Posted on 07/03/2002 12:59:41 PM PDT by NYer
"I’m going to live with my daddy," Ben Stewart said when he was eight. "Because there I have both a daddy and a mommy."
Stewart’s childhood was vastly different from most kids’. He was constantly forced to choose between two homes: his mom’s, where his sister and mom’s female lover lived, and his dad’s, where his stepmom—whom he didn’t always get along with—lived.
"I was very young when I learned about lesbianism," said the 30-year-old Virginian, whose name has been changed for this article. He learned about it from his mother, who told him: "This is what I am, and don’t tell your dad or he’ll take you away from me."
Caught up in his choice between mommy and daddy was a choice between two worlds. One was the world where family means a mom, a dad, kids, and normalcy. In the other, the "gayby" boom was starting and developing its own vocabulary, one where "breeders" was the word for male-female couples, where "co-parent" replaced the terms "mom" and "dad," and where "family" was already starting to mean anything, and nothing.
For Stewart, it was also a woman’s world.
"I left because it was such a female environment, and I was having many problems," Stewart says. "I remember going to a counselor with my mom. The counselor was some kind of feminist, listening to me express dissatisfaction because there were no boys in my life." The counselor was unmoved. But Stewart was so unhappy that he eventually got to move in with his father and stepmother, while his sister stayed with his mother. What Stewart found is that in one sense, the son of a lesbian mother doesn’t have two mommies—or three, counting Dad’s wife. He has none.
The fact that these people are unstable to begin with means that most of them are not too keen on signing legally-binding contracts like this, and I understand that the number of these "marriages" in Vermont has declined substantially since the legislation was first passed.
2) The government must uphold legal contracts between adults.
3) We screwed up from square 1.
I'm not sure, but no sex marriages or infrequent sex marriages should be against the law.
Thanks, you beat me to this post.
01. You have to believe the AIDS virus is spread by a lack of federal funding.
02. You have to believe that the same teacher who can't teach 4th graders how to read is somehow qualified to teach those same kids about sex.
03. You have to believe that guns in the hands of law-abiding Americans are more of a threat than U.S. nuclear weapons technology in the hands of Chinese communists.
04. You have to believe that there was no art before Federal funding.
05. You have to believe that global temperatures are less affected by cyclical, documented changes in the earth's climate, and more affected by yuppies driving SUVs.
06. You have to believe that gender roles are artificial but being homosexual is natural.
07. You have to be against capital punishment but support abortion on demand; in short, you support protecting the guilty and killing the innocent.
08. You have to believe that businesses create oppression and governments create prosperity.
09. You have to believe that hunters don't care about nature, but loony activists who've never been outside of Seattle do.
10. You have to believe that self-esteem is more important than actually doing something to earn it.
11. You have to believe the military, not corrupt politicians, start wars.
12. You have to believe the NRA is bad, because it supports certain parts of the Constitution, while the ACLU is good, because it supports certain parts of the Constitution.
13. You have to believe that taxes are too low, but ATM fees are too high.
14. You have to believe that Margaret Sanger and Gloria Steinem are more important to American history than Thomas Jefferson, General Robert E. Lee or Thomas Edison.
15. You have to believe that standardized tests are racist, but racial quotas and set-asides aren't, because the right people haven't been in charge.
16. You have to believe Hillary Clinton is really a lady.
17. You have to believe that the only reason socialism hasn't worked anywhere it's been tried, is because the right people haven't been in charge.
18. You have to believe conservatives telling the truth belong in jail but a liar and probable sex offender belonged in the White House.
19. You have to believe that a homosexual parade displaying drag, transvestites and bestiality should be constitutionally protected and manger scenes at Christmas should be illegal.
20. You have to believe that illegal Democratic party funding by the Chinese is somehow in the best interest of the United States.
21. You have to believe that Al Gore really did invent the Internet
You're not to be blamed. Aside from the media blackout of the anti side of the gay marriage debate, very few conservatives have even bothered to put together much in the way of an intellectual defense of traditional marriage. Rather than taking gay marriage seriously, most seem to want to dismiss it and ignore it. That's a mistake.
Another problem is that the gay marriage proposition is taking advantage of the terribly weakened state of marriage as it exists. This is a culture of divorce that disposes of marriages more easily than used motor oil. We have largely lost the ability to defend marriage on any basis stronger than emotion. See if you can answer the question yourself: why is marriage important?
Yet even a casual study of this institution shows that marriage has long been the bedrock of society. There is clearly something more important about it than convenience, preference, or fashion.
For one of the few solid conservative arguments against same sex marriage, see Stanley Kurtz's excellent series of articles on the topic from National Review Online.
Love and Marriage,
The Right Balance,
Point of No Return,
Code of Honor,
Listening Attentively,
Middle Ground,
Radical Proposal,
Marriage’s Best Chance.
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