The Case for the Marriage of the Sexes

For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.

--Ephesians 6:12


my contention in this thread is that what would like to be legalized as a valid and equally legitimate form of marriage, i.e. same-sex marriage, would be another manifestation of the continued out-workings of our culture's embrace of a larger movement which, working its evil for many decades now, clearly portends the continued decline, and ultimate downfall of our (western) civilization.

to jfolden who only asked that i provide a list of legal reasons from the constitution for the prohibition of same sex "marriage", i can only say that that i can hardly do so, in the same way that one can hardly provide an explicit account from the constitution for another prohibition of an 'institution' that preceded the establishment of the institutions of our government, namely prostitution.
Chalk it up to being prohibited on the grounds of the obligation and right to promote and ensure the general welfare. Or show me then just where you think you have a constitutional right for same-sex marriage to have the same legal protection and benefit.

so while i hardly feel constrained in not being able to furnish my case through some appeal to explicit constitutional clauses and amendments, i believe i can support the case for why the government has no place in redefining by judicial fiat a pre-political institution that in my view is the only secure condition of possibility for the anchoring of a government to govern a society of equals, that condition being the mutual commitment of the two sexes to each other in the marriage covenant, -or contract, if you will.

every culture that has lasted more that two days, (indeed, any culture which in name already assumes a cultus, a cultivated manner of being-in-the-world which encodes and symbolizes, communicates and mediates experience) has found it to be a matter of necessity and survival to recognize its vested interest in the regulation of sexuality and the legitimation of some types of union to the exclusion of other types.
in other words, show me the society which has successfully practiced the legal recognition that same-sex marriages are of equal (moral) validity, and merit the support of the state.

the question is not shall a society shape, guide, and regulate the sexuality of its members or not, but just how shall it do so, and upon what grounds, to what end.

So in looking at just how our culture has been doing that this, and trying to see just where this same-sex movement fits within the bigger picture, it seems clear to me that it is part of a much larger movement to which i believe much of western hetero-normative culture is already beholden, and enslaved, and primarily responsible for. i characterize it as a gnostic rebellion. a faustian quest for (what it unconsciously knows) is unattainable. because the outright denial or contempt of the vital relationship between sex and reproduction is the first manifestation of such rebellion and idolatry, which leads to a claim for the supposed moral equivalence of same-sex 'marriage', among many other things that will, with all foreseeable likelihood, be the downfall of american culture.
it is within this context of the overall disintegration of the institution of marriage in our law and culture that i want to situate any discussion of the morality, rightfulness, or legitimacy of same-sex 'marriage.'

the wild claim that homosexual unions are equally moral and equally valid forms of human 'marriage' and that they make for equally equivalent households for raising children is the logical outcome of the illogical and irrational and immature demand for liberation from our biology, and the demand for sex and pleasure as a right, without regard for responsibly assumed consequences and commitments. by this i mean contraception, abortion, no-fault divorce, euthanasia, IVF family making, deliberate human embryonic destruction for research, and the demand for rights to children to be had, adopted, made, or purchased, (or abandoned), in any familial context.

whether they know it or be unwitting vehicles and victims of the cunning of gnostic reason, the cry for same-sex 'marriage' is the demand for the effectual abolition of the family and the further capitalistic consumer commodification of all things, and in this case manifesting itself again in a new outrageous form - the commodification of human life, procreation, and children.

for this is not simply about live and let live (hardly!!) this is about those who will not commit in convenantal love to the other sex, and demanding a rightful claim to what can only be the rightful fruit of opposite-sex covenantal love in marriage, ---- i.e. the fruit of children.

one of the most ridiculous claims of the homosexual movement and its claim to children is that the biological father and/or the biological mother have nothing unique to give the child.

i will try later to lay out further how the homosexual movement and the many other rebellions against biology and mature responsibility and acceptance of our brute reality and finitude is, for the sake of a most succinct characterization, is gnostic in form, and is the power and principality that i am warring against and not some specific 'sin'. but people here seemed concerned with 'the list' of just why i think it will be bad for our society, and just why i do not find it it be 'a right'.

so.... as requested, let me begin simply with some not-so-orderly reasons, claims, and quotes that support my case for the exclusive privilege of the union of a man and woman in marriage:

"In every society the main cultural institution designed for...enforcing high paternal investment...is marriage"
--David Popenoe, Life Without Father: Compelling New Evidence That Fatherhood and Marriage Are Indespensible for the Good of Society (New York: Free Press, 1996) p 184.

