Fundamentalist and extremists of any colour always look alike.
“John Hawkins: What do you say to your critics who claim that you attack liberals just as viciously as you say Conservatives are attacked by liberals?
Ann Coulter: Our insults are true.“
Unfortunately, the root of opposition to same sex marriage is a belief that homosexual relationships are, at their root, unnatural and immoral. If you don’t believe me, look at the text of some of the amendments being proposed to state constitutions. Ohio’s and Georgia’s, for example, could easily be interpreted to forbid state courts from recognizing the legal documents that many gay couples already have in place to create a semblance of the rights of marriage. What possible purpose does this serve? No one has ever been able to articulate a reason not rooted in prejudice why, for example, gay partners should be legally denied hospital visitation rights, or the power to make medical decisions, or any of the other rights that come with marriage. No explanation other than “it’s wrong and we’re agin it.” These are the same people who gnashed their teeth at the Supreme Court saying that states don’t have a compelling interest in preventing consensual homosexual sodomy. Our President was one of those - he’s on record as supporting the anti-sodomy statute that the Supreme Court struck down as a necessary measure to protect traditional values. And now he’s leading the vanguard of the anti-same sex marriage statute.
If you believe that homosexual relationships are not immoral, or not any of society’s business, it becomes much much harder to explain why the legal benefits and obligations of marriage should be denied to them. Those like many people just regard homosexuals as aberrant deviants who should be prosecuted. CurtC’s post frames the issue nicely - if it wasn’t for the legal benefits that marriage grants, no one would be having this debate. The text of the marriage amendments now being proposed reveals that it’s not just a semantic objection to the word “marriage” that’s at issue - it’s the very idea that homosexual relationships should have any legitimacy at all, an idea that is inseparable from prejudice and bigotry.
I’ve got to admit that, in this instance, with the apparent lack of any supporting argument other than the slippery-slope, irrational, us and them-type worries that, according to the above posts, seems to prevail in this debate, Spectrum has a point.
It may not advance the discussion much but where’s the harm in calling a spade a spade?
I assume not many here read Dobson; I was giving his position.
As for being open-minded, us Christians are not called to be open-minded, we are called to follow the Lord, especially when its not popular.
sorry for the hi jack.
Wouldn’t want to hurt the poor spade’s feelings, now would we?
It’s akin to the “I’m NOT a homophobe, I just don’t think homosexuals should have the same rights as we good, upright, straight people do…” argument.
You are wrong. I have never advocated eliminating marriage, and I don’t think gay marriage is politically possible right now.
What I favor is civil unions, open even to people not in a romantic relationship but who need to set up a household. This would be a parallel structure with traditional marriage, not replacing or affecting it in any way.
I hope this clarifies matters. I believe this sort of arrangement is the only politically tenable one right now, and even it is being risked by the backlash currently being seen against the imposition of gay marriage by the judiciary.
Where in the world is gay marriage being imposed on anybody?
Raindog, what you’re forgetting is that we’re talking about real, living human beings, not some dry, intellectual discourse that has no direct bearing on our lives. If someone’s mission in life is to deny my humanity and treat me like some sub-human with lesser rights, I’m not going to sit back and treat him with more respect than he’s treating me. All the intellectual and rational arguments are out there, and have been for quite some time. We don’t need to continue repeating them ad nauseum, even when our opponents continue repeating their stale inanities. We don’t negate our intellectual arguments by adding passion; in fact we enhance them.
You should address, though, panache45, a similar problem on the other side.
There are people out there who need benefits right now. And a civil union that could get them benefits is being jeopardized by a large backlash against gay marriage. Instead of moderating their rhetoric, and pushing for more modest goals, many gay activists are becoming more demanding, and IMO not helping their cause much.
Actually, I disagree. In fact, statements like this only allow opponents to say that those who support gay marriage win their crusade by “demonizing” the opposition.
There are plenty of people who hate gay people. They’re the sort who go and wait outside gay bars to beat up people who come out the door.
But there are also loads of people who simply don’t understand gay people. They don’t know what ‘gay’ is, and their first exposure to it is hearing about the gay marriage fight on the news. And maybe they heard a couple of insults thrown back in high school.
These people grow up in a society that glorifies love and the one-on-one heterosexual relationship. Every second song on the radio is about it. The culmination of adolescence is the high school prom, where the boy asks a girl. Virtually every movie includes a romantic element, and virtually always it’s a boy interested in a pretty girl. The transition to adolescence is a big deal, and central to the whole thing is the sudden intrest in girls (by boys), or boys (by girls). Gay people weren’t anywhere on the radar when today’s middle-aged people went through high school in small towns in North America, and every boy had his girl ('cept Jughead).
You’re raised by a husband and wife, and taught that that’s what people do. If you’re not raised in a nuclear family, you’re always aware of the idea that your situation is odd and non-ideal. You’re taught “Boys like girls”, and that’s just the way it is - and it makes eminent sense because it describes in human terms the essential mechanism of reproduction and it jives precisely with the feelings you have - you’re a boy, you notice girls; it’s just natural. Sex Ed was a hushed topic, but it was clear what the point was, and how people are supposed to behave.
