I’m sorry for bringing up an old argument which went on far too long. I don’t want to be known as a one (or few) trick pony, but I just discovered an article by my favorite author (Orson Scott Card) which describes to a tee why many Christians (and I know he’s not Christian), including myself, feel that same sex marriage is bad for society. Everything that I wasn’t able to communicate to you guys about this subject, I hope becomes clearer when explained by a real writer.
“Of course, in our current society we are two generations into the systematic destruction of the institution of marriage.”
“Since the natural reproductive strategy for males is to mate with every likely female at every opportunity, males who are not restrained by social pressure and expectations will soon devolve into a sort of Clintonesque chaos, where every man takes what he can get.”
“Now huge numbers of Americans know that the schools are places where their children are indoctrinated in anti-family values.”
“the fanatical Left”
“Already any child with any kind of sexual attraction to the same sex is told that this is an irresistible destiny”
“society will bend all its efforts to seize upon any hint of homosexuality in our young people and encourage it”
“Already most parents regard schools – an institution of the state that most directly touches our children – as the enemy, even though we like and trust the individual teachers – because we perceive, correctly, that schools are being legally obligated to brainwash our children to despise the values that keep civilization alive”
“the screaming hate speech of the Left”
“The dark secret of homosexual society – the one that dares not speak its name – is how many homosexuals first entered into that world through a disturbing seduction or rape or molestation or abuse, and how many of them yearn to get out of the homosexual community and live normally.”
Is it possible that this chappie is a right-winger?
I must say I hadn’t noticed the ‘systematic destruction of the institution of marriage’ for two generations. Is it a secret campaign?
Of course ‘schools are the enemy’. They teach evolution, which goes directly against the Word of God.
Still one must ‘admire’ this chap’s gift of understatement ‘any child with any kind of sexual attraction to the same sex is told that this is an irresistible destiny’. Wow. these fanatical lefties are really well organised.
And how did he penetrate homosexual society to discover its dark secret? :eek:
Well, technically, it’s a way around the bans. To say it mocks the sanctity of marriage is moot as SSM proponents don’t see it as a religious matter. (At least, from what I see here. This is pretty much my only interaction with gays as I don’t know any personally at the moment).
Actually, I don’t understand why 2 gay men and 2 lesbians don’t get together for a double wedding to get the bennies of straight married couples. (Yes, I know. It’s not the same, but if you want the benefits, that’s the best option for now. I alone can’t change it. Just offering a suggestion.)
Hell, if enough couples do this publicly (the government can’t witness any “consummation”) they could show the ban is worthless and may get SSM closer to fruition. It would show those wanting the ban that it’s pointless.
Just an idea. I usually get a pileon when poking my nose in any gay issue around here. But hopefully that wasn’t too imflammatory.
I cannot see how that would be much of an improvement. Inheritance, spousal decision power and so forth would be given to the wrong person, just like before they married.
By the way, it happens. I know a Russian lesbian girl who married a Russian gay man to get their respective parents to stop nagging them to marry.
While LDS theology is very much “out there” IMO, the tendency here in GD is to extend the term Christian to any person who claims to be one – a problem not unlike what Card is palming with relation to marriage. While I realize you don’t want your personal views brought into this thread, can you see the disjunct between your saying that Card isn’t Christian (despite what his church would say) and what Card says, apparently with your blessing, regarding marriage?
As a founding half of a family that is now quite extended and half of what turned out to be an infertile marriage, I must tell you that I completely resent the efforts of Card and other activists of his tenor to reduce marriage to the ability to procreate. Human beings have coped quite well with the disjunct between the desire to parent and the need of minors for parenting, and the ability to cause fertilization of an ovum.
A “democratic voice” does not have the privilege of deciding who gets what rights, when those rights are guaranteed by the compact establishing that democracy. Whether marriage is so guaranteed, and what the proper terms and limits on it may be, are obviously actionable – and that means they’re proper grounds for court review. As well say that a majority of Catholics in a given state could require that all citizens obey the canon law of Catholicism, though owing to the Establishment Clause, they can continue to call themselves Methodists or Baptists provided that they meet Catholic moral expectations.
I presume if you obtain a license from your local clerk and go before your clergyman with the woman you have fallen in love with, promising to remain faithful to her until death do you part, you would expect the community to regard that as a marriage, not referring to it in pejorative quotes or making reference to “the broad you’re shacking up with and laying every night.” Yet those opposed to gay marriage see nothing incongruous with their doing the same thing to gay people who do likewise with those they love. May I suggest what standards of behavior which we claim to share that attitude violates?
