Comparing homosexual marriage to inter-racial marriage

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.

If this issue is of such monumental importance to you, why didn't you know the answer to your question?

Because the number is changing all the time. I thought I read it had reached 38 but that may have been about yet another state that would have to pass a law insure that sanity would prevail.

Anyway, I've been debating reality with some of the pro-homo cheerleaders here on FR for some time now and they'll crow as if they've proved something if you mistake a fact by even the smallest of margins, even if that margin of error doesn't gain them a thing. Because of this, I did not want to go on record with a number until I had the time to check.

Better yet, why didn't you take the ten seconds it took me to find the answer?

Because I had to leave during the last discussion and did not have the time to perform as rigorous a search as I would normally insist upon before stating a number as a fact.

But thanks for asking!

Marriage is not a religious doctrine.

Sorry, guess I got a bit confused seeing all the Biblically oriented posts saying that it's for straight people only.

It is the foundation of civilization, the structure that moves the motion of humanity.

Well, I'll acknowledge that we all sprang from heterosexual relations (guess I'm leaving the in-vitro conception people out, but that's a pretty small number), if you'll acknowledge that we didn't all get here from a heterosexual relationship that absolutely involved marriage. I'm one of those people, and I'm just as here as anyone whose parents were married on at least the day of their birth, if not the day of their conception.

Do a geneological research of yourself

Sorry, as alluded to above, my research stops with a home for unwed mothers in Quebec City. But I'm still here.

Here's one thing I think you might be able to explain to me. When people on these threads talk about the destruction of marriage, that's the part that's the hardest for me to understand. I would suspect that those in the mushy middle have some problem with it, too. If the gay couple across town from you, or even the guy across the county in love with his unneutered dog, or the threesome in the next state all get some government-issued piece of paper saying they are "married", how does that invalidate or destroy what heterosexual marriages between only two people have? What would it actually take away from my wife and myself? Wouldn't we be just as able to think of ourselves as married, just as we would if none of the above had ever happened? Wouldn't society still honor our marriage, even if it extends that honor to relationships that we either don't engage in, or further, find quite distasteful?

I can't find my philosophy book right now but some of those guys had some pretty far out ideas about how to best structure society. The common thread throughout time has been that society needs structuring -- and is structured even if it isn't. Non-structure IS a structure, with all of the consequences of its design.

The first principle of civilization is the control of impulse. Sharing things in common -- values -- is what keeps it functioning with peace and harmony. What nearly all persons who lived before us, and a vast majority of those who live now agree on is the fact that the nuclear family is the foundation of civilized society, precisely because of that heterosexual principle we talked about earlier.

As demonstrated by the Dutch, raising other relationships to equal status lowers the value of the essential one. What is happening there is a separation of childrearing and marriage. They view marriage as just an adult convenience; having kids is something else. The out of wedlock birthrate is something like 60%. Couples are often waiting until the second child to consider marriage. This actually increases government costs and is certainly not an idea structure for a nation.

I'm running out of time. Talk to you later.

Marriage arose as an institution of civilization to strengthen families.

Well, being as none of us was there, the origin of marriage is purely speculative. Here's my speculation:

Marriage, or pairing one-on-one, arose in Mesopotamia, around the dawn of agriculture. Before that, sexual behavior was not connected with reproduction, and I can imagine the sexual behavior of pre-agricultural humans probably resembled several of the types of relationships we see among primate groups. What's the point in controlling sexual behavior, if it is not seen to have any consequences?

What was it about agriculture that changed this? Tilling fields, and other farming duties, required domestication of large animals. Domestication involves penning the animal up, and with the superior upper body strength of males, animal husbandry became the province of men. Surely, some started to notice that a female animal penned up without access to sex with a male animal of the same species was barren. Add a male, and you have offspring. Further, the offspring resembled the male that the female had sexual contact with. Long before genetics were understood, or even conceived of, early animal tenders discovered that in order to have the concept of "my child", a man had to have exclusive sexual contact with a woman. This became part of the tribe's "sacred knowledge", along with the calendars that told early farmers when to plant and when to harvest, and evolved into their religions.

Marriage has gone through many different forms in that time, within the framework of the one-man, one-woman mold, often allowing the old alpha male of the pre-agricultural time, now called the chieftain, or king, to have numerous other women for his exclusive sexual access, even though one woman's children had primacy, and were considered "legitimate" heirs to the chieftainship. Marriage used to be primarily a property transaction, with goods flowing to either the bride's or the groom's family, and the woman was just part of the transfer. We've evolved beyond that today, thankfully.

The present national debate about gay marriage has arisen because of medical technology. In agricultural times, each new child had not only a mouth to feed, but a pair of hands and legs to work the farm. Besides, many did not survive the hardships of disease, malnutrition, war, or weather. Hence, a society that had "be fruitful and multiply", rather than its opposite, was favored by the circumstances. Parents often didn't survive long enough to see even most of their grandchildren's generation being born. Further, we were finally able to separate heterosexual behavior from reproduction with the development of reliable means of contraception.

If there could be marriages that did not have children in them because the kids were all grown and gone (partly because there were less of them), and marriages where it might be explicitly planned that there be no offspring at all, then conferring marital benefits solely for the purpose of nurturing the next generation became less imperative. Add to the fact that at least lesbian couples can have children without the usual intervention by a male, and you have the heterosexual and homosexual couple not looking as different from one another in the days when procreation was the chief natural delimiter between them.

All the talk about "tradition" and what some dusty religious text says, in someone's interpretation, will not change the fact that there is a greater and greater tolerance of, and acceptance of homosexual people in our society. If anyone really wants to slow this trend, they're going to have to come up with some other reason, and I've just not seen one on the horizon.

The gay marrieds, as a class, will be able to litigate on equal protection grounds, to change aspects of the legal incidinces of marriage that don't appeal or apply to them. The family-strengthening aspects will wither away.

What did the interracial couples change? I guess one could argue that non-religious marriages increased the number of marriages that demanded no-fault divorce, but to people who are/were solidly committed to each other for reasons reflecting their religion are not really tempted by this. I suppose that if it's easy for a wife to divorce a man who would otherwise use the law to keep her bound in the marriage, to satisfy his religious obligations, he could be said to be damaged, but in that case, he doesn't want a wife, he wants a prisoner.

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