In this context, homosexuality - that catch-all word for those people referenced on the news - doesn’t make sense. All you know about gays is that their behaviour is out of the norm; they’re shrill, they’re artsy, they’re neurotic, they do bizarre, disgusting sexual things. They dress funny - some of them dress up like women (Lord knows, they probably think they’re women or something), and they’re all about sex and fashion and lispy complaining.
Cleary, they’re messed in the head. As you’ve been eminently demonstrated by your upbringing, boys like girls - every guy you’ve ever talked to is a clear example. (Not that you ever talked to Stuart about it, but he’s kind of shy and you’re not really his friend.) Anybody who acts like gay people do has got something not quite right in the head - it doesn’t need clear explanation, it doesn’t have to make sense - the mentally off-kilter don’t always do things that make sense, after all. These are people who’ve got a chemical imbalance, or fell in with the wrogn crowd, or somehow got into this like an alcoholic gets into his problems without even realising it. You’re pretty sure you’d never get into it, but you were raised right.
But now that they’re becoming less shunned, now that we have this idea of “rights equality” for all kinds of things you never considered as alternatives to your familiar, Christmas-and-Easter Christian lifestyle (seriously, when did Islam spring up?)… now they want their way-out-of-mainstream practices to be treated like marriage? I mean, honestly, this is the kind of thing that only someone in the bad parts of town… or some other town… does. And marriage, as established, is a step on the natural progression of our modern lifestyle. It’s important. It was the biggest, most emotinally-infused thing you ever did… your marriage and your family are (or you hope someday they’ll be) the central point of your life. This is the way modern life works, this is the way things have been and should be, and this is part of what tells you how to act within society. And these wierdos that didn’t grow up right want to have their behaviours treated like it’s a “marriage”?
There’s a sudden disconnect between society and you. If society allows this, if the government approves it, how do you tell your children it’s wrong? How do you explain that while the lifestyle you’re trying to raise them on is the right way, the broader society has suddenly approved this kind of un-understandable aberration as if it’s normal? And for crying out loud, how is this nornal? for one thing, look at how they act. For another, if everybody did it, the human race would die out in one gneration. And since it’s an obvious moral and practical error, you want to protect your children from it. But every positive picture of it in the media, every approval of it by the broader society, just makes it that much harder to do that… and to keep your child from falling into it because it’s “okay”, and because they’re curious or youthfully impressionable. It’s like drugs.
. . .
Yes, I know there are things in that explanation that aren’t borne out by the facts. But people don’t always have the facts - lots of people don’t know any gay people. (Or don’t know they do, in any event.) They haven’t seen that gay people - even the shrill, limp-wristy lisping queens - can ben very respectable, sensible people. They have the idea that they’re sexually messed up, and we’ve seen the kinds of things that people like that can do… to children, even.
And before people jump all over me, I’d like to make it very clear that I don’t agree with the conclusion my hypothetical citizen reached above, but I can see how he can come to it. And I can see how even if he had a gay friend or co-worker, it’d be hard to get out of the back of his mind.
There are plenty of reasons why people aren’t keen on gay marriages, and not always is it because of an active or passive hate, excpet perhaps in the most general sense of the word.
Really? I’ve been pretty active in these threads, and I’ve never seen anyone advocate this. I’ve seen folks (including myself) advocate the government’s abandonment of the word, leaving it to be a purely cultural construct instead of a legal construct; but I’ve never seen anyone advocate the dissolution of marriage as a social institution. Could you link to a post or three that makes such a request?
Daniel
Mr. Moto:
Ah, but gay couples are not “people who are not in a romantic relationship”. Their need to set up a household is secondary to their romantic relationship, and therefore they have more in common with straight couples than with any gender-neutral “domestic partnership”.
What this issue boils down to is the refusal of people from religious circles to accept that these romantic relationships exist.
Simplicity. WHereas there’s a pretty cookie-cutter set of rights and obligations you can confer on a couple, the polygamous relationships out there are all over the place in terms of the rights and obligations that the lovers involved want to confer to each other. The government’s job is to serve its citizens efficiently and equably. SSM (or civil unions for everyone) accomplishes that by making all couples go through exactly the same amount of hassle to achieve those rights. There’s no easy way to confer the same rights to all polyamorous groups.
Which isn’t to say that polyamorists don’t deserve those rights; we should streamline the process by which they may achieve customized rights and obligations that fit their circumstances. But doing so is a task far more complicated than the simple task of standardizing how we treat couples.
Daniel
How about in this sense – people aren’t keen on gay marriages not necessarily because of their own hate, but because their view of homosexuality is through the prism of “otherness” and marginalization that has been imposed thanks to the active, overt hatred of many in the hetero majority for centuries. How’s that?
Bravo!