Monogamous marriage is the only way that societies transform men from cruising savages to good faithful, family men.
--George Gilder, Men and Marriage (Pelikan, 1986)
--Gail Collins, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines (NY, William Morrow, 2003)

"Societies with significant paternal involvement in routine child care are more likely than father-absent societies to include women in public decisions and to allow women access to positions of authority."
--Scott Coltrane, "Father-Child Relationships and the Status of Women: A Cross-Cultural Study" American Journal of Sociology 93 (1988)
--Scott Coltrane, The Micropolitics of Gender in Nonindustrial Societies" Gender and Society 6 (1992) 86-107
--Scott Coltrane, Family Man: Fatherhood, Housework and Gender Equality (NY, Oxford University Press, 1996).

"when young boys have primary caretakers of both sexes, they are less likely as adults to engage in woman devaluing activities and self-aggrandizing, cruel or overly competitive male cults."
--Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, My Brother's Keeper:What the Social Sciences Do (and Don't) Tell Us about Masculinity (Downers Grove, Ill. InterVarsity Press, 2002), p.121.

There has been no legitimate argument put forth for the redefinition and restructuring of marriage and our kinship system, except one's that would also legitimize polygamist marriage, which in praxis effectuate the oppression and inequality of women.

"Hence only monogamous marriage is democracy for the domestic and sexual lives of men and women. "
--Glenn t. Stanton and Dr. Bill Maier, Marriage on Trial (InterVarsity Press, 2004) p 66.

The majority of children growing up in same-sex homes are being raised be lesbians, or in other words, intentionally fatherless homes.
--Tavia Simmons and Martin O'Connell, "Married-Couple and Unmarried-Partner Households: 2000" U.S. Census 2000, Census 2000 Special Reports, February 2003, p.10

But a loving and wise society should never intentionally create fatherless or motherless families.

and yet people want to do precisely this for no other reason than desiring such families. how seriously take it? i don't know the consequences seem to be an experiment that they would find interesting (!)

"It would be interesting to see over time whether lesbian sons have an easier or harder time developing their gender identity than do boys with live-in fathers."
--D. Merilee Clunis and G. Dorsey Green, The Lesbian Parenting Book: A Guide to Creating Families and Raising Kids, 2nd ed. (New York: Seal Press, 2003), p 243.

"The research is absolutely clear...the one human being most capable of curbing the antisocial aggression of a boy is his biological father."
--Shawn Johnston in the Pittsburg Tribune Review, March 29, 1998

Children from stepfamilies, where the biological father is missing, are eighty times more likely to have to repeat a grade in school and twice as likely to be expelled or suspended, when compared to children living with both biological parents.
--Nicholas Zill, "Understanding Why Children in Stepfamilies Have More Learning and Behavior Problems Than Children in Nuclear Families" in Stepfamilies: Who Benefits? Who Does not? ed. Alan Booth and Judy Dunn (Hillsdale, N.J) Lawrence Erlbaum, 1994), p.100

Unmarried people have lower activity levels and they spend twice as much time as patients in hospitals as their married peers.
--Lois Verbrugge and Donald Balaban, "Patterns of Change, Disability and Well-Being" Medical Care 27 (1989): S128-S147

Married people have the lowest morbidity or illness rates, while the divorced show the highest rate.
--I. M. Joung et al. "Differences in Self-Reported Morbidity by Martial Status and by Living Arrangement" International Journal of Epidemiology 23 (1994): 91-97.

"Virtually every study of mortality and marital status shows the unmarried of both sexes have higher death rates, whether by accident, disease, or self-inflicted wounds, and this is found in every country that maintains accurate health statistics. "
--Robert Coombs "Marital Status and Personal Well-Being" p.98

jointly conducted research at Yale and UCLA reports:
"One of the most consistent findings in psychiatric epidemiology is that married persons enjoy better health than the unmarried. Researchers have consistently found the highest rates of mental disorder among the divorced and separated, and the lowest rates among the married and intermediate rates among the single and widowed. They also found that a cohabiting partner could not replicate these benefits of marriage."

"All things being equal, children with married parents consistently do better in every measure of well-being than their peers in any other type of family arrangement. And this is stronger indicator of well-being than the race, economic or educational status of parents, or of the neighborhood in which these children grow up."
Stanton and Maier, Marriage on Trial, p 103

boys and girls who lived with both biological parents had the lowest risk of becoming sexually active.
Teans living with only one biological parent, including those in stepfamilies, were particularly at risk for becoming active at younger ages.
--Dawn Upchurch et al. "Neighborhood and Family Contexts of Adolescent Sexual Activity." Journal of Marriage and Family 61 (1999):920-30

Girls raised by lesbian mothers appear to have been more sexually adventurous and less chaste. And they are more likely to be involved sexually with other girls.
--Judith Stacey and Timothy Biblarz, "(How) Does the Sexual Orientation of Parents Matter?" American Sociological Review 66 (2001): 170-71.

