for permission for that. When Heather wants her ears peirced, both moms want equal rights to give consent. When the moms get divorced, they want equal standing in the court for custody and child support.
So what? This shouldn't concern my family.... yes, it does. When given equal standing with man-woman marriage, homosexual couple demand the right to adopt and foster other people's children. This has already happened for one mother who placed her baby for adoption and then found he was given to a homosexual couple. The courts told her she had relinquinshed her right to object to who raised her birth-son.
So you wouldn't place your child for adoption, but what about foster care? Suppose you were traveling out of state. You are injured in a car accident and hospitalized. Thankfully, your child is uninjured but needs someplace to stay until relatives can come get him/her. Would you want your child placed in a homosexual home? Even overnight?
This whole issue IS about children and having equal rights to raise someone else's children. But unlike inter-racial marriage, homosexuality is defined by a behavior, not an appearance.
This debate is being won by the advocates of gay marriage who are smart enough to appeal to the idea that homosexuality is "the way people are" rather than "what people do." I seem to remember a lot of racial predjudice in the 1960's that focused on "what they do", when it came to black people. That may have sparked some of the comparison. Even if there were solid evidence to support homosexuality as solely behavioral, there would still be a lot of support for the rights of gay people to behave as such. After all, religion is not innate, and our society values the toleration of different religious behaviors, even if some, like Wiccanism, or Islam, are very, very different from what most people in our society believe.
While I'm on the subject of religion, you can see in the gay marriage threads an awful lot of denouncement of gay marriage based on religious thought and belief. While I'm happy to say that I have engaged in discussions with a goodly number of people here at FR who have attempted to make points against gay marriage for reasons other than religious or traditional, it seems that those who use theological justifications are the only ones who get quoted in the news media. When GWB talks about using the Constitutional amendment process to "protect the sacrament of marriage," it makes a lot of people wonder why government is in the business of protecting sacraments.
Simply put, there are more people in the mushy middle who fear government being used to impose religious doctrines on people, than fear homosexuality. So far, reciting litanies of diseases has not convinced enough people to put homosexuality back in the closets of decades past.
The comparison, whether fair or not, between racial discrimination and marriage discrimination is being effectively made by those using it. If those who find the comparison unfair and inaccurate wish to win the battle, they'll need to change the messages they've been sending out. There's still a large group in the middle who are uncomfortable with gay marriage, and there is only a short window to convince them that their discomfort is well founded, or they will get over it. My guess is this window will be closed, nailed shut, and painted over by the time that there's a vote in Massachusetts in November, 2006 (at the earliest).
Not really. If there is a "Gay Gene" it could be recessive, or it could only express itself every two or three generations or whatever.
You are pretty fixated on that body part; aren't you?
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