Most people aren’t exactly independent, rational thinkers. Most people would never examine a phenomenon as broad as human sexuality through their own eyes, and come to their own conclusions based on what they’ve experienced. And this would probably be asking too much, except for the relative few who devote their lives to the subject.
Most people get their ideas from their parents, their teachers, their religious authorities, their friends, the media - and there’s no necessity to actually know or acknowledge any real live gay people. And if the dominant culture is one of ignorance, fear and hate, the person just absorbs those ideas, sort of by osmosis. But the hatred is still there; it may not be a consciously thought-out concept in most people, but it’s still there.
And the saddest thing is that gay people, themselves, grow up with the same influences, resulting in a self-hatred that has to be consciously fought in order to be overcome. We’ve all spent years of our lives fighting those inner demons, and we know we have reason and light and love on our side. And no one will ever convince me that we have to compromise with superstition and hate, just for the sake of expedience.
What are the arguments that do include polygamy? The idea of two people who are in love and want to commit to and publically acknowledge that committed, monogamous, relationship in the eyes of society and the state, and recognize that relationship morally, legally, and socially – how does that have anything to do with polygamy? Why aren’t people standing around chapels when every man and woman get married, wailing and gnashing their teeth, moaning, “We just let that couple get married, now we’re going to have to allow polygamous marriage!”
Why do people insist on saying that a man wanting to enter into the exact same relationship with another man as every heterosexual married couple currently in existence, or a woman with another woman, is the same thing as polygamy? Or any other unrelated issue that people want to throw at it? Why do people keep saying that it’s the same thing as a civil union, when it’s not? Why do people refuse to acknowledge that a “gay marriage” is 99.9999% the same as a heterosexual marriage in every meaningful way, except for the figures on the wedding cake?
And finally, kudos to wolfstu, who I think explained the majority of people’s feelings on the issue perfectly. People are so obsessed on the differences that they act as if they’re completely blind to what’s exactly the same. People aren’t asking for permission to be gay or even to have gay sex. They’re asking why they’re not allowed to do exactly the same thing as everyone else.
And it gets so twisted around that opponents refer to it as “defending” marriage. And they’re “defending” it from the very people to whom the institution is so important that they’re willing to sacrifice their privacy, their time, their energy, and their dignity (because it’s humiliating having to publicize your sexuality when it should be your own damn business) just to be able to get it.
That adults who mutually want to confer legal rights and obligations in respect to one another should have equal access to the mechanisms by which this is done?
Daniel
And I will respectfully point out that this is nothing more than self-serving and an unwillingness to have your beliefs challenged. I hate to break it to you, but unless you are an ex-felon or are below voting age, you do have a dog in this fight. Thousands of people in your country, and thousands of people in your community, are fighting to have their relationships legally recognized, and that decision has been left in the hands of other people – in other words, people exactly like you.
Sooner or later, if it hasn’t happened already, you will be presented with a ballot for you to vote on whether to recognize same-sex marriages. And you have only two options. One is to vote in order to have them recognized just the same as every heterosexual couple in the country can. The other is to vote against it, or to abstain. By abstaining from the vote, by saying “this issue doesn’t affect me,” or “I don’t have a stake in this,” you are saying that the situation as it exists now is acceptable and that these homosexual couples are not deserving of calling their relationship “marriage.”
You have already stated your opinion on the issue, as much as you claim that you haven’t. You are opposed to same-sex marriage, because your interpretation of your religion condemns homosexuality. You have every right to have that opinion, just as you have every right to have your own religious beliefs. But you, along with everyone else, are in a situation where your personal beliefs are having a real, definite impact on the lives of people in your community and in your country. And you must decide how much of your beliefs you’re willing to impose on other people, and how much the actions of other people will affect your own beliefs. And by saying that you have your own opinions but refusing to put them forth because it “doesn’t affect you,” accomplishes less than nothing. It only adds to the frustration of people who are expected to fight against an injustice that refuses to show itself.
Okay. Where’s the ballot initiative for this? Where is this system already in place? Where has this generalized, open system of “marriage” been in operation for hundreds of years? Where have people grown up for decades seeing an image of marriage with all its associated societal and legal connotations, that fits in with polygamy? Where is it that a heterosexual couple who wishes to get married has to wait until society is “ready to accept” an open, purely secular, purely legal definition of marriage that makes no restrictions on the number of participants? I can’t think of a place. But I know of many, many places that insist that a monogamous homosexual couple is being unreasonable not to wait for the same thing.
In case it’s not clear, my point is exactly this: y’all want civil unions? Y’all want polygamy? Fine, go right ahead and fight for it. Just don’t say that it’s the same thing as two monogamous adults of the same sex who are in love and wish to get married, now.
See my post above, where I explain why I see the two situations as different. I just didn’t want to let pass the implication that there were no similarities, either.
Near as I can tell, the differences are logistical, not moral. Polyamorous folks have exactly the same claim on the legal obligations and rights as SSC and ASC have; it’s just that providing these rights to polyamorous folks is a heckuva lot more complicated.
Danile