"It is no exaggeration to say that a stable, two-parent family is an American child's best protection against poverty. "
--The Progessive Policy Institute, Kamarck and Galston, "Putting Children First." p. 12

former domestic policy advisor in the Clinton administration, Dr. Bill Galson explains that avoiding family poverty requires three things. 1. finishing high school. 2 marrying before having children and 3. marrying after the age of twenty. Only 8 percent of families who do these are poor, while 79 percent of those who fail to do these are poor.

And children with married mothers and fathers are more likely to do these things and therefore are not as likely to raise children who also end up in poverty.

"children residing in households with non-biological adults were 8 times more likely to die of maltreatment than children in households with 2 biological parents. Risk of maltreatment death were elevated for children residing with step, foster, and adoptive parents."
--Michael Stiffman et al., "Household Composition and Risk of Fatal Child Maltreatment" Pediatrics 109 (2002): 615-21.

Research published in the journal Child Abuse and Neglect found that a girl is seven times more likely to be molested by a stepfather than a biological father. And the abuse has been found to be more severe.
--Michael Gordon, "The Family Environment of Sexual Abuse: A Comparison of Natal and Stepfather Abuse" Child Abuse and Neglect 13 (1985): 121-30.

"Stepfamilies typically have an economic advantage [over single parent families], but some recent studies indicate that the children of stepfamilies have as many behavioral and emotional problems as the children of single-parent families and possibly more..."
"Stepfamilies problems, in short, may be so intractable that the best strategy for dealing with them is to do everything possible to minimize their occurrence"
--David Popenoe, "The Evolution of Marriage and the Problems of Stepfamilies: A Biosocial Perspective" in Stepfamilies: Who Benefits? Who Does Not? pp 5, 19 (emphasis added).

in sum, here's some things for 'the list''
-Children from biological male-female marriage uniquely protects children from poverty.
-It better protects them from poverty and sexual and physical abuse.
-It shows a better physical and mental health for children.
-It helps them to do better in every measure of educational development.
-It better helps them to stay away from violent, criminal, and sexual behaviors.


more list items later.


attemptatclarityedit
[Edited 3/9/07 14:52pm]

HiinEnkelte said:

LittleRedCorvette said:

http://www.lifesite.net/l...21603.html

http://worldnetdaily.com/...E_ID=54283

http://worldnetdaily.com/...E_ID=54276

http://www.freerepublic.c...5201/posts

http://www.freerepublic.c...5200/posts

http://www.worldnetdaily....E_ID=54241

http://www.theatlantic.co...3/tim-gill

http://rightbias.com/News...CEDAW.aspx

http://www.freerepublic.c...2951/posts

http://www.freerepublic.c...2609/posts

http://www.freerepublic.c...1725/posts

http://www.catholicnewsag...php?n=8584

http://www.weeklystandard...8xpsxy.asp

recently read items. add em to 'the list'.

i particularly like this, quoted in part, from The Chronicles of Love and Resentment by Eric Gans

"Gay Marriage": An Originary Analysis

No. 289: Saturday, August 23, 2003

I have pointed out previously in these Chronicles that the victimary critique of institutions that dominated the postmodern era has lost its epistemological power to discriminate between victims and persecutors. A key example is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has been prolonged in large measure by the ability of militant groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad to arouse in Europe and elsewhere a knee-jerk reaction in favor of "victims," with the perverse but deliberate consequence of making the lives of their fellow Palestinians all the more victim-like.

A less simplistic and only slightly less controversial application of latter-day victimary thinking--we might take our cue from the neo-Marxists and call it "late victimism"--is the movement urging the adoption of "gay marriage"--the colonization of the word "gay" by the homosexual community being an apparently definitive conquest of the victimary era. Is the exclusion of same-sex relationships from the financial and other advantages of marriage not a form of discrimination?

