Posted on 03/20/2004 4:03:06 PM PST by qam1
It has been a roller-coaster ride of emotions for my partner and I, these past several weeks. We have been together for over twenty-one years and have also been battling AIDS and HIV for all those years. Lately, we have watched the long awaited dream of gay marriage unfold on the television as we sit side by side in a hospital room.
My partner, Peter, has been admitted to the hospital, six times in six weeks. The most heartbreaking moment was a month ago. For seven years he has been on dialysis and for over a year on the kidney transplant list. A month ago we received that long awaited call that a kidney was available. We raced from Medford to Portland for the transplant. He was all prepped and ready for the operating room when it was discovered he had a bad heart valve that needed to be replaced first. He was turned away.
A return home saw a series of hospital stays caused by complications from his dialysis condition. Last Monday he had his heart valve replaced in open-heart surgery and is currently recuperating.
We are still here, partially through luck, but mainly through our love and commitment to each other and a constant concern over each other's health. It always helps to have a gently nagging spouse to make sure you take care of yourself. The simple concepts of taking your medicine, exercising and eating right are more readily followed when you have a persistent partner by your side.
Mutual care giving is a huge benefit marriage provides. It is a benefit to both the married partners and society as whole. This benefit will be even more valuable to society as the baby boomers age. In contemplating these benefits, it has occurred to me that gay marriage really is a socially conservative concept. If one is able to separate one's religious beliefs from gay marriage and look at it at it without bias, its conservative values and benefits become apparent.
It is an element our own gay spokespeople often ignore. I think by now the public is well informed on how gay marriage strengthens our gay families and how it benefits gay people. They have heard our heart-wrenching stories. What is missing in the debate is how gay marriage benefits the rest of society.
The broader question to ask when changing civil laws is whether a change would benefit society overall.
Successful marriages for heterosexuals has long contributed on average to better health both physical and mental, dual parenting of children, greater financial stability and home ownership, better loan repayment, better health insurance coverage, joint legal responsibilities, less transmission of sexual diseases, less substance abuse, less financial burden to taxpayers with joint care giving, and fewer individuals on Welfare, Medicaid or other government assistance. This is just a partial list. All these same societal benefits and taxpayer savings would also come from legal gay marriages.
If just one teenage gay boy sees society value gay marriage and thus avoids AIDS by living a committed and monogamous life, the health care savings to the rest of society is substantial. Over a lifetime AIDS cocktails can literally cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
My partner and I unfortunately know all too well the cost of these drugs. We believe one or the other contracted HIV shortly before we met in 1982. One can only guess whether, if gay marriage was available and valued back then, our earlier sexual behavior would have been different and years of heartbreak avoided.
Legal gay marriage is a net gain for society and has no verifiable negative effect on heterosexual marriage. (It is ironic that as a gay man I have greater faith in heterosexual marriage than many conservatives.) Gay marriage sends a consistent conservative message to both gay and straight that sexual intimacy in the bounds of marriage is a valued and healthy way of life.
On a personal note, because of an unstable work history there are many times when I may have required government welfare assistance if not for the financial assistance of my spouse, Peter. And I in return have and will continue to be, when needed, a caregiver to Peter. Thus, the taxpayer savings and societal benefits of stable long-term relationships are very real. Gay marriage truly is a conservative concept.
One closing note, my partner and I registered as Domestic Partners on March 25, 1985 in the city of West Hollywood, CA. on the first day their new groundbreaking registration went into effect. I believe we may be the longest registered Domestic Partners in the United States.
Mark MacDougall lives in Medford.
Boy, if I could only be able to force myself to become one of their kind, perhaps I could leave my life of contentment and understand that contentment isn't what life is all about.
How I long for the commitment of a partner to sit by my side and watch me die of aids which has been brought forth because of my insatiable lifestyle.
That is a scary thought isn't it?
To some however it is a statement that is emotionally appeasing.
A child who is adopted by two men will be motherless; a child who is adopted by two women will be fatherless. Either way, the child will be a bastard.
Although many couples get married and never have kids for a variety of reasons, a key--if not defining--aspect of marriage is that it allows a couple to have (whether by birth or adoption) legitimate children. Since same-sex couples cannot have legitimate children, they fail a lack aspect of marriage.
BTW, a child could be raised by a same-sex couple if there were no pretense that the members of that couple were the child's mother and father. If an orphan's nearest relative happens to be gay, such arrangements may make the best of a bad situation. That is far different, though, from saying that such situations should be deliberately entered into.
So because of the existence of heterosexual marriage, people are never heterosexually promiscuous?
What is needed is for people to decide that promiscuity (whether homosexual or heterosexual) is not a lifestyle they want to adopt. The availability of marriage as an option is neither necessary nor sufficient for people to make such a determination. While the ability to officially record a monogamous union may help slightly, such help is minor compared with the help that could be given if criticism of such lifestyles weren't so actively stifled.
Gay marriage looks a lot like one of those 60's ideas that liberals had so much faith in and that eventually disappointed and disillusioned people. When one can see in advance that it isn't going to work the way the proponents claim it will, isn't that reason enough not to do it? Probably, but history has seen lots of erroneous "ideas whose time has come" which prevail because of the passionate fervor of the few and indifference of the many.
What a crock!
That's just dumb.
1) If you need an organ transplant the odds are you are close to dying real soon anyhow so worrying about getting cancer later is not an immediate concern.
2) Most organs come from young people who die in accidents, I wouldn't worry about getting cancer from a 16-40 year old.
3) You can't get cancer from a transplant, The reason cancer is so hard to fight is because it's part of your own body so it's hard for your immune system to pick it out. Even if you got a lung that had tumors in it those tumors couldn't spread so the worse case scenario would be that you need a new lung in a few years. Even if you transplanted a whole tumor and nothing but the tumor from one person to another the recipient wouldn't get cancer as his immune system would destroy it.
I am also against transplanting lungs into cystic fibrosis patients, kidneys into hypertensive/diabetics, etc because the disease process that ruins the original equipment will then ruin the new, making them wasted.
I agree, Mikey Mantle was a perfect example, He was already knocking on death's door and total waste to put a new liver in him only for him to die in a few days anyhow. People over 60 should be last on the list anyhow. I am also against giving prisoners serving life organ transplants.
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