Posted on 10/05/2006 4:42:21 PM PDT by SJackson
"Throw those babies overboard!"
"Why?"
"To protect the family."
"Whose babies?"
File photo A newborn infant is held in this 1998 photo. "I don't know. Maybe yours. Maybe mine. Maybe your best friends' babies. Maybe my best friends' babies."
"This is crazy. What are you talking about?"
"Don't ask questions. It's the law. Just throw those babies overboard."
Sound insane? It's no more insane than Wisconsin's gay marriage ban amendment on the Nov. 7 ballot.
The people in favor of this amendment don't seem to understand what they're doing. They don't comprehend that what they want will bounce back at some of them and wound them and their own families - in their wallets, in their legal rights, and in their confidence in the basic sanity of their state.
It will wound them as deeply as it will wound the currently visible gay and lesbian and otherwise unconventional couples, who they mistakenly think are the only targets of their blind prejudice.
They don't understand that their own precious babies whom they cuddle in their arms, to whom they pour out their hearts, and for whom their families have their highest hopes are just as likely to grow up gay or lesbian as other people's babies down the block, across town, or at the other end of the universe.
The people who support this amendment don't seem to understand or to care that the infants who are at the very center of their families' dreams have exactly the same chance of growing up to be targets for bullies, objects of fear, scorn, hatred and ugly, unfair constitutional amendments as any other babies whose arrivals are recorded in each day's birth announcements.
And they don't seem to know or care that there is not a single iota of genuine evidence that the targets of this amendment are less capable of fulfilling the responsibilities of citizenship and of parenthood than any other group in the state's population.
Biologists know the basic facts about the hormones that circulate in each baby's blood within a few weeks after it is conceived. These hormones set the delicate balance of masculinizing androgens and feminizing estrogens in the fetus and the baby's later development. These androgens and estrogens determine how each baby's body and mind will grow into the indefinitely varied combination of male and female physical and mental traits that define us all.
Physicians know that no program of treatment or prayers can substantially alter the basic, underlying templates of growth that guide our babies, our children and our teenagers in their progress toward adulthood. Their sexuality and their gender identities will become superstructures that are built "above the waterline," on foundations of biology that are shaped by God or by nature, depending upon how one chooses to view these fundamentals of life.
We know that most of the leaves will fall off most of the trees in the next few weeks. The leaves and the trees will obey the laws of nature as they have evolved in the Wisconsin environment.
It is equally lawful in nature that about 3 percent to 8 percent of the children born in Wisconsin (and everywhere else) will grow up with some pattern of androgen and estrogen balances that misguided, misinformed or hostile people judge to be "unnatural" or "abnormal." That judgment is plain and simply wrong. These people are the way they are, like leaves on the trees, as God or nature made them. There's nothing unnatural or abnormal about it. It is the most natural thing in the world for things to be this way.
There is only one thing that is unnatural or abnormal in this picture. It is that even in modern times there are still so many people among us who are willing to listen to misguided leaders, leaders who try to establish separate sets of laws and citizenship for people whose otherwise legal patterns of partnering are different from their own.
About 70,000 babies are born in Wisconsin every year. At the rate of 3 percent to 8 percent with unconventional sexual and gender identities, this means that there are 2,100 to 5,600 new babies every year whose future rights as Wisconsin and American citizens would be limited and thrown overboard if this amendment passes on Election Day. In 10 years this could be more than 50,000 people. In 20 years, it could be more than 100,000 people.
No one can predict or control which baby will grow up to be in which category. That is the heart of the matter.
Remember, voters: If this amendment opposing same-sex marriage passes, the babies and the adults you throw overboard into second-class citizenship may be your own.
Bernard Z. Friedlander is emeritus research professor of human development at the University of Hartford in Connecticut. He now lives in Wisconsin. Published: October 4, 2006
Horse hockey.
I have said it before and I will say it again.... How long before this same "logic" reaches the court system....
"I am sorry your Honor but 10% of us were just "born" carjackers. We Can't help it! Did you know that your own son had a 10% chance of becoming a carjacker?"
"I am sorry your Honor but 10% of us were just born rapists! Sorry about your daughter, but you know 10% of us just can't help ourselves. We were born that way! Did you know that your son had a 1 out of 10 chance to be "born a rapist"?