If marriage consists merely in the state’s recognition of a pairing of individuals, then nothing essential distinguishes a same-sex couple, or indeed a more numerous "polyamorous" grouping, from a traditional husband and wife. Once we consider marriage to be independent of gender, there is no point raising objections to gay marriage on the plane of love and fidelity, even if, statistically speaking, male--but not female--homosexual couples have been shown to tolerate and practice infidelity considerably more than heterosexual ones, as biology would lead us to expect. Put the other way around, in order to defend the traditional concept of marriage, it is necessary to consider heterosexual relationships--including sexuality and procreation, if not as an obligation, then as a thematically present option--as more legitimate than their homosexual counterparts. The legitimation of heterosexual relations is the purpose of marriage. In today’s victim-addled world, such discrimination in favor of a single variety of sexual partnership appears very nearly scandalous. Because of the private nature of sexual acts, there is an understandable reluctance to grant a superior status to one set over another. But this is to misunderstand the anthropology of the institution of marriage.

Although modern society no longer takes an official interest in whether marital relations take place at all, let alone in whether they are geared to procreation, marriage is a license to perform such acts. In order to affirm the traditional concept of marriage, one must affirm not merely the social value of restricting this license to heterosexual couples, but the conformity of this restriction with the moral model of reciprocity that all humans as language-users carry with them. In liberal-democratic polities, ethical laws that are felt to come into conflict with moral law generally end up by being discarded. The gay marriage case is a crux because it points up the necessity of defending as moral an arrangement that appears to violate the symmetrical reciprocity of the moral model. It obliges us to choose between simplifying this model to eliminate any element of sexual specificity and defending this specificity as not an exception but a necessary extension of the originary model. Intellectually speaking, the first course seems much the easier, because we define the moral model today in sex-neutral terms. The issue of homosexual marriage forces us to examine the universal appropriateness of such terms.

If (linguistic and ritual) representation originates as a means to defer violence, then the reciprocity of the originary scene must have operated exclusively among men, not between men and women. The subsequent extension of this reciprocity to women, which has only become definitive in our time (and still not universally) is rightly understood as a victory for the moral model, and, more specifically, as a major accomplishment of the postmodern victimary critique. But the entry of women into the public sphere is not the beginning of women’s role in human society; from the outset, women have been bound to men through the asymmetrical institution of marriage in its various forms.

In the context of the extension of public reciprocity to women, it is tempting to see the institution of marriage, within which men have traditionally exercised power over their wives, as a fundamentally oppressive one that should be retained only if it can be purged of its asymmetry, even where this asymmetry favors women (thus men have successfully challenged women’s exclusive right to maternity leave). Yet so long as women retain biological exclusivity in childbearing, sexual asymmetry will perforce persist. Asymmetry is not in itself a violation of the moral model, since asymmetry is not (and, despite appearances, never was) synonymous with domination.

Traditional marriage is not, and has never been understood as, a public relationship falling under the abstract model of moral reciprocity, but a publicly recognized private or "domestic" relationship founded on the biological asymmetry that makes possible human procreation. This point is independent of the specific origin of any given marriage/kinship system. Proponents of gay marriage often assert that if homosexuals should be denied marriage because their sexual relations cannot produce offspring, then childless heterosexual couples are equally illegitimate. But this polemical thrust is incompatible with the notion of marriage as a relationship between two individuals; if children were required to legitimate marriage, then marriage itself would be only a provisional bond. It is marriage that legitimates procreation, not the other way around. Marriage within a given society must institutionalize the asymmetric relationship of the two partners in child-production independently of the symmetrical reciprocity of the originary scene before it can provide legitimacy to child-rearing, an activity which even in our fragmented society involves an "extended family" of grandparents, uncles and aunts, and so on, coupled by the same asymmetric bond whether or not they have children of their own.

No institution is immune to change or even abolition. But women’s having achieved public equality with men does not imply that marriage has now become a contractual relationship between morally equivalent parties into which it would be discriminatory not to admit pairs of same-sex persons. Once we define, and we might as well say, define away, marriage as a form of civil contract between two abstractly defined individuals, its institutional specificity disappears; society has declared itself by default indifferent to the nature of child-producing and –rearing arrangements, if not to the welfare of the children themselves, which would have to be assured by new institutional means. Such a position, however unpalatable to most, has its own logic. But if marriage is merely a contract between individuals, then it becomes difficult to justify the state’s taking a special interest in promoting it through such means as tax relief. If any two--or perhaps three or ten--people can "marry," then there is no obvious reason why the state should not deal with marriage in the same way as it deals with any other form of voluntary association; indeed, it becomes unclear in what sense "marriage" is a distinct form of voluntary association.