Hey, duffer? What precisely do you think a marriage is? I suspect that the overwhelming majority of people who marry mean something by the words they pledge in it – something that a gay man “marrying” a lesbian while his beloved does likewise with hers, would not be meaning by the words he recites.
While I respect Mr. Card’s rich imagination in the realm of fiction writing, I think he still suffers from some misconceptions regarding same sex marriage. Putting aside his loaded language and apparent persecution complex by the “fantatical left”, I think there are simple responses to the concerns he outlined in his article.
The Massachusettes Supreme Court, like every court before it, interpreted the relevant Constitution to determine whether rights were violated. The judiciary is, and should be, the branch that has the reponsibility to protect the rights of the minority from the majority. Just as the Supreme Court in Loving protected the rights of the minority from the majority that felt that a black man should never be allowed to marry a white woman, the Massachusettes Supreme Court protected the rights of an minority that is oppressed for no legitimate legislative reason. Although I’m sure to Mr. Card this the protection of minority rights is “judicial activism”, it’s also one of the most important roles the judiciary has to serve under the Constitution.
The argument that homosexuals are not being denied the right to marriage because they can still marry someone they don’t want to would be hilarious if it wasn’t so tortured. I suppose Rosa Parks had the right to ride the bus, just not in the front. Or that the men from NCATC had the right to lunch, just not at the segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter. Or that Richard Loving had the right to marry another person, just not a “Negro” one. The right to marry, without the right to marry whom you choose, is no right at all.
At least Mr. Card has moved onto the real reason, no matter how prettily dressed up by language, that many people are against same sex marriage: homosexual’s are somehow broken, and cannot possibly raise children properly. While I’m sure that Mr. Card truly believes that a child must be raised by one mother and one father, with sex roles strictly enforced, I’m more concerned about the foundation for the belief that this somehow excludes same sex partners. His argument, at its heart, simply boils down to homosexuals cannot raise children as well as hetereosexual couples. That argument gets no credence from me.
At this point, I fear Mr. Card has began to rant, rather than make a cogent argument. It seems to me, his point is that divorce is bad. OK, Mr. Card, I’ll concede the point. What precisely does that have to do with the discrimination against same sex couples?
Once again, I think I can concede the point that marriage is important. My simple response is: And?
Once again, for the sake of argument, I will agree. My question: why can those “Parents in a stable marriage” not be of the same sex?
What the Massachusettes Supreme Court, and, indeed the entire government, is concerned with is CIVIL marriage. That being the rights and responsibilities recognized by the government through marriage. We are not discussing the ability to reproduce or even the emotional health of a relationship between two people. While I’m sure Mr. Card’s marriage is stronger, healthier, and more helpful to society than millions of others in this country, how does making “civil marriage” available to homsexuals denigrate it? By expanding his twisted concept of what a “marriage” is, by creating this strawman, Mr. Card once again misunderstands what the Massachusettes Supreme Court ruled.
I read this entire section, and nearly went to my bedroom and ripped up my treasured copies of the Ender series. The misinformation, specious arguments, strawmen, name calling and persecution complex in this section do not deserve a response, even if written by a man I used to admire. If anyone wishes to defend his statements in these sections, perhaps I will find the time, but I find no reason to battle the winds of brainless propoganda.
I’d say OSC is losing it, but sadly, these seem to be the opinions of far too many Americans these days. Basically it boils down to “Gay Marriage is icky!” but since that won’t really fly as an argument, you have to dress it up with a lot of blather about “Civilization” and “Sanctity” and the “Purpose of Marriage,” as well as dark mutterings about “the fanatical left.” It’s the same stuff you hear from Falwell and Limbaugh, though OSC is a much better writer.
As a side note I can’t see why people are really that surprised. I found a creepy and judgemental tone running through all the Ender books, and Card has never made a secret of his Mormonism or his cultural conservatism.
“The dark secret of homosexual society – the one that dares not speak its name – is how many homosexuals first entered into that world through a disturbing seduction or rape or molestation or abuse, and how many of them yearn to get out of the homosexual community and live normally.”
Ya know, this may be a wee OT, but I, for one, am tired of the claims by the far right that lefties indulge in screaming hate speech. I’m sure there are militant, angry liberals out there–but these accusations are usually made be people who are fairly shrill themselves.
The dark secret of homosexuality? What era is this man living in? Methinks he is the one in a closet–and not a gay closet either.
Kids need stable, mature parents, period. Gender makes no difference. He is confusing pedophilia with homosexuality–a common, misguided assumption.
He sounds both uneducated, intolerant and ignorant–in the most pejorative sense. I won’t waste my time reading anything else by him.