"I am sorry your Honor but my client can't be held responsible for that murder! He is just simply one of the 10% who was born a murderer.... After all, your Honor, your own son had a 10% chance of being born a murderer"....
If liberals argue that "gays" are born "that way" then they can not possibly think that every other "wrong" person in the world was not "born that way too"....
Scarry....
Zot bait
There are many good things that are not guaranteed rights. Does that mean the state should embrace social policy that works directly against theose things? No way.
Yep.
If someone said, "We won't let the socialists teach our daughters that being promiscuous is good, and they'll end up as better wives and mothers because we stopped you," would you ask where the first slut came from?
Can a person become a practicing homosexual without indoctrination? I'm sure they can, but...
...that's not how it happens with any but a tiny minority.
...even if 95% of gays got that way without help, there would still be plemnty of reason to fight the recruiting going on with the rest of them.
First, there are many good things that are not guaranteed rights. But does that mean the state should embrace social policy that works directly against theose things? No way. This debate is about citizens insuring that some baolck robed potentate will not work against the good of children, end of story.
Second, the statement was that the right of a child two have two complementary parents takes precedence over the "right" to gay marriage. It does not say that no child can ever be raised in a different situation.
Third, the last three paragraphs are idiotic strawmen. You may feel better when you paint a reasonable position (Children should have a mom and dad) as some wacko space trip, but it makes you look dumb and self-righteous.
I wonder who recruited you to be a troll at FR.
By your logic, we shouldn't regard cancer as a problem, because it's natural. Same thing with genetic mental illness and pretty much anything else someone is born with or develops through no fault of their own. Since being bipolar is natural, why don't we remake our society to their specs and pat ourselves on the back for it?
You rock! Nice post, and a nice life. Good on you!
I'm glad you grabbed ahold of that post & explained it, cuz I'm used to debating this kind of subject with people who have a little bit of understanding about the way public policy is supposed to work.
I wonder how many of you are homosexual or know homosexuals.
I've known a few people who had committed adultery. Guess what, that doesn't mean I was against adultery before I knew them and in favor of it after. I know a guy who's been arrested for DUI twice, and he's one of the people I love most in this world. Guess what? I still hate drunk driving.
I wonder how many of those homosexuals that are afraid to admit they are for fear of being torn apart by you guys.
I've had four come out to me, five if you count the transgendered guy. Four have respected that I disagree with their lifestyle but still love them and they are still friends. One of them, a bisexual, was my best man at my wedding. Again, your puny imagination fails you.
Oh, hey wasn't foley a homosexual that preyed on homosexual pages in the white house?
It turns out that Foley is a homosexual who propositioned (prepare your brian) an ADULT who had served as a page at ant earlier time. Do I consider his behavior despicable? Of course, but you lefties don't get to criticize Foley, because he was just engaging in "consenting adults" conduct like your hero Bill Clinton...and Foley never perjured himself about it.
Oh, and by the way: Foley didn't work at the White House, dumbass. He was a Congressman. Go back to the seventh grade and take a civics class.
blaock=black
The poster was making a joke.
Until recently, homosexuality was correctly listed in the DSM-V as a psychological abnormality. So, yes, in as much as some people are born with psychological problems, some people are born gay. Others are recruited. Others decide to be gay for reasons of social acceptance.
Nature created males and females with different sexual organs for the purpose of procreation. Homosexuality is unnatural. (red-herrings about recreational heterosexual sex and infertile heterosexual sex aside.)
Thanks!
Good post.
Psychosis and other mental illnesses (such as "homosexuality") occur in some individuals for reasons we do not always understand. Those affected by the disease of "homosexuality" feel compelled to vindicate their illness by perverting others. They basically infect others. They are no different than child-molesters (who are OVERWHELMINGLY "gay"). That we why we have to stop the "homosexualization" of our society.
Even if it were so, a significant percentage of people are born with propensity to develop cancer or psychosis. Does it mean that there is nothing "unnatural or abnormal" about these afflictions? Should we try to treat them, or should we celebrate them as expression of diversity?
Hmmm. By that logic, a "murder ban" may "affect" me because one day I might have a kid who wants to grow up to be a hit man.
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