.
[Edited 2/18/07 22:20pm]

oh, fuck no, i am too tired to even attempt reading this tonight.

but i did find it telling that the first words out of your mouth are a biblical quote, with a subject that is not defined by religion.

i'll give it a shot (or 40) in the morn.

i've referenced Eric Gans' ideas obliquely before, so here's more from The Chronicles of Love and Resentment:

Gay Marriage II - The End of Kinship

No. 296: Saturday, March 6, 2004

I have a pretty good gay friend who hasn’t answered my last couple of emails. He may be out of town, or his computer may be down, but the most likely explanation is that he was offended, perhaps permanently, by my previous “Gay Marriage” Chronicle (#289). One thing that has surprised even me, inured as I am to victimary thinking, is how quickly support of gay marriage has gone from tentative to Pharisaical. Statements of various public officials and letters to newspapers proclaim as a self-evident moral truth, which only an unregenerate Yahoo could think of opposing, a “right” that no one dreamed of until a few years ago and that no one dreamed of enforcing until a few weeks ago. Instant self-righteousness is a powerful thing.

A couple of examples from the 3/6/04 LA Times:

I am angered by President Bush’s push for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriages. … This is a time when we must look to ourselves and ask whether we’re going to let our leaders perpetrate hate and second-class citizenship upon people or if we will join the fight for equal rights. Rise up from the back of the bus, demand your place at the counter…

So Bush wants to ban gay marriage. I thought the purpose of law and government was to protect people’s rights and freedoms, not to diminish them.

And from the 3/7 issue:

I am a homosexual. I am created by God and nature. . . Those people who feel their beliefs entitle them to take away my equal rights have crossed the line from smugness to tyranny.

Thus gay marriage has become in the space of a few days a “right” that government is supposed to “protect,” denial of which is “perpetrat[ing] hate and second-class citizenship.” To deny a homosexual the option of gay marriage is to "take away" his “equal rights” and thereby to practice “tyranny.” The reference to Rosa Parks shows the power of the victimary paradigm to define any de jure difference as a shameful denial of human equality.

Victimary rhetoric may be on the wane; it has not lost a major confrontation yet. Gay marriage is beginning to look inevitable. President Bush’s proposal of a constitutional amendment to prevent it seems dubious; as a rule, an amendment designed to preserve a distinction that some court or other has determined to be invidious is destined to fail. Do I even support such an amendment? It seems to me that if amending the Constitution is the only way to enforce a once tacitly held social norm, then that norm is no longer generally accepted, in which case we certainly shouldn’t write it into the Constitution.

This may indeed be a special case, and I will say why I think so, but no one seems to be making much of a fuss about it. The general public has treated this as one more social-values issue somewhere down the scale from abortion, fetal stem-cell research, and Internet pornography; far from everyone supports it, but it arouses little passion among those who oppose it. After all, abortion, stem-cell research, and pornography may be said to have “victims”: who is the “victim” in a same-sex marriage?

The victim is our system of kinship, as it has been known since the dawn of human society. But perhaps we don’t really need a kinship system.

The only mentions of kinship in relation to the gay marriage issue that I have been able to find on the Internet are favorable to gay marriage. Here are two, the first from a relatively neutral source (atheism.about.com), the other from a gay newsletter.

In summary, what's the point of gay marriage? The point of gay marriage is the point of all marriage. Marriage is different from other contractual relationships because it creates bonds of kinship. These bonds are in turn different and more important than other bonds: they create significant moral, social, and legal obligations both for those who are married and between those who are married and everyone else. Some individuals may not choose to acknowledge those obligations, but they exist and they constitute the basis of human society - a society which includes both heterosexual and homosexual human beings.
Obviously marriage only begins to address the much bigger and more interesting question of equality of kinship. Kindness is what makes us kindred--a single act of kindness can be, therefore, a more powerful bond than any court decision or act of Congress. -- Scott Tucker, Editor Of Open Letter Online

Neither of these statements reflect a real understanding of kinship. Kinship is a means for creating family alliances, yes, but the central focus of kinship, which Lévi-Strauss described in the pre-feminist era as “the exchange of women,” is to confine the perpetuation of the species within the extant social order. Marriage has until now been between men and women because childbearing is both a human necessity and a potential disturbance to lines of ancestry that must be maintained within the kinship structure. It is interesting that the first paragraph above speaks about “bonds” and “obligations” without mentioning the children who are normally considered, particularly in modern, nuclear families, as the primary focus of these bonds and obligations.