Well, as I read much of his writing throughout my lifetime, I have always wondered if he could be gay. He is very unique in his writing style. It’s very emotional and he gets into the minds of his characters that I wouldn’t expect to get from a guy. It’s been said of OSC about homosexuality, he is one that appears to “get it”.
Religious views aside… that’s part of my point… The original questions weren’t about religion. They were addressed to all people against SSM. I know I said Christians in my OP. Sorry, my mistake. I shouldn’t have limited the opinions to that group. Whatever our collective religious beliefs, I (mostly) agree with him regarding same sex marriage. And I believe that those that are against same sex marriage (whether they are Christian, LDS, Jewish, Muslim, or atheist) also believe most of what Card said here: that SSM is bad for civilization.
I’m not going to tell you personally how you live your life. That’s between you and God (or you and nothing, if that’s what you believe). Vote however you want. But I will use my one single vote to support candidates that are against SSM. Just as it’s wrong of me to try to force my Christian ideals on you, it is also wrong of you to berate me for excercizing my right to have an opinion and do what I can to support it.
I’m half of a heterosexual marriage, and both I and my wife are devout Episcopalians, who happen to believe in the Real Presence in the Eucharist, the propriety of the invocation of saints, and a few other “Catholic” beliefs and practices. I don’t know for a fact, but I presume these are contrary to your beliefs and practices, based on what I’ve seen mirrored of your personal religious views in your posts.
It would clearly be wrong of either of us to take any action that mandates our religious beliefs upon the other – for me to require you by force of law or something to seek the intercession of St. Francis or our Lord’s Mother, would be as heinous as for you to attempt to prohibit my doing so.
Do we have an agreement of sorts here, regarding how we ought to deal with differences in piety and belief?
Presuming we do, let’s look at the SSM issue from that perspective.
I grant the proposition that most marriages consist of a couple desirous of spending the rest of their lives together, out of love, with an element of erotic attraction to each other and the expectation that that will eventually result in the birth of children, whom they will welcome and attempt to nurture properly. In that sense, marriage is a bulwark of our culture.
People do marry for other reasons, some noble and some not so. Some few couples desire companionship and are not particularly interested in sex; some desire sex but not children; some are infertile, either totally so or not interfertile. Those in the last class who do want children proceed by in vitro processes, a “technical adultery” in which the fertile partner couples with someone outside the marriage to produce a child which the couple will raise, fostering, adoption, youth work that sublimates the parental urge by working with the children of others, etc.
Typically, gay couples marry for the same reason as straight couples – out of love, with an element of erotic desire – and the knowledge that they themselves will not have children. Those who do resort to the same expedients as do infertile straight couples.
To be sure, some couples, both gay and straight, do not have the lifelong bond idea behind why they wish to marry, or have romantic notions about a happily-ever-after life that means when the infatuation wears off they believe themselves to no longer love the partner (in point of fact, they probably never did). And some couples regrettably grow apart and find themselves incompatible. However, the straight couples who go through these problems are not usually seen as destroying the institution of marriage.
Now, you have a right to your opinion, true – and if your opinion is that SSM is damaging to our culture, then you most emphatically should not enter into one. But the point at which you decide to regulate the ability of others to make that decision, for whatever reasons, good or bad, is the point at which you have crossed the line from having an opinion to enforcing your beliefs (notice that I am not saying religious beliefs) on others.
Prisoner, I have begotten no children of my loins. But I have three sons and several grandchildren whom I love dearly, the product of other marriages who needed me and my wife in their teens and whom we gave what we could to help them grow into mature, productive, stable adults. In particular, I am absolutely certain that the three I count as my special grandchildren, Amanda, Brandon, and Jordan, would not have been born if we had not been in the role we were – their parents met and fell in love at my home, their father living with me, a runaway from a town nearly 50 miles away, and their mother the girl from down the street (and sister to another of my boys). And I hope that you will not take it as a personal insult but as a measure of the depth of my feeling toward them if I say that if I had to choose between the life of any one of them and yours, I’d have you thrown to the lions without a second thought (and pray for the repose of your soul after).
If any gay couple can foster or adopt the children who have no home and family, and give them the love and nurture they need, then they are far from damaging but rather improving our culture. And whether or not they do so, they have a personal right to seek their own fulfillment in a marriage to the person they love.
Card is, in fact, a descendant and namesake of Orson Pratt , an early Mormon convert and one of the most educated (albeit autodidactically) men of early Mormonism (and as such hated by Brigham Young). Pratt was the husband of at least ten wives and the father of forty-five children.
