Gay Marriage vs.

American Marriage

For millennia, we have relied on a commonsense, intuitive understanding about marriage. Everyone simply knew what marriage was and what it was for---to begin a family, and a family entails the idea of procreation. Marriage, then, is NOT a term that applies to just ANY relationship between human beings, but only particular kinds of relationships---those that at least in principle can help form families, the foundation of society. That is why governments have gone out of their way to promote marriage. Today, however, homosexuals want their relationships recognized by the State as equal to married couples even though their relationship does not serve the same purpose that the heterosexual marriage relationships serve. Homosexual activists argue that marriage can be defined in any manner the State chooses. They say marriage is about the public union of two people who wish to affirm their love and commitment to one another in a public, official manner. Why the limitation of this definition? Where does the idea of two come from? Why not three or four? And where do we get the idea that love is the foundation of marriage? Who decided that? Although an added plus, to be sure, but nowhere in the history of the world has love been the basis of marriage. What happened to procreation as the basis of and reason for marriage? If marriage can be defined by the State, and the basis of marriage is love and commitment, then there is no principled reason to prohibit group or incestual marriages, is there? Francis J. Beckwith, Professor of Philosophy & Church-State Studies at Baylor University, stated correctly: Just because you can eat an ashtray doesn't make it food. Food is not determined by what you put in your mouth, but by the nature of the substance itself, and the types of things the body is designed to consume and use. Just because two homosexuals pledge the vows of marriage does not make it a marriage. Marriage is a particular something, not an arbitrary anything. Homosexuality is not congruent with the nature and purpose of marriage, and therefore we should not call same-sex relationships "marriage." Civilization has always characterized families as a union of men and women. Why? Because men and women are the natural source of the children that allow civilized culture to persist. This alone answers the question, "What is marriage?" Marriage begins a family. Families are the building blocks of culture. Families--and therefore marriages--are logically prior to culture. Marriage is not an institution constructed by culture; culture is constructed by the institution of marriage. Culture merely recognizes its foundation and seeks to protect it. The gay community asserts they are entitled to equal protection. However, homosexuals do have the same right every other U.S. citizen has: they have the right to marry someone of the opposite sex but choose not to avail themselves of this right. Therefore, isnt the real issue not one of equal protection, but one of additional rights?

The gay communty asserts the issue of marriage is one of civil rights. As Kay Hymowitz wrote in the "City Journal" back in 2004, in an article entitled, Gay Marriage vs. American Marriage: "While gays often invoke the black/homosexual analogy to assert in a general way that anti-homosexual

sentiments are as vicious and irrational as racism, gay-marriage advocates use the comparison much more specifically. Their most commonly repeated argument goes like this: denying homosexuals the right to marry whom they wish is little different from denying blacks the right to marry whites, an injustice written into many state law books well into the twentieth century. It was not until 1967 that the Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, finally ruled that state bans on such intermarriage were a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's equal-protection clause. "Marriage is one of the basic civil rights of man," Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in his decision, in words that have become a familiar refrain in the current debate. The court rested its decision on one important pillar in the sophisticated architecture of republican marriage: that marriage is a civil contract. If the Fourteenth Amendment protects the right of black citizens to enter into a mortgage agreement or take out a car loan, it certainly protects their right to marry whomever they choose. It is logically inescapable, gay-marriage advocates conclude, that the same goes for homosexuals. And it would be logicalif a pillar were the same thing as the whole building. That the state has an interest in upholding the civil rights of individuals who want to marry doesn't mean that that's the only interest it has in the institution. The state also has a strongeven a life-and-deathinterest in marriage as the environment in which the next generation of its citizens is raised." The same-sex marriage issue is not about liberty, but the demand of homosexuals that society approves of their lifestyle. To make a marriage, what you need is a husband and a wife. Redefining marriage so that it suits gays and lesbians would require fundamentally changing our legal, public, and social conception of what marriage is in ways that threaten its core public purposes. Given the political experiment that they were designing, our Founders were very interested in the subject of marriage. They understood the basic sociological truth that familial relations both echo and shape the political order. "To the institution of marriage the true origin of society must be traced," James Wilson, a member of the Continental Congress and later a Supreme Court justice, wrote in 1790. Before the Revolutionary War, legal philosophers and statesmen like Wilson filled magazines and speeches with discussions of what kind of marriage would best live up to the principles of the new country. It's not surprising that they zeroed in on one quality in particular: self-government. In fact, the fraying of the marriagechild rearing bond over the past decades has increased poverty and inequality. Too often, single-parent families, whether divorced or never married, are poorand very much poorer than their two-earner counterparts. Instead of being the self-reliant units the Founders envisioned, too many of them are dependent on a powerful nanny state, either for welfare payments or for determining custody and tracking down child support. And instead of being the self-governing institutions of republican theory, nurturing sturdy, self-governing citizens, too many single-parent families, as many studies have shown, bring up kids who as adults do markedly less well on average in school, career, and marriage than those who grew up in intact two-parent families. As for children of never-married mothers: many of them make up the permanent underclass, and their high rates of crime, school failure, and welfare dependency are everything that the Founders expected the republican family to prevent. If we forget that marriage is both a voluntary union between two people AS WELL AS an arrangement for rearing the next generation of self-reliant citizens, our capacity for self-government

weakens. Different kinds of marriage will mold different kinds of individuals. Our Founders envisioned a very specific sort of institution, one that would nourish a republic of equal, self-governing citizens. Gay marriage threatens to sabotage that vision. Imagine a strictly gay society, secluded and left to their own devices. Theyd have every chance to prosper in every aspect of life except one: GROWING THEIR POPULATION. The fact is they could NOT grow their numbers beyond their initial figure regardless of how big the initial society was. Over time, theyd whittle down to zero population. To prove a point, and using the definition of the word parasitism---a type of non-mutual relationship between organisms of different species where one organism (the parasite) benefits at the expense of the other (the host)---the irrefutable fact is that the gay community (parasites) relies on their hosts (heterosexuals) for survival (continuity). Therefore, to me, this same-sex marriage vs. civil union issue is not about, as Obama stated, whether were welcoming to people who are not like us. Accepting someone for who they are is one thing. Changing the rules and foundation of society and the tenets of religion to accommodate them is another. ___________________ by Lori Wallach Boxer May 13, 2012

I Now Pronounce You Man and Husband: An Argument Against Same-Sex Marriage http://www.inplainsite.org/html/same-sex_marriage.html Gay Marriage vs. American Marriage http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_3_gay_marriage.html