We are now proposing to do away with kinship as we know it. Of course this can be presented in positive terms, as the extension of our kinship system to include a few same-sex couples among the many heterosexual ones. Those nice gay couples kissing on the steps of the San Francisco City Hall can hardly be said to pose a danger to the social order. But this reasoning assumes that with gay marriage, all outstanding invidious distinctions relating to marriage have been abolished. On the contrary, the institution of gay marriage makes marriage itself an invidious distinction.

A recent Weekly Standard article points out that polygamists have been waiting in the wings for gay marriage to be approved; if two men can marry, then the argument against marriage between six men, or two men and a woman, or any other combination, loses its main premise. And why should any two people, whether sexually interested in each other or not, be denied the benefits of marriage? Suppose I live with my sister--or my mother; why shouldn’t we be able to “marry” in order to save on our taxes?

Marriage is between two people because it takes two people to produce children; this is a biological reality that goes back to well before we came on the scene. Once marriage is redefined as the creation of a “kinship” bond between two people, then the reason for forbidding the extension of this bond to arbitrary groups disappears. Gay marriage is an extension of traditional marriage that paradoxically relies on the traditional notion of marriage remaining intact. Those nice gay couples are acting just as nice heterosexual couples do. But once one need no longer be a heterosexual couple to marry, the very notion of a married couple loses its raison d’être. The presumptive legality of polygamy and group marriage is not the main difficulty posed by gay marriage; the main difficulty is the legality of marriage itself.

If we see marriage as a privileged state heretofore unfairly denied to a fraction of the general population, then gay couples, let alone polygamists, constitute only a tiny subset of this fraction. Most of the people who suffer from the lack of the marriage privilege are, very simply, the unmarried. So long as marriage had a clear place in social tradition, its privileged status was more or less uncontested. But now that marriage is no longer conceived as a ritually derived adjunct to originary reciprocity but as deriving, like any contractual relation, from this reciprocity itself, its privileged status is no longer justifiable. The gay couple’s argument that it is unfair that a heterosexual couple, but not they, should be eligible for the legal benefits of marriage can be turned against both sets of couples: why should a man or woman be forced to join with someone else in order to receive social benefits? Why should those who like to live in couples have an advantage over those who like to live singly? Polygamists may well ask how what is given to groups of two can be denied to groups of ten. But the more fundamental question is: why deny it to groups of one? How can our society justify denying the equal rights of the uncoupled? Is this denial at a moment when same-sex marriage is becoming legal not crossing the line from smugness to tyranny? It can’t be long before lawyers begin making such arguments; for all I know the briefs are being written at this moment.

A counter-argument might be made that, precisely in order to maintain the structure of our kinship system, the benefits of marriage should be extended to homosexual couples but not to larger groups or incestuous pairs or single individuals. But the core of this argument is self-contradictory. If tradition is no argument for maintaining marriage in the face of the standard victimary argument for equal rights, then how can it be an acceptable argument for maintaining our kinship system in the face of the same argument?

Can we do without a government-supported kinship system? This would seem to be the logical conclusion of subjecting marriage to the moral model of reciprocal relationships. Europeans, especially Scandinavians, seem to do pretty well without marriage. This may or may not correlate with the fact that the original non-marrying ethnic stock of these countries is being replaced rather quickly with immigrants from other continents who do marry and whose families, unlike those they are replacing, average well above the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman.

Since WWII we have lived through a victimary revolution in which the Nazi-Jew model has been applied to every form of unequal human relation. This revolution has now progressed to the point where marriage, the building-block of our kinship system, is seen as discriminating against homosexuals.

I had always thought that gay marriage would mark the point at which the victimary revolution would be forced to retreat. This may indeed come to pass, but my present impression is that I was wrong--that the moral imperative of inclusion in the reciprocal human dialogue outweighs all else.

When we were discussing this issue, my wife gave me the example of a couple of elderly ladies of our acquaintance who have lived together for many years. If, she asked, they decided to get married and invited us to their wedding reception, how could we dream of hurting their feelings by refusing to attend? But if that is so, then how can we oppose gay marriage?

The only reasonable answer to this question is the reasoning I have followed above. If homosexuals want to call their relation “marriage,” so be it. But at that point marriage becomes strictly a matter of personal preference, an institution of civil society with no a priori claims on legal advantage. This would not necessarily prevent couples or larger groups from receiving tax benefits, but such benefits would have to be justified by something other than the fact of living as a married couple--perhaps by that of sharing a single residence. These ramifications will no doubt take some time to work out, but it’s hard to imagine that our legal system will evolve in any other direction. Unless, of course, enough people feel strongly attached to our kinship system to force the advocates of same-sex marriage to accept a less radical form of government-approved consecration. This doesn’t look like a good bet at the moment.

