Whenever my friends and I get into a discussion or friendly debate over the merits (or lack thereof) of gay marriage, the arguments they put forth in favor are always pretty much the same:
* Half of heterosexual marriages end in divorce, so what’s the big difference?
* Why get hung up on sexual orientation? Better to have a child grow up in a loving same-sex household than a unhappy heterosexual union or one with only one parent;
* As long as its between consenting adults, what right does the government have to tell people how they should live?
And somewhere in the discussion, I’ll usually come back at them and say, OK, let’s say we allow any two people to marry or enter into a legal union, why stop there? Would you allow three or four people to do the same? At which point, they’ll usually fall back on the argument about unions of two people max being ideal, or better than one, or something along those lines, but to me that’s intellectually disingenuous.
The fact is, once you open the gates to “marriage” or “civil unions” between same-sex couples, it’s a very slippery slope to every out-there activist organization pushing their own bizarre agendas and employing the ACLU to sue for changing the law in their favor. After all, in a free and open society, why not three-person marriages or unions? Or four? Or ten? Or should there be a limit, and if so, why? How about unions with cars or trees? Or unions with animals? (My wife would like that – then she could leave most of her money to her rabbits instead of me! Just kidding, of course, but you get my drift…)
Don’t believe me? streiff at Red State notes that last week, no less than the esteemed Washington Post ran on concurrent days stories sympathetic to non-traditional relationships involving people seeking to hop onto the same-sex marriage argument that gay, lesbian, and transgender activists have been pushing without success over the last few electoral cycles as a way to further their own agendas. He writes:
For those who have ridiculed us traditionalists whenever we raise the usually disreputable “slippery slope†argument in the defense of marriage as understood by most cultures over several millennia these articles should serve as evidence that we are not exaggerating. When viewed through the mawkishly distorted prism of the arguments proffered by proponents of homosexual marriage their particular cases are compelling and if we accept the idea of marriage as some amorphous “human right†they are irrefutable.
My guess is that it’s just the Post’s way of firing its first salvo at soon-to-be-former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, a Mormon who is keen to enter the 2008 Presidential sweepstakes, but you never know how these things can all of a sudden take off and become such a hot topic in the mainstream dino-media and the cable news channels that the idea actually begins to gain legitimacy.
To me it’s all ridiculous, and just another way the Progressive Left is trying to tear down anything that smacks of the basic fabric that holds this country and society together. Watch them try and turn gay marriage, and then polygamy, into a “civil rights” issue, invoking the ghost of Rosa Parks to try and put their pathetic warped agenda across. What they really want is Rome, and hopefully, more and more states will follow the dozen-plus states who have passed constitutional amendments limiting marriage to that between one man and one woman.
For this country to do anything less is to court both societal and legal chaos and disaster.
I’m going to go down a different limb on this one, and ask a question.
Why does it take an act of government to make a spiritual union?
Isn’t marriage, first and foremost, in the eyes of God? If so, then why is there some kind of legalistic requirement for a marriage “license”, issued by a government, to make marriage legal? The obvious answer in these modern times is due to benefits sharing and in the division of assets in the case of divorce or death. But all that gets us is more government regulation over our lives and more money for the lawyers of the world. So much for a civilized world.
All this nonsense about what is moral or legal has no bearing on our final disposition after we die. It is not for those of us on earth to judge each other, but rather how God judges us after we are finished with the mortal part of our lives. I, for one, am not worthy of judging whether someone is moral or not.
Nor have I ever met another human who is.
Comment by Dave Richard — November 28, 2006 @ 6:47 am
Actually, marriage is both, in the eyes of God and in the eyes of the “state”. We can quibble over the cross-over between the two – me, I’ve long held the belief that civil unions – in whatever form, as long as they are between two people – should fall under the auspicies of “state” and the sacrament of Holy Matrimony should fall under “church”, and never the twain should meet.
I’m uncomfortable with the “moral relativism” argument that only God knows what’s morally right and, as flawed humans, we are in no place to morally judge anything. Quite the contrary – there ARE ways in which people live their lives that are, and should be, subject to moral judgment. Morals are nothing more than what we inherently, as human beings, know to be “wrong” and “right”. And there is a difference.
One of the reasons why marriage (or, I would add, “unions”) have been legislated by “state” the way they have been is the Judeo-Christian traditions upon which our society – and indeed, Western civilization, has been founded upon.
I’m no sociologist, but my guess is that the reason why these traditions have hung on for so long is that civil societies have found they remain intact longer with a framework of laws that promote civil order, and societal health in general.
You simply can’t have everyone doing whatever they damned please because someone’s afraid to make moral judgments on what’s right and what’s not. When societies “work”, everyone benefits, when they don’t, everyone loses. While I would never argue for a government that sticks its nose into everything everyone does as some kind of omnipotent moral judge, government does have it’s necessary place as a basic means of protection for laws that help keep our society healthy and in order.
Comment by The Great White Shank — November 28, 2006 @ 1:36 pm