Posted on 02/28/2005 7:17:36 PM PST by Utah Girl
Seven years ago, Andrew Sullivan and I conducted a fierce debate in Slate about same-sex marriage. Along the way, I hazarded this prediction:
"Andrew, three years after we permit gay marriage, it will be illegal for schools to send home printed forms with one blank for the mother's name and one blank for the father's."
Did I say three years? In Canada, it's taken barely one.
In the province of Ontario, the words "wife," "husband," "widow," and "widower" are now all to be stricken from the law. The words "mother" and "father" cannot be far behind.
Ontario's action is a reminder that same-sex marriage is not just the extension of an existing legal status to previously excluded persons. Same-sex marriage is a revolution in the definition of marriage for everyone - a revolution not just in law, but in consciousnessness.
And one effect of this revolution - and for many proponents, one of the revolution's aims - is to make forever unthinkable the idea that husbands and wives each have special duties to one another, and that a husband's duties to his wife - while equally binding and equally supreme - are not the same as a wife's duties to her husband.
Once we lose that knowledge, we lose the basic grammar of marriage. It is one more reminder that in the same-sex marriage debate, we are debating not marriage's change - but marriage's overthrow.
Ping
We have entered the Woody Allen universe.
Hell, three years after they legalize homosexual marriage, they will decriminalize the molestation of children.
Justice Scalia said, years ago when the sodomy law in Texas was struck down, that we would have gay marriage within a decade. Everyone laughed.
We already see gays adopting children, which I am completely opposed to.
Tammy Bruce has written extensively in her book The Death of Right and Wrong about how the media elite is working hard to make pedophilia acceptable. My hair dresser told me today that she watched a television show about how people are trying pedophilia as an experiment.
The former silent majority MUST speak out against these things.
Thank you David Frum. I'd tell Andrew Sullivan to stuff it but he'd probably like that!
If the gays need a special legal relation lets call it garriage to prevent confusing the rest of us.
"It is one more reminder that in the same-sex marriage debate, we are debating not marriage's change - but marriage's overthrow."
I propose we call it homo-gamy.
mono-gamy
poly-gamy
homo-gamy.
But let's not call it marriage.
Yes, it does.
NAMBLA I started to post an image from the cover of NAMBLA Bulletin, but was too offended myself and would deserve shunning from the whole FReeper population for posting it. here it is, if you want to puke. http://216.220.97.17/bulletin.htm
The Christian God is also on His way out with these people.
The lament of the homosexual in the '60's and 70's - "We don't want co-equal marriage rights, we just want people to accept us without hating us."
Yeah riiiight.
The lament of the homosexual in the '60's and 70's - "We don't want co-equal marriage rights, we just want people to accept us without hating us."
Yeah riiiight.
This doesn't surprise me at all. There are two factions, at least, in the homosexual rights movement. One group wants social acceptance by being considered equivalent to married couples (even though a large portion of this group has a rather loose definition of marital fidelity); the second group wants to see marriage as a privileged relationship destroyed on the notion that marital covenants and fidelity are "anachronistic" and limiting. These groups are warring among themselves but the attack on marriage is a common denominator.
The sad thing is that if we stop recognizing the differences between men and women in our laws, we rewrite literally thousands of statutes and regulations automatically without considering whether the changes make sense. For example, in most states, a child born to a married woman is presumed to be also the child of her husband. Therefore, anyone challenging that assumption has the burden of proving differently and the parents have the right to refuse genetic tests in most cases. Now, this presumption doesn't make sense in the case of same-sex couples since, at this point anyway, a baby needs both a male and female genetic donor to exist. Yet if the laws are automatically wiped out as Canada is doing, it seems that the there are two choices: Allow the law to presume something physically impossible, or wipe out the presumption. And if you wipe out the presumption, there is a whole new set of problems which the presumption was intended to avoid. It is a no-win situation, all because we don't want same-sex couples to feel bad.
In other examples, a school district may have a regulation that a mother can chaperone girls on a school trip. Invalidating these differences means that a gay man can chaperone the girls, or that chaperones aren't allowed and therefore trips aren't allowed? The point is that the consequences of ignoring reality are far-reaching and largely unforeseen.
But we are becoming a society that can blithely dismiss reality when it conflicts with principles as illustrated by so many liberal causes like environmentalism, socialism, gay rights, NOW, affirmative action and so many others. I guess I won't be surprised to see it happen here. We had best be prepared for insanity codified.
If American society allows the disintegration of marriage and the family by not pressuring their Representatives to rein in the activism of the courts whose fault is that?
It's a fact that we, in America, have a rogue court system intent on changing American society whether the people want it changed or not. This is a tyranny that people have come to accept.
It's also a fact that we have good for nothing Congress that will do nothing to protect the people's interests from the courts. This is a shirking of responsibility that the people also accept.
So, how can anyone whine about what's coming our way?
Sounds more like Orwell
The strongest case against same sex marriage is to go back to the original reason why the institution of marriage was created.
Marriage was not created as a means for two people to express their love for one another. This is a modern idea, encouraged by romance novels, magazines, movies, advertising, etc.
Nor was marriage created in order to give religious sanctity to a relationship between a man and a woman. This only came about after the advent of Western religion, when the concept of marriage was integrated into ideas about morality.
Go back to ancient times. In all four corners of the globe, societies had marriages. The concept of marriage came about to address an unavoidable reality. Young men and young women were physically attracted to each other. This attraction led to women getting pregnant. Marriage was created to deal with procreation. A woman needed some assurance that the guy who got her pregnant wouldn't just disappear.
Frankly, I don't think it's necessary for women who are past menopause to get married. They do so for religious reasons or to conform to the norms of society.
If we want to protect hetrosexual marriage, there needs to be less emphasis put on the concept of marriage as viewed through a religious prism, and more of an emphasis on why marriage was created in the first place in ancient societies. Religion and modern romance have redefined our perceptions about marriage. We need to go back to the most basic reasons why people were getting married thousands of years ago.
When two 70 year olds decide to get married, it's tough to defend their right to get married and make a strong case against gays getting married. I'm not saying that we shouldn't let older women get married. I just think we need to acknowledge that it's not essential to why the institution of marriage was created.
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