.
[Edited 2/18/07 22:42pm]

cborgman said:

oh, fuck no, i am too tired to even attempt reading this tonight.

but i did find it telling that the first words out of your mouth are a biblical quote, with a subject that is not defined by religion.

i'll give it a shot (or 40) in the morn.

Tsk, tsk... the requested list was to be concerning SSM (Same sex marriage) itself. The issue to be discussed was not whether children should grow up in families where they will be raised by same sex couples. These families, obviously, already exist! (The 2000 U.S. Census backs this up and while a post-Census study by UCLA economist Dr. M.V. Lee Badgett found that there was a significant undercount of same-sex couples in 2000, the Census reports that among the couples answering they are a same-sex couple: 1/3 of lesbian couples and 1/5 of gay male couples have children under 18 living in the home. http://www.iglss.org/medi...ftout.pdf)

So, the question in that respect is ; should these parents be forced to live with a commitment less than equal to other familes, with no official recognition or rights as provided to those currently capable of obtaining a marriage license?

The American Psychological Association's Council of Representatives has adopted a resolution supporting legalization of same-sex civil marriages and opposes discrimination against lesbian and gay parents. http://www.apa.org/releas...riage.html

Most of the quotes and studies you provide here are inapplicable to this discussion and bear no weight to the topic at hand. Careful examinations of many of the citations highlight the fact they are in reference to a comparison between male/female couples to SINGLE parent families (or households of unmarried couples in unstable relationships) and NOT to same sex couples at all.

Personally, I'd prefer we tackle the original issue as requested but I will provide a few brief sources of info to this new subversion of the topic.

In 2003 same sex parenting was evaluated by the Massachusetts court in Goodridge vs. Department of Public Health. This is what lead to the legalization of SSM in the state.

Justice C.J. Marshall wrote:

"No one disputes that the plaintiff couples are families, that many are parents, and that the children they are raising, like all children, need and should have the fullest opportunity to grow up in a secure, protected family unit. Similarly, no one disputes that, under the rubric of marriage, the State provides a cornucopia of substantial benefits to married parents and their children. The preferential treatment of civil marriage reflects the Legislature's conclusion that marriage 'is the foremost setting for the education and socialization of children' precisely because it 'encourages parents to remain committed to each other and to their children as they grow'.... "

He went on to state: "In this case, we are confronted with an entire, sizeable class of parents raising children who have absolutely no access to civil marriage and its protections because they are forbidden from procuring a marriage license. It cannot be rational under our laws, and indeed it is not permitted, to penalize children by depriving them of State benefits because the State disapproves of their parents' sexual orientation."

In composing the majority decision, he wrote "Without question, civil marriage enhances the 'welfare of the community.' It is a 'social institution of the highest importance.' French v. McAnarney, supra. Civil marriage anchors an ordered society by encouraging stable relationships over transient ones. It is central to the way the Commonwealth identifies individuals, provides for the orderly distribution of property, ensures that children and adults are cared for and supported whenever possible from private rather than public funds, and tracks important epidemiological and demographic data.....Where a married couple has children, their children are also directly or indirectly, but no less auspiciously, the recipients of the special legal and economic protections obtained by civil marriage.....marital children reap a measure of family stability and economic security based on their parents' legally privileged status that is largely inaccessible, or not as readily accessible, to non-marital children. Some of these benefits are social, such as the enhanced approval that still attends the status of being a marital child. Others are material, such as the greater ease of access to family-based State and Federal benefits that attend the presumptions of one's parentage." More : http://www.mass.gov/court...ridge.html http://www.socialaw.com/s...ov03c.html


Prior to that, in 1996, SSM was evaluated by the Circuit Court of Hawaii. It is notable that all of the professionals called as witnesses in the trial on both sides (the plaintiffs and the defense) stated that same sex couples are as capable and as loving as male/female parents. Judge Kevin Chang ruled that the state did not prove that SSM's would negatively affect the development of their children. He stated that the most important factor for child development is the nurturing relationship between a parent and a child and that the sexual orientation of said parents is not an indicator of a person's fitness to raise a child. Indeed, a great number the rights that same sex couples would receive from a legalization of SSM would have a positive benefits on their children. More: http://www.debtaylor.com/...19707.html

Also reference:
R.W. Chan et al., "Psychosocial adjustment among children conceived via donor insemination by lesbian and heterosexual mothers," Child Development, 69, Pages 443-457, (1998). This study reported that, among the largely upper-middle-class mothers studied, there was no difference in children's adaptation and development up to the age of seven years old. The study compared homosexual and heterosexual mothers, some of whom were in couples and some who were singles.

J. Laird, "Lesbian and gay families," in F. Walsh, Ed., "Normal family processes" (2nd ed, Pages 282-328), Guilford Press, (1993).
C.J. Patterson "Family relationships of lesbians and gay men" Journal of Marriage and the Family, 62, Pages 1052-1069. This and the previous study found that children of same-sex parent families "do not seem to grow up disadvantaged emotionally and may even possess certain strengths of character such as tolerance, empathy, and contentment."

Indeed, a great number of the rights that same sex couples would receive from a legalization of SSM would have a positive benefit on their children.

So, looking at your list:

as with just about everything from Theodor Adorno's book Minima Moralia the following particular "reflection from damaged life", although not specifically about same-sex marriage, deserves much contemplation, and is VERY rich for thought and discussion. Any thoughts?


Tough baby – A certain gesture of manliness, be it one’s own, be it that of another, deserves mistrust. It expresses independence, surety of the power of command, the silent conspiracy of all men with each other. Earlier one anxiously called it, awe-struck, the whims of lords, today it is democratized and is played by film heroes for the benefit of the lowliest bank employee. The archetype for this is the good looking man in a smoking jacket, who enters his bachelor’s pad alone one late evening, turns on the indirect lighting, and pours a whisky-soda: the carefully recorded fizzing of the mineral water says what the arrogant mouth does not; that he despises whatever does not smell of smoke, leather and shaving cream – above all, women, and for that very reason they swarm all over him. For him, the pinnacle of human relations is the club, the site of a respect founded on a considerate inconsiderateness. The joys of such men, or on the contrary of their models, which hardly anyone alive really matches, for human beings are always better than their culture, have altogether something of the latent act of violence. By all appearances, this is threatened to others, though he has long since had no need to do so, sprawled on his easy chair. In truth it is past violence against himself. If all pleasure sublates earlier displeasure [Unlust], then here displeasure is raised – as pride in bearing it – unmediated, untransformed, stereotypically into pleasure: unlike wine, every glass of whiskey, every puff on the cigar still recalls the reluctance, which it must have cost the organism, to accustom itself to such powerful stimuli. According to their own constitution, the he-men would thus be what they are usually presented as in film scripts, masochists. The lie is concealed in their sadism, and it is as liars that they truly become sadists, agents of repression. That lie is nothing other than repressed homosexuality, which emerges as the only approved form of what is heterosexual. In Oxford one can differentiate between two kinds of students: the “tough guys” [in English in original] and the intellectuals; the latter are equated almost without further ado to those who are effeminate. There is a great deal of evidence that the ruling class polarizes itself according to these extremes on the road to dictatorship. Such disintegration is the secret of integration, of happiness of unity in the absence of happiness. In the end the “tough guys” [in English in original] are the ones who are really effeminate, who require the weaklings as their victims, in order not to admit that they are like them. Totality and homosexuality belong together. While the subject falls apart, it negates everything which is not of its own kind. The opposites of the strong man and the compliant youth fuse into a social order, which unreservedly asserts the masculine principle of domination. By making everyone, without exception – even presumed subjects – into its objects, it recoils into total passivity, virtually into what is feminine.

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[Edited 2/18/07 23:09pm]

HiinEnkelte said:

jtfolden said:

first of all, you shoot yourself in the foot by opening with a biblical quote.

this is about american law and government and government's definition of marriage, not your religious beliefs. it has NOTHING to do with religion. zip. zero. nada.

so, before you have even started, you have already mixed a completely unrelated issue in to cloud the issue.

This is ridiculous.

Four, five, six threads about hating homosexuality.

You people only worry about thousand year old texts blasting homosexuality.

While your country is in danger and the world needs your help.

HiinEnkelte said:

jtfolden said:

so, should we continue spending the time and effort to point out the numerous reasons why this thread is garbage, or are we all in agreement that it was a failure?
[Edited 2/19/07 14:44pm]

cborgman said:

cborgman said:

jtfolden said:

jtfolden said:

cborgman said:

cborgman said:

HiinEnkelte said:

cborgman said:

it also is deleriously unaware of historical precedent and has no idea wether it is arguing about religious marriage or legal marriage.

sounds like a dead horse thread to me.

---my bold

okay! historical precedent? just what orwellian world are you living in?

HiinEnkelte said:[quote]

cborgman said: