As hard as it is to express the truths about abortion, euthanasia, and embryonic stem cell research to Democrats, it can be even harder to talk about homosexuality. Many people wrongly equate opposition to same-sex marriage with opposition to racial equality during the civil-rights movement, applying the emotional power of race issues to homosexuality. The conversation can become even more personal and heated if they have family or friends who are gay.
To reach supporters of same-sex marriage, you have to understand how they approach the issue, what their valid points and concerns are, and where they may misunderstand the opposition. Finding areas of agreement, and building on those, will help you avoid the standard pitfalls that accompany these discussions.
The most important step in that process, as always, is to pray for the person with whom you are speaking. Try to see him or her as an instrument of God’s mercy to you, rather than “the enemy.” Pray for yourself, that you may speak the truth in love. Above all, remember that you can’t convert anybody; the Holy Spirit does that. You can only remove objections, and even then only through God’s grace, which flows through prayer.
Next, insulate yourself with charity. Friends of mine may be willing to hear me out, but strangers won’t necessarily give me that benefit of the doubt; rather, they often begin with the tacit assumption that anyone opposed to gay marriage is a “bigot” or a “homophobe.” It’s vital to defuse that impression from the outset. After all, the Catholic Church completely rejects bigotry, saying, “It is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and are the object of violent malice in speech or in action. Such treatment deserves condemnation from the Church’s pastors wherever it occurs.” Paragraphs 2357-58 of the Catechism call us to authentic love for our brothers and sisters with homosexual tendencies. Many gay people have suffered real and painful bigotry; it’s important to hear their stories and understand their suffering before attempting to preach to them.
Speaking the truth in love can also help move the conversation away from the standard Left-Right dichotomy that prevails in the United States. To most supporters, opposing gay marriage is a hallmark of the homophobia and bigotry that they, in their caricatured view of the Right, believe all conservatives hold. They’ll need help seeing that one can oppose gay marriage and not hate gay people. Additionally, think how your own words may sound to other ears: Casually dropping phrases like “gay agenda,” a common term among conservatives, can cause offense, and opening your conversation by saying homosexuals are sinning will be taken as judgmentally condemning all gay people to hell.
Finally, it’s good to ask questions and listen respectfully to the answers. It is not only the right thing to do, but it can shed additional light on your friends’ thought processes. Sometimes, by asking the right questions (“What is a marriage? Why do governments give any special status to married people at all?”), you can make them more aware of their own biases and logical missteps. They may come to see they agree with you more than they’d realized.
1. Focus on the Words ‘Right’ and ‘Marriage’
So much of the argument for gay marriage is based on the idea of equal rights for all. An easy response is to state that you fully support equal rights for everyone — to free speech, to association, to any legitimate human right.
Of course, you then clarify that the freedom to marry anyone one wants is not a right. A few quick examples should show why:
- Marrying an already-married person is illegal. If marriage were a right, then this restriction would be unjust and should be illegal.
- All states restrict certain persons from marrying (to some degree or another): aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, children and parents, even in-laws (who aren’t related by blood). These restrictions would constitute another breach of a “right” to marry whomever one chose.
- Marriage has an age of consent; there’s no “age of consent” for our rights to speech and religion.
It’s also worth asking why rights exist at all, and where they come from. Are they granted by governments? If that were the case, the government could also take them away. Are they simply innate, then? But if so, how do we know that? What does that mean?
Of course, we as Catholics know that rights come with duties; that freedom means the right to do what we ought to do; and that these things stem from our being made in the image and likeness of God. Prompting these questions gives you the opportunity to share a more coherent view of rights and their origins.
Eventually, the question comes down to what marriage is: the lifelong union of one man to one woman. The two sexes are complementary, not undifferentiated. “Nature and reason tell us that a man is not a woman,” says scholar Harry Jaffa. The Minnesota Supreme Court concurs, writing, “There is a clear distinction between a marital restriction based merely upon race,” a limitation it finds illegitimate, “and one based upon the fundamental difference in sex.” A man and a woman are necessary for the creation of children, and for those children to be raised by people with complementary gifts.
What about auxiliary rights that have been attenuated to marriage through the years — hospital visitation, inheritance, and so on? These can be fulfilled by other readily available means, including contracts, wills, and power-of-attorney documents. Marriage is not necessary to acquire them.
In short, by shifting the conversation from “equal rights for all” to the nature of rights and marriage, you’ve removed the conversation from the realm of bigotry and homophobia to a place where progress can be made.
2. Oppose the Status Quo
At this point, gay-rights supporters will often say that it is heterosexual couples who have damaged marriage. They are right, and we need to agree.
It was heterosexual couples who embraced contraception, leaving us with a birth rate below the rate of replacement (2.1 children per woman) since 1972. The Witherspoon Institute notes that “same-sex marriage has taken hold in societies or regions with low rates of marriage and/or fertility,” and it is easy to see why: Once marriage and children were separated, gay marriage — childless by nature — would be the next natural step.
Gay activist Andrew Sullivan sees this connection clearly; he writes, “The heterosexuality of marriage is intrinsic only if it is understood to be intrinsically procreative; but that definition has long been abandoned in Western society” (as quoted by Christopher West in The Good News About Sex & Marriage). West later comments, “There’s little moral difference between a genital act that a married couple renders infertile… and homosexual behavior” (emphasis his).
Heterosexual couples are also responsible for no-fault divorce, starting with the 1969 California law signed by Ronald Reagan. At present, between 41 percent and 50 percent of first marriages end in divorce, and the average first marriage lasts only eight years. Is it any wonder that legalization of gay marriage would be next, since our society has already established that marriage is “a mere convention, so malleable that individuals, couples, or groups can choose to make of it whatever suits their desires, interests, or subjective goals of the moment”? Gay-rights activists have learned that lesson because we’ve taught it to them.
Our society has also embraced artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization. Just as contraception promised society sex without children, these new technologies now offer children without sex. It is through these reproductive technologies (and surrogate motherhood) that gay couples can build families of their own — again leading to the push for legally recognized gay marriage.
None of the damage done to marriage and families — whether by contraception, divorce, porn, affairs, the hook-up culture, or artificial fertilization — was inflicted by homosexuals. Only by acknowledging this fact — and stating your opposition to these things — can you show consistent support for the institution of marriage.
In short, you share your view of marriage to (a) demonstrate humility by agreeing that heterosexuals have damaged marriage, (b) prove that your opposition doesn’t stem from anti-gay sentiment, (c) show that you’re being rational and internally consistent to a complete vision of family life, and (d) share the fact that another vision of family life exists than what the culture normally displays, perhaps creating cognitive dissonance and an opening to consider a positive vision of the human family.
3. Talk about Children’s Rights
There are some people who often don’t come up in discussions about gay marriage, but should: children.
Ask a random assortment of people what the purpose of marriage is; you may be surprised to find that few of them will even mention children. And yet study after study has shown that children simply do better in families with a mother and a father than they do with same-sex partners. According to a 2008 article in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy,
It isn’t that gay people are necessarily bad parents, but that children thrive most fully when raised by a mother and a father. The Witherspoon Institute’s Report on Marriage explains why: “There are crucial sex differences in parenting. Mothers are more sensitive to the cries, words, and gestures of infants, toddlers, and adolescents, and, partly as a consequence, they are better at providing physical and emotional nurture to their children.” Complementing that, “Fathers are more likely than mothers to encourage their children to tackle difficult tasks, endure hardship without yielding, and seek out novel experiences.” Similar arguments appear in a policy brief by the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy and a journal article from the University of St. Thomas Law Journal.
Governments’ granting married couples special protections in turn protects children’s rights, a fact that France recognized when it issued a report explaining why it rejected same-sex unions. Hence, as the Harvard Journal puts it: “Society’s interests in those endangered social goods are compelling, implicating as they do the quality of society’s practices of self-perpetuation.” Or, in the words of the Arizona Court of Appeals, limiting marriage to heterosexuals “rationally furthers a legitimate state interest,” that of protecting the development of the future adults of the state.
4. Show that the Slippery Slope Is Real . . . and Happening Now
More than 3,000 people in Japan signed a petition on behalf of people’s rights to marry computer avatars, as one man did in November 2009. Another man in Korea recently married his anime body pillow. Back in 1999, in less enlightened times, a Missouri man wanted to marry his horse.
Once we’ve decided to reject the historical definition of marriage — once we’ve shown that it can, in fact, be redefined — what legitimate limits can we put on it? What rational grounds do we have for denying these men from Japan, Korea, and Missouri?
Take the example of a married couple in the Netherlands who, after the country passed legislation roughly equivalent to civil unions, chose to have the wife enter a union with her bisexual lover, and now the three live together as a triad. Why, as the Huffington Post asks, should relationships like these not be recognized as marriages? Once we start the ball rolling, it’s hard to say where it must stop.
In fact, a court in Canada has now ruled that a child can have three parents, and “polygamous Muslim families are living in Toronto and claiming multiple Canadian welfare benefits in many cases. The logical and legal grounds to resist polygamy have been removed, making it difficult to prosecute.” Canada’s Justice Department ruled in a 2006 report that there was no reason to deny polygamy after it had legalized gay marriage, and Great Britain and Australia recognize both gay marriage/civil unions and some elements of polygamy.
But beyond the theoretical question of what may happen in the future, it’s important to also point out what has already happened: the explosive growth of the polyamory movement. A few years ago, only a few experts were talking about polyamory; now, there are daily updates on poly news-gathering sites featuring neutral-to-positive coverage from sources as diverse as the New York Times, Newsweek, and Fox News.
In fact, many homosexuals live in relationships that are essentially polyamorous themselves. The Web site Meet Gay Couples notes, “[Surveys] all report that varying degrees of non-monogamy are fairly common among male couples.” The gay newspaper Washington Blade reports that “three-quarters of Canadian gay men in relationships lasting longer than one year are not monogamous.” The study’s lead author, a gay professor at the University of Windsor, holds the opinion that “younger [gay] men tend to start with the vision of monogamy . . . because they are coming with a heterosexual script. . . . The gay community has their own order and own ways that seem to work better.”
In fact, some advocates of gay marriage are advocates for the end of marriage itself. For example, gay scholar Nan Hunter argues that “legalizing lesbian and gay marriage would have enormous potential to destabilize the gendered definition of marriage for everyone.” Anthropologist Stanley Kurtz describes Norwegian sociologist and gay marriage advocate Kari Moxnes’s views as seeing “both marriage and at-home motherhood as inherently oppressive to women.” In Moxnes’s article “Empty Marriage,” she describes “Norwegian gay marriage [as] a sign of marriage’s growing emptiness, not its strength,” as “a (welcome) death knell for marriage itself.”
It’s worth noting that, among those people in gay relationships who have the opportunity, very few actually choose to get married at all: The Family Research Council quotes a statistic from USA Today showing that, in Vermont’s first three-and-a-half years of civil unions, only 936 gays or lesbian couples chose to take advantage of the opportunity — about 21 percent of the estimated adult homosexual population. In Sweden, where traditional marriages are increasingly rare, gay union numbers are even lower, as reported by a 2004 Baltimore Sun article: “About 1,500 same-sex couples have registered their unions” out of an estimated 140,000 gays and lesbians, or about 2 percent.
The significance? The quest for gay marriage isn’t so much about gay marriage as it is a single step toward bringing about a sea change in the culture of the United States.
5. Show that Gay Marriage is Harmful
At some point in this process, the gay marriage supporter is likely to ask, “Why shouldn’t they be allowed to get married? After all, who does it really hurt?”
In fact, a surprising number of people. We’ve already seen how gay marriage can be harmful to children. But these legal unions also hurt those who take part in it. First of all, it opens them up to an increased risk of domestic violence: According to the Journal of Interpersonal Violence, a stunning 31 percent of lesbians in relationships had experienced physical violence from a partner within the past year. According to John Klofas of the Rochester Institute of Technology, “Trends suggest that as many as half of lesbian relationships experience some form of abuse.” Meanwhile, gay males, according to the journal Violence and Victims, “are more likely to be killed by their partners than [by] a stranger. The increased potential for violence has been confirmed in numerous studies, as well as by gay advocacy groups such as the Gay Men’s Domestic Violence Project. Part of this higher chance may be due to gay relationships’ absence of the cultural taboo that generally prevents men and women from violence against each other. Encouraging people to enter relationships so much more dangerous for them than marriage is not responsible behavior on the part of any government.
Likewise, legalizing gay marriage hurts homosexuals in general. When the government says that gay marriage is fine, it teaches (often through public elementary education) that homosexual behavior is fine. But unfortunately, these behaviors are linked to a number of serious health problems, including drug abuse, HIV infection (gay men are infected 50 times more often than straight men), anal cancer (among men), breast cancer and gynocological cancers (among women), and suicide.
Same-sex marriage has already hurt a number of private citizens and social institutions in the United States and Canada as well:
- Catholic Charities in D.C. decided to discontinue spousal benefits for their employees rather than be forced to contradict the teachings of the Faith by offering benefits to same-sex partners, as mandated by the District
- Catholic Charities in Massachusetts had to give up its adoption services, rather than be forced to adopt to same-sex couples;
- a Knights of Columbus chapter in British Columbia was fined for refusing to host a lesbian wedding reception;
- a Canadian teacher was disciplined by the teachers’ governing body for a letter to the editor about homosexuality, while another published letter-writer was convicted of and fined for hate crimes, a conviction supported by the Canadian Supreme Court;
- public schoolchildren in states with same-sex marriage are taught as early as kindergarten that both options, gay and straight, are equally valid lifestyle choices;
- several Canadian marriage commissioners and at least one Massachusetts justice of the peace who asked to recuse themselves from performing gay unions were told that they must either marry the couple or resign;
- a couple who manages a bed and breakfast were charged and convicted of discrimination for not allowing homosexual couples, and they had to shut down their business;
- several Canadian mayors were fined thousands of dollars for refusing to declare “Gay Pride Days” in their cities; and
- an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois lost his job teaching Catholic Studies for explaining why the Church teaches against homosexuality, an action being contested as of this writing.
None of these damages was anticipated by the courts or legislatures that made same-sex marriages legal, but they’re here now. Gay marriage does have an impact on society at large.
Finally, legally recognizing these unions hurts the nation as a whole. Noted Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin declared in The American Sex Revolution that he found virtually no culture that both failed to restrict marriage to a man and a woman and survived very long. Cambridge anthropologist Joseph D. Unwin stated nearly the same thing in Hopousia, The Sexual and Economic Foundations of a New Society: “In human records, there is no instance of a society retaining its energy after a complete new generation has inherited a tradition which does not insist on pre-nuptial and post-nuptial continence.”
In short, gay marriage harms everyone, regardless of whether they themselves are gay or married.
Don’t Get Derailed
There are a few other things gay marriage promoters may say to try to derail your arguments:
If they say that marriage isn’t about children, since we don’t forbid sterile people from getting married, you can reply that, in the case of a sterile union, the sterility is not sought and is not an integral part of the act; as West puts it, “Their sexual union is still the kind of union that God has intended for the procreation of children.” On the other hand, with contraception, the sterility is sought; for homosexual unions, the sterility is an integral part of the act.
If they say that animals engage in homosexual behavior, you can reply that animals engage in many behaviors we wouldn’t want to copy; we have the capacity to operate on more than animal instinct.
If they say that same-sex attraction is genetic, you can reply that even if it were eventually proven to be true (which, according to the American Psychological Association, it likely isn’t), so are various other conditions that predispose one to harm, including depression and alcoholism.
If they say that you’re accusing all gays and lesbians of sin, you can reply that, according to the Church, “the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin.” Only actions are sinful. You can also point out that you believe fornication and adultery are sinful, showing that it isn’t about the orientation, but the action.
And if they say that you’re accusing gays and lesbians of being disordered, you can reply that, as expressed by Jeffrey Mirus, president of Trinity Communications, being “ordered” means “whether or not it is operating according to its proper end. If it is not, we call it ‘disordered.’” He continues:
The gay political movement largely follows the methods described in Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen’s gay strategy manual After the Ball. This includes making themselves seem victimized in order to gain sympathy; carrying out a “conversion of the average American’s emotions, mind, and will, through a planned psychological attack, in the form of propaganda fed to the nation via the media”; and marginalizing people and groups who oppose homosexual behavior. Those opposed to gay marriage must have their own strategy, one based upon charity and facts. Many other resources are available from various places on the Internet.
In the final analysis, many of these well-meaning people are unaware that their support for gay marriage would create social changes beyond what they have imagined or would favor. Rather than granting legitimacy to homosexual relationships by calling them marriages, we would be opening ourselves to a society where marriage itself has little value and no fixed meaning. The gay-marriage movement claims to be about respect and rights for homosexual persons, but the inevitable result is that homosexuality must not only be tolerated but actively endorsed by all.
We are told that if we truly loved gay people, we would support the gay marriage movement. But true love always draws the beloved away from harmful behaviors, “always chooses the good of the person loved,” as West puts it. Only a false compassion permits another person to drink the poison he wishes.
the trouble with such “movements” is the lawlessness and disregard for right ordering of one’s life or society (i.e. rebellion),…all the emotional manipulations of opinion are only to mask this true intent,…like the dangerous biological free-radicals that can lead to cancer physically, the smallest agreement with what turns out to be these rabid self-serving agendas can only lead to a devastating social cancer,…
it is best not to tamper with God’s order,…no matter how much the misfit squalls for a reprieve,…
give ‘em an inch, and they’ll take a mile,…their true motives and methods have been revealed,…
Very fair, helpful, concise, and charitable. Thank you for speaking the truth in love.
“In the final analysis, many of these well-meaning people are unaware that their support for gay marriage would create social changes beyond what they have imagined or would favor.”
OK we’ve had a state with marraige equality for about six years now.
Name a single harm that has arisen from the existence of same sex marrgage equality in MA since 2004? Where is the slippery slope?
The Korean and Japan examples are accedotal nonsense.
Where are the harms to the general population? Name one and be specific…… A court would require you to provide the names of the same sex couple and how their marraige as adversely affected you or some other named individual with a harm covere by civil law. (Hint: in the CA Admt case the plaintiffs could not name a single harm when pressed by the judge.)
any phenomenon, when very limited in scope or looked at in an isolated case, as in “tell what harm this one couple has done,” will be something that society at large can almost ignore, and does,…(not that that changes the status of the behavior or its condition before God),…
we have recently had many many reports of collateral damage to children affected by gay marriage phenomena (as in anonymous sperm donation, gay parenting/lack of father or mother role model, etc.),…
as the numbers and collective attitudes grow, the “critical mass” of the phenomenon is reached, where it becomes something that can no longer be “ignored”/tolerated by society, and the fall-out evil effects are accumulating before everyone’s eyes,…while, at the same time, it begins to claim to have a legitimate platform for its existence, “just because it can,”…no matter that the distorted reasonings resemble the whines and cries of any adolescent trying to rationalize getting permission to do ill-advised things,…
Luke 17:24-30
24 “For like the lightning, that flashes and lights up the sky from one end to the other, so will the Son of Man be in His [own] day.
25 But first He must suffer many things and be disapproved and repudiated and rejected by this age and generation.
26 And [just] as it was in the days of Noah, so will it be in the time of the Son of Man.
27 [People] ate, they drank, they married, they were given in marriage, right up to the day when Noah went into the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all.
28 So also [it was the same] as it was in the days of Lot. [People] ate, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they built;
29 But on the [very] day that Lot went out of Sodom, it rained fire and brimstone from heaven and destroyed [them] all.
30 That is the way it will be on the day that the Son of Man is revealed.”
it may be that the “critical mass” and momentum of the growing societal evils will reach such an uncontrolled point that societal self-correction will be almost impossible,…even doing/saying the best that we can may not be effective enough to stem the tide,…such is the powerful momentum of evil in the hands of its disciples en masse,…
woe, the day,…as they say,…
Eric, that was very well done.
Thank you, sir!
Thank you for this article! It is chock-full of helpful information and links that will be invaluable to further loving, knowledgable dialogue about the same-sex ‘marriage’ question.
I especially appreciate your advice to graciously acknowledge all the ways that our culture has already damaged marriage and family life. The Catholic vision of marriage, after all, is NOT identical to the current American vision of cohabitation, delayed marriage, 2 full-time professionals, 2.1 kids (or less), consumer household, and so on. We need to reclaim and proclaim the beautiful vision of marriage given to us by John Paul II and Benedict!
“Name a single harm that has arisen from the existence of same sex marrgage equality in MA since 2004? Where is the slippery slope?”
From the article:
Nonsense, all of it.
A civil registration confers nothing except perhaps some rights of property division, inheritance, and tax write-offs. There are so many forms of civil registration than one more or less means nothing.
To force the Church to pervert its sacraments is out of the question. It is not even on the table.
The rest is semantics and hysteria.
The real issue hinted at here and not being addressed is point #2–heterosexuals have damaged marriage and have reduced it to the low-rent “contract” that it is now.
Where is my Church and where are my Knights? Why aren’t we hearing from every pulpit about the damaging effects of divorce and contraception and how it is connected to this issue?
Why aren’t we fighting to reverse the tide? I get solicitations to help stop abortion, and to a lesser degree about the death penalty…and a couple of times to fund the “fight against gay marriage”. But never, not once, to reverse the trend in divorce.
Imagine if we made the same stink about divorce that we do about abortion (not to take one drop away from the effort made on that front)? Imagine if annulments weren’t viewed as a “Catholic divorce”? Imagine if we were screaming about the damage to kids and society that has caused?
How can we complain about people marrying whoever and whatever they wish (or not bothering at all) when we are so complacent about marriage in the first place?
If we want to make marriage relevant, we need to do more than acknowledge our failure to defend it–we actually need to start defending it on all fronts and not just the one that bothers us today.
The issue isn’t definitions or rights, the issue is legal contracts and fairness. Gay couples should be allowed to contract their relationships and receive the benefits of any other couple. To argue otherwise, for any reason, is simply misguided.
Why did you set this article up in the first paragraph as instructions on talking specifically to “Democrats” ? Perhaps I fail to appreciate the divide in the States between the political parties. But I see no reason among those you discussed that has anything to do with being Democrat or Republican or otherwise. This would have been a better article with the political reference left out.
God save the Queen.
This was well written and very clear. Thanks for the talking points.
Todd hit the issue most squarely. We’re in this mess because divorce and contraception have hollowed out the common understanding of marriage. We lost the fight when we caved on no-fault divorce. And if we think we’re getting flak for speaking out against gay “marriage,” what are we going to face when we have to go back to the root of this whole mess?
Marriage as a contract between two consenting parties is only a shade of what it used to mean. And yet, now it does in fact mean that. And since the inherent meaning of male and female has been erased through the sexual revolution, it seems to me utterly fruitless to try to put our finger in this one small hole in the dike, esp. when there’s an enormous gap directly above it.
Having said this, I think we must adopt the writer’s strategies particularly with our young people who are trying to understand why we oppose what we do. They do need to see how the opposition to divorce, contraception, gay “marriage” and IVF comes from the same essential charity.
The article I really want to read is how to reverse no-fault divorce. Any suggestions there?
Pavlat’s panicky obsession with proving how unbigoted he is exhausted me before I even got to his argument. So homosexuals have been the victims of … BIGOTRY! Good heavens! A bigot is “a person obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices” (Merriam-Webster) That’s just about everybody, starting with Pavlat. He seems to rather unsure about his belief that SSM is wrong. There’s only a couple of points to make: 1. homosexuality is a deeply disordered condition; 2. therefore, the idea of defending the “right” of homosexuals to marry each other makes about as much sense as declaring that somebody in an alcoholic stupor has a “right” to drive a car.
In terms of the legal/constitutional debate, the argument adduced by gay-marriage supporter isn’t so much about rights as it is access to being protected under the equal protection clause of the Constitution. Of course, I counter by arguing that I know of no law that prohibits gays and lesbians from marrying a single, non-related, non-married, agreeing major of the opposite sex, i.e. the same entitlement that everyone has. This may be flippant, but the equal protection clause has come up.
I can see no reason the pro-SSM crowd shouldn’t push forward as long as #2 is ignored by those who oppose SSM. I know LOTS of Christians (I inclube Mormons in this context) who have gotten divored and remarried (in the case of Catholics-divorced, annulled, remarried) And of course pretty much everyone is on contraception.
If we are to stop SSM, when need to stop it at its source–contracepted, broken, so-called Christian marriages.
Dear Mr. Pavlat, I only wanted to make a short note in thanks for your writing this article. In my opinion, true or false though it may be, what you’ve tried to do is arm your fellow brothers and sisters with “talking points” that should be developed and elaborated in each of our minds. As with any other truth worth it’s two small coins, the truths that are contained here deserve to be chewed up and digested into our thought processes.
Furthermore, I wholeheartedly agree with those who emphasize the glaring importance of the second point. However, that in no way justifies or indemnifies Christians from witnessing to the truth on all fronts. What I mean to say is that I hope that no one focusing on the truth of point 2 would abandon the topic of this post, the opposition to same-sex “marriage”.
I have one question that cropped up into my mind, and it’s mostly a question of logic. The stories from Korea and Japan, are they meant to indicate the downward fall on the “slippery slope” of legalized same-sex “marriage”? Because, if so, they wouldn’t work as arguments unless those countries had legalized same-sex “marriage”. Although, like another commenter said, if they’re meant only as anecdotes then I see no problem with them. I do think that one need not mentally travel to Korea or Japan to grasp the (sexual) disorder in our fallen humanity.
I’ve bookmarked this post, and I’ll be returning to it over another morning cup of joe sometime soon so that I can assimilate more of these salient points.
God bless.
Matthew Wade
The article does not mention the root problem which is that “marriage” ceases to have any definite meaning if an agreement between two males or two females to live together is called “marriage”. Marriage has and hopefully always will have a clear meaning. Homosexuals and lesbian can and presumably have and do marry. Thus, even if marriage was a right, it does not discriminate. However, a so-called “homosexual marriage” destroys the meaning of the term. Calling a donkey a tree does not change the donkey into a tree. It just makes it more difficult to talk about a tree. The SSM effort is a attempt to give legitimacy to perverted sexual acts. “[H]omosexual acts . . . [are] acts of grave depravity”. CCC 2357. It may succeed in achieving cultural legitimacy but it is an ultimately vain enterprise because the real goal is to convince those engaging in homosexual conduct that what they are doing is good. Unfortunately, any success by the SSM effort in changing the culture will have many known (as noted above) and unknown adverse consequences to man including most particularly impeding man’s ultimate goal to be united with Christ in Heaven.
I’ll do my best to reply to everyone.
Georgie-Ann, I agree.
Paul, you’re very kind. Thanks for the encouragement.
DCH, did you not notice the nine bullet points within strategy #5, all naming people who have been harmed?
Cord, thanks much.
Jane, good insight.
Alex, I was a little unclear about what you were getting at. Sorry.
Todd, great points. (Are you Todd Fl., or another Todd?)
Eran, to reject talking about “rights” and move over to “fairness” is sleight-of-hand. You’re tacitly assuming we have a right to fairness, which puts us back to having to define rights. There’s no escaping that requirement.
Domenic, sorry for the U.S.-centric bias; it was unintentional. These points are useful for talking to the liberal, secular left, regardless of nation or political affiliation. Thanks for the catch.
Anne, thank you very much.
Sibyl, very insightful. May all of us who are married live out our marriages in authenticity.
Bob, your self-contradictory remarks and unwarranted general nastiness do not condition the reader (i.e., me) to wish to reply to your ideas. In other words, you’re missing the idea of this entire series of articles: how to talk to people you oppose and be persuasive without offense.
John, you make a relevant point, but it is perceived as flippant by those on the other side, so I avoid that argument unless the conversation flows near enough that the comment will seem straightforward.
Kathryn, good point.
Matthew, thanks very much! And yes, the two Asian stories were there as anecdotes.
Mike M., have you studied philosophy? You make some really great arguments there.
=Whew!=
Thanks, everyone who chose to comment.
–Eric Pavlat
Wow! Great article. I have been looking for a logical and defensible agrument against gay marriage for some time. This is the most coherent defense of hetero sexual marriage, that I have seen yet.
“Meanwhile, gay males, according to the journal Violence and Victims, “are more likely to be killed by their partners than [by] a stranger.” I think you will find this applies in straight marriages too.
“Of course, you then clarify that the freedom to marry is not a right. ” The European Convention on Human Rights defines marriage as a right for a man and woman. That was written in 1950 when the climate was as it was. The ECHR might rule otherwise today.
“public schoolchildren in states with same-sex marriage are taught as early as kindergarten that both options, gay and straight, are equally valid lifestyle choices”. Well, if the national law recognises both that would be logical.
” HIV infection (gay men are infected 50 times more often than straight men)”. The existence of the ability to have legally-recognised gay marriage/union may well encourage the monogamy which would reduce that risk. That is the health argument for gay marriage.
“Governments’ granting married couples special protections in turn protects children’s rights”. This is specious – granting such rights to gay married couples could enhance the rights of children they choose to adopt – note children to whom they wish to devote love and protection when their natural parents have been unable to do so for whatever reason. Indeed opposition to gay couples will tend to make the risk of harm to their children’s rights more likely by legitimising discriminatory attitudes and behaviour which fact you fail to consider.
“This includes making themselves seem victimized in order to gain sympathy; carrying out a “conversion of the average American
what do you make of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Bible and related texts that condemn men lying with men as with women?–(as long as you’re addressing these issues from your personal viewpoint?)
example:
Romans 1:26,27 “For this reason God gave them up to vile passions. For even their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature. 27 Likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust for one another, men with men committing what is shameful, and receiving in themselves the penalty of their error which was due.”
most of us feel that it is incorrect to rewrite meanings that are clearly expressed in Scripture to represent the opposite of what has been said, and then attribute your own interpretation to God,…
When discussing homosexuality, I would think the main point is that homosexuality is a behavior, not an identity. Once this is recognized, there can be no bigotry toward homosexuals since they are merely human beings just like us. They are not a separate class of human beings, only human beings with a disordered behavior and if we are all honest with ourselves, I think we would admit that we all have our own disordered behaviors.
Response on the damage claims.
Actually, gay pride days/parades have everything to do with same sex marriage, inasmuch as they represent the full spectrum of people who consider themselves gay and are proud of that – including the eliminate-the-age-of-consent guys (NAMBLA) and the S &M crowd. These 2 groups and others would benefit from SSM laws to the same degree that monogamous gays would.
My question is: should men who men who believe there should be no minimum age of consent for sexual activity and men who publicly celebrate the fact that they like to do violence upon themselves and others also be allowed to marry and adopt? I am truly interested in how you make this distinction.
My question is: should men who men who believe there should be no minimum age of consent for sexual activity and men who publicly celebrate the fact that they like to do violence upon themselves and others also be allowed to marry and adopt? I am truly interested in how you make this distinction.
These are canards and hypotheticals and not actual cases.
1. There are large numbers of heterosexulas that engage in relations with under-age individuals as well as S&M. Are they denied the right to marry in any state? By this logic they should not be able to get married. In reality there are no such restrictions.
2. Gay Pride Days. Have you ever been to New Orleans during Mardi Gras? Its one giant hetrosexual pride march. It has no bearing on anything else.
3. Adoption is subject to screening and a long approval process.
The real argument being avoided:
“The real issue hinted at here and not being addressed is point #2–heterosexuals have damaged marriage and have reduced it to the low-rent “contract” that it is now. Where is my Church and where are my Knights? Why aren’t we hearing from every pulpit about the damaging effects of divorce and contraception and how it is connected to this issue? ”
……………..You are attending the wrong church. Mine is very vocal and dead set against both infidelity and divorce, and encourages all married adults to focus on those things that are proper; that strengthen their marriage.
===============================
“Justifying your prejudices in God’s name”:
“Meanwhile, gay males, according to the journal Violence and Victims, “are more likely to be killed by their partners than [by] a stranger.” I think you will find this applies in straight marriages too.”
………….. Violence within SS relationships is statistically far higher than among opposite sex relationships of any kind. Fidelity is not, so the notion that SSM would reduce the huge incidence of HIV infection through fidelity is specious.
“Being kicked to death, stabbed – so such victims made themselves seem victims? What a piece of pure bile and hatred”
………… But this is false. The nationwide incidence of violence against gays is nearly negligible. Even the Mathew Shepard story is a lie, since he was murdered by his drug dealers over an unpaid drug debt, not because some stranger acted out of hatred of gays.
“I would guess that the majority of gay marriage advocates would simply ask for the same respect and rights as accorded to marriage per se.”
…………… This is your belief, clearly, but not what many others see. I, myself, see exactly what the author sees – a concerted push for the normalization of homosexuality, with indoctrination of children as a cornerstone of the effort.
“The man who lusts after a woman in his heart commits adultery.”
………… Absolutely correct. However, this in no way makes either lusting after another nor homosexual behavior any better. Finding another who sins does not make YOUR sin any better.
“Jesus enjoins us to love one another.”
……….. You bet! But He does NOT encourage us to pretend anothers sinning is not sinning, nor use anothers sins to redefine sin for our own belief system. As the author said (best part of what he wrote): standing by silently while another harms him/her self is evil, not loving. At a minimum we should all encourage those who are harming themselves to not do so.
==============================
“Damages?”:
………… I agree – the list of ‘damages’ was far short of compelling. The decisions of catholic groups cannot be ascribed as a harm. I would discuss ‘damages in this way:
1. Societal damages take a long time to manifest. Even if NO damages are seen in the 5 years of SSM in Mass., I would deduce zero from this.
2. The near collapse of ‘marriage’ in Scandinavia since the onset of SSM 20 years ago I WOULD say is a damage – a HUGE damage.
3. While SS couples can be loving to a child, and while a child adopted into a SS household may be better off than if allowed to remain an orphan, it remains true that a child flourishes best in a calm household of opposite sex, loving parents. Removing or reducing this benefit through the reduction of either ‘marriage’ in it’s traditional sense, or through the proliferation of SS households, is CLEARLY damaging to children who otherwise may have found loving opposite sex families.
4. The convolution of our legal system such that Christians expressing their beliefs becomes illegal, and subject to legal repercussions, is a totally unacceptable damage not only to those individuals, but to our society.
There are already straight perverts out there doing whatever so give the gay perverts a chance, too? Sorry, that’s not at all convincing.
Lesbians, gays, bisexuals and trangenders – these groups are all now under the umbrella LGBT – they all celebrate LGBT month together and they march together in gay pride parades, with NAMBLA, and provide us with a preview of who will benefit from SSM laws. This is the reality of the situation, not a canard and certainly not hypothetical.
Jan?,…i’m really interested in your response to the scriptures referenced, following your comment,…
You noted that “You are attending the wrong church. Mine is very vocal and dead set against both infidelity and divorce, and encourages all married adults to focus on those things that are proper; that strengthen their marriage.”
It is great that your particular parish (I’ll assume you are Catholic, but if you are not, please excuse me for the assumption) is towing the Church’s line on marriage, divorce, and presumably contraception. Most do not. That is the…complaint…I’ve seen over and over again in various NFP newsletters, pro-life magazine, weblists, news articles. You name it. Solid parish support for the Truth in these areas is simply not there.
And Catholic church support for it is not enough: Protestants need to get on board as well. I don’t see that happening.
The problem with not allowing gays to marry is that this is a legal issue. There are two solutions to this. You can allow gays to form the legal contract of marriage, or you can prevent heterosexual couples from forming the legal contract of marriage. In either case, the church does not have to perform marriages that violate their beliefs. However, if marriage is legally allowed to all couples, then those who serve in political offices that perform legal marriages (not religious marriages) must perform those marriages as it is a legal issue and not a religious one.
Furthermore, when it comes to tax benefits and health insurance available to spouses, there is no contract you can sign to gain these benefits other than marriage, so not all benefits derived from marriage can be arranged by outside contracts.
My preferred solution is to have all people, heterosexual and homosexual alike, get civil unions for the legal contract, and marriages for the religious ceremony. This keeps marriage a religious issue, to be determined by each individual church, while civil unions are solely an issue of the state.
Also, I should note there are many religions, including sects of Christianity, that marry gay couples. Many are already married, even though their states don’t recognize the marriage. Luckily, they can be confident that God does recognize their marriage and love for each other.
a questionable assertion:
“Luckily, they can be confident that God does recognize their marriage and love for each other.”
Perhaps, but no more questionable than the assertion that God recognizes any other marriage and the couple’s love for each other.
May the LORD God bless you in the name of St. Judas Maccabaeus,
I guarantee you, that all of this gay marriage stuff is simply Zeus and Apollo flexing their new-found cultural and political power. Next comes the ending and possible criminalization of circumcision, kosher slaughter, etc. No, I am not Jewish, I am a Maccabean Catholic. All of this has happened before. After Alexander the Great (bisexual) conquered Judea it took decades to establish their one, true (homoxexual) intentions, After patient planning, and expert cultural propaganda techniques, the Greek gods of Mt. Olympus achieved their acutual objectives: to topple the religion of God the Father, the God of Israel. The slow, but steady decline in the belief in Judaism among the very wealthy elite Jewish ruling classes finally resulted in an uncircumcised, totally Pagan, and many times homosexual Jewish elite.
As expected these new, young male Jewish elites despised the superstitious, ‘reactionary’ faith of the Jewish masses, especially what they considered the ‘barbaric’ practice of circumcision. Due to their tremedous wealth and influence, along with their close alliance with the Greek occupiers, the Hellenized Jews took over the entire nation, even though they were very, very few in number. Sound familiar? By the 166 B.C. there was a fully operational Satanic orgy, practicing the most sickening rites and ritual you can imagine, right in the heart of the Temple of Jerusalem. While not ‘specifically’ labeled a Satanic orgy, that is exactly what it was. I quote the Bible itself as proof:
The king also sent edicts by messenger to Jerusalem and the towns of Judah, directing them to adopt customs foreign to the country…profaning Sabbaths and feasts, defiling the sanctuary and everything holy, building altars, shrines and temples for idols, sacrificing pigs and unclean beasts, leaving their sons uncircumcised, and prostituting themselves to all kinds of impurity and abomination, so that they should forget the Law and revoke all observance of it. Anyone not obeying the king’s command was to be put to death. (I Maccabees 1:44-50)
Shortly afterwards, the king sent Gerontes the Athenian to force the Jews…to profane the Temple in Jerusalem and dedicate it to Olympian Zeus…The advent of these evils was painfully hard for all the people to bear. The Temple was filled with revelling and debauchery by the gentiles, who took their pleasure with prostitutes and had intercourse with women in the sacred precincts…introducing other indecencies besides. (II Maccabees 6:1-4)
you have nothing to base that statement on,…or the other one,…
-”One must pay the government a fee in order to marry. But rights are free and automatic, not available for purchase.” No, you pay a fee for paperwork and processing.
-Show that the Slippery Slope Is Real . . . and Happening Now
Computer avatars have no legal standing here in the US, or Japan. Nor do animals or anime pillows
-’gays and lesbians are hurt amongst their own communities, they get aids, they get beaten and oppressed’ There’s a phrase for this; it’s called “blaming the victim.” To a certain extent, those of us who are GLBT are to blame, but only in the sense that so often we teach people how to treat us. This goes for everybody. But this is a two way street, since once we stand up and say no more, it is the duty of the hurting party to stop. We engage in risky behaviours because we have been shunned, we take drugs to deal with oppression, we accept beatings because we have come to expect them, we commit suicide because we can no longer deal with the oppression. The response to the abuse is our own fault, but it is a response born of desperation. What the article didn’t even mention is the high number of homelessness that GLBT people face due to family and job discrimination. If they really want to talk about how being gay hurts society, let’s start with this, and with how it’s the homophobia perpetuated by religion that affects society.
Marriage is and always has been a legal thing. It was around far before the church got involved, and for the longest time it was simply a transference of property: the daughter became the wife. It’s a contract meant for two consenting adults.
And really all you Republicans out there should be FOR gay marriage: the government, after all, has no grounds to get involved with our private lives.
Weddings, however, are a religious thing. No one is saying the Catholic Church or any other church is required to hold a wedding for gay people–if they want to discriminate against gays, they have every right to. Separation of Church and State goes both ways. The Church has no grounds from which to force the government to do anything, and the government has no grounds from which to force the Church to do anything, unless they’re going out and killing people, which of course would then result in the individuals being tried in a court of law, not a banning of the Church.
Don’t try that fear mongering tactic with the “gay marriage actually hurts us” bull, and if you are, at least have the decency to use a legitimate argument (not that there is one). Two men being married doesn’t hurt me just like a man and a woman doesn’t hurt me.
And to the poor soul who mentioned Sodom and Gomorrah: Ezekiel 16:49-50 declares, “Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me…” They were punished because they were inhospitable, haughty, and arrogant. They treated Lot with disrespect. Also, you’re upset that they wanted to have sex with Lot, but aren’t upset that Lot offered his daughter to complete strangers without even asking for her consent?
Wow, Christians really love to hate people that are different, and are always concerned what other adults do in their bedrooms.
Funny how they can’t live up to what their silly books actually command them to do.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkXOwBIRX7Y
Christianity: The Ala Carte of Religions, pick and chose the parts you want, and ignore the ones you don’t.
“…and did detestable things before me,”…
“The left” is not stupid enough to fall for this sophistry.
OK, so: still no response from Jan, from whom georgie-ann asked for scripture. Her original comment was at least interesting, though I found it bizarre that she apparently thinks that the European Commission on Human Rights, in 1950, supported gay marriage.
DCH had some intelligent objections, but other combox contributors responded very well to them.
Jenn accuses me of “blaming the victim” when I’m trying to help them avoid harmful behaviors. Well, I’ll tell you what: the school where I teach has had two students murdered in the past four years. Both students were gang members. If I use that fact in conversation with gang members to try to get them to disband, am I blaming the victim? Dangerous, possibly-fatal behaviors are dangerous, possibly-fatal behaviors, regardless of whether or not telling that fact to someone hurts someone’s feelings.
Hebrew Mythology accuses me of “hate,” an ad hominem attack. Basically, my feelings are that if someone else insults you personally (a logical fallacy), they’re admitting that you’ve (logically) won. Thank you, HM, for your admission.
Bea accuses me of “sophistry” without evidence, another ad hominem; thank you, as well. “You couldn’t make this stuff up”–you’re right; I didn’t. Follow the links; much of it links to pro-homosexual, left-wing sites, and much of the rest links to scientific, peer-reviewed journals. Truth.
Thank you to everyone else; I appreciate your comments.
it sounds, Eric, as if those who wish to lie in homosexual beds, have evolved an elaborate system of “custom designer” reasons and excuses and self-pitying emotional-brainwashing/strong-arming techniques and tactics, which they have pulled out of the depths of their sorrowing, suffering, misunderstood and much maligned and self-medicated souls,…
evidently, their misery loves their own company,…it is a subjective world which they have created, and which they promote and feel self-justified in,…and, you’re just going to have to take their word for it, as their is no natural or God-based support for the life-style,…i hear a lot of anger and bitterness, and we all can see their determined, purposeful attempts to turn natural and God-fearing society on its head for their own benefit,…
it’s apparently not like they would be inclined to be tolerant and protective of the “straight” community’s interests, either,…they’ve already shown their powerfully determined and subversive (anti-God, anti-nature) tendencies and goals,…give ‘em an inch, they’ll grab the mile, & thank you very much,…ultimately a very narcissistic and self-serving drain on commonsense and goodwill,…
What are the straight community’s interests? I’m straight and I wasn’t aware there was an agenda. NEWSFLASH: there isn’t a gay one either. They just want to live their lives without US bothering them. Many gays are Christians, and many of those gay Christians are better Christians than many straight ones, so don’t try that anti-God stuff. It’s not an elaborate system, it’s a simple one: live and let live.
It’s this kind of crap that’s killing evangelicalism, and will soon kill the Catholic faith as well. Just ask Christian Science Monitor.
If you’re really interested in saving someone, why don’t you make it so kids don’t suffer the fate of this one: http://joemygod.blogspot.com/2…se-he.html That’s where you should direct your efforts, not in screwing with the lives of consenting adults.
Ouch, get to Point 5
this rosy “innocent” picture painted on behalf of gays and their lifestyle(s) just doesn’t “stack up” with the data that has stacked up over the years,…what is “innocent” or OK about “man-boy-love?”….there is a huge unacknowledged, but very much in our faces and observable effort of “attitude seduction” going on, especially via main stream media,…
of course people can “feel sorry” for people who are unhappy with their life situations, but this is not sufficient reason to redesign biblical morality in an effort to “pretend” that some things are OK, that just aren’t,…
personally, if society wants to grant civil union status and privileges to gay partners, it’s OK with me,…but marriage should remain what it always has been,…
You claim that things are very bad for gays because of “acultural stressors” and you use this to justify drug use, risky sexual behaviors, violence etc., blaming them on the lack of acceptance of homosexuality.
If what you say is true, there should be observable improvements in these areas of gay culture since the early ’70s, when the APA removed homosexuality from their list culture of pychiatric disorders; acceptance of homosexuality has vastly increased in the last 40 years, therefore greatly alleviating “acultural stressors”. Please illustrate what those improvements are.
The truth is that gay culture has made remarkable progress in the last 40 years, gays have good reason rejoice and are currently riding a wave of positive energy like never before. Yet the risky behaviors, drug use, etc. have not improved in any way.
Sadly, seriously perverted movements like NAMBLA have become energized, too. But societies naturally recoil from aberrant behaviors such as pedophilia; that is part of their healthy function, and those behaviors have been/will be discouraged by the collective rejection of the society.
It would be terribly grave if this instinct for societal self-preservation was detroyed. Passing of SSM laws would be a major step in that direction.
Catholics need to focus on their own priest scandals,
and butt out of other people’s business.
The Bible is an evil book that supports slavery.
If gays aren’t making love in public and aren’t getting married
in your churches, butt out. (You’re lo-o-o-o-sing the fight.)
But edwords, our priest scandals were created by pedophiles and homosexual men interested in teenage boys; most entered the priesthood after homosexuality was normalized by the APA in the early ’70s, a decision the influence of which reached even the seminaries.
Since you agree that there *is* a priest scandal, then logically you must also agree that these men were *doing* something scandalous. I’m going out on a limb and guessing you don’t support a celibate priesthood. So naturally these men would, under the umbrella of new SSM laws, also receive the full advantages of these laws – men who you have already stated were doing something scandalous.
You can’t have it both ways, edwords.
Meg, the scandal here is the pedophilia, not the homosexuality.
And you fail to mention the HUGE coverup that put children at risk
to protect the church’s reputation.Yet another example of its “divine” guidance.
You hate the Church – that’s obvious and that’s OK. But please at least know what you’re talking about. Do your homework and you will find that most of the victims are post-pubescent.
But the point is, pedophiles will benefit from any progress achieved by LGBT activists. Pedophiles couldn’t be happier at the prospect of SSM laws being enacted.
So you are aguing against yourself: if you don’t truly support priestly celibacy, how can you be so horrified by how the Catholic church has handled this pedophile/homosexual abuse scandal and at the same time support laws by which pedophiles will benefit? Think it through, edwords.
Since you mentioned HUGE coverups: someday the New York Times will finally gain the courage it needs to expose the abuse problem in the *public school system* – the magnitude of which far outweighs anything that has happened in the Catholic Church.
“Hypocrites
Catholics need to focus on their own priest scandals,
and butt out of other people’s business.
The Bible is an evil book that supports slavery.
…
If gays aren’t making love in public and aren’t getting married
in your churches, butt out. (You’re lo-o-o-o-sing the fight.)”
edwords , August 04, 2010
…no matter what you say in this vein, your words will die with you,…and God will have the Last Word,…He always does,…we can’t lose,…
So georgie-ann, you’re okay with men marrying as many women as they can as long as the male relatives agree with it? You’re okay with blacks not being allowed to marry whites? You’re okay with men selling their daughters as sex slaves, and the male who owns them deciding if he wants to marry her or have his son do it? Because THAT’S what traditional marriage is.
And megwords, if you actually look at the profile of a pedophile, it’s a middle-aged white male, not a gay man. And your lies about gays going into priesthood after the APA took homosexuality out the DSM… Well they’re lies. I thought lying was against the Christian code.
Both of you need to know your own stuff before spouting off bigoted views.
…you seem to be the ignorant one:
Matthew 19:8 “He said to them, Because of the hardness (stubbornness and perversity) of your hearts Moses permitted you to dismiss and repudiate and divorce your wives; but from the beginning it has not been so [ordained].”
please don’t bother trying to put your words in my mouth, as i will surely spit them out,…
The APA decision was the single most important victory to date in the gay rights movement, they know this even if you don’t. It changed the face of homosexuality – how it was viewed and how it was dealt with, in all areas, even the Catholic Church. You need to read up a little, there’s plenty on the internet, I don’t have the time or the inclination to educate you.
LBGT absolutely has an agenda – you saying they don’t doesn’t make it so. Right now it includes passing hate speech laws (so they can legally quiet all anti-gay speech in churches etc.) and passing SSM laws. Then it’s on to the next thing, God only knows what that is.
So you see, they are doing just fine. You can calm down and stop insulting the people who are trying to have a discussion here.
Chuck, the D.C.-based Gay and Lesbian Activists’ Alliance has a website titled Agenda: 2010 http://www.glaa.org/archive/20…c262743201 Saying there is no gay agenda is just factually incorrect.
Pterodactyl, glad you liked approaches #1-4. (I like to accentuate the positive.)
Meg, excellent point (which takes care of Pterodactyl’s arguments against #5 at the same time; many thanks).
Edwords, changing the topic to pedophile priests is another logical fallacy, one politicians do all the time. If you can’t win the argument presented here, either admit it or don’t post.
Chuck (again), re. pedophilia and homosexuality, here’s the connection: a 1996 study in the journal Adolescence showed that 0.6% of adult children of heterosexual parents report having been molested by a parent; however, according to authors Cameron & Cameron, a
Good points, but the Left doesn’t care. It’s not about reason, logic, or anything else besides power and the Left’s insatiable craving for instructing the masses in all things immoral. You can’t argue with liberal emotions. You must legislate and enforce proper Catholic morals or else face persecution by the morally illiterate.
The only other option is to break off the liberal indoctrination which is taking place in state run sex education.
There is no “talk to the left” about anything. Their minds are darkened and made up, and they know how to control the teaching branches of society.
Dear Meg, it would be incorrect to assume that forty years ago there were any dependable statistical insight into the health and shape of the global queer population, due to institutional bias, blindness and majority silence within what we’d now call the gay community. So regression trend statistics peformed today do not have a reliable history to refer to – and that leaves us both referring to anecdotal sources and specific examples.
It would also be incorrect to say that I am trying to justify any amount of behaviours due to rates of aculturative stress. I am using stress in an explanatory way. It can be very difficult to teach priviledged eyes to see how a dominant and naturalised culture might impact the psyche of a minority. But I believe that you would have a heart of mercy towards those gay teens who experience such environmental stressors that they resort to suicide. They do not kill themselves because of homosexuality. I would say they kill themselves because they live in a world where it is still okay to valourise their oppression, to treat them as lepers, to rebuke the very notion that they can know and express what it is to be loved.
Dear Eric, I praise your act of paying attention to the replies. I absolutely reject all points 1 to 5. But I found point 5 to be most pharasiacial and unjust that I focused my attention up it. Do you think that you should now edit that section to explain why you expect a difference in domestic violence between married and unmarried same sex couples? Why wouldn’t the normalisation of same sex marriage reduce domestic violence, is there not less violence in straight marriage than straight co-habitiation? Can’t you just say black people have more domestic violence, and hence they should not have the freedom to marry?
Need a good list for why gay marriage is bad for heteros? I’ve seen a couple at MarriageNewsNow.com
Then explain these verses to me:
(Deuteronomy 22:28-29) If a man is caught in the act of raping a young woman who is not engaged, he must pay fifty pieces of silver to her father. Then he must marry the young woman because he violated her, and he will never be allowed to divorce her.
(Deuteronomy 22:23-24) If within the city a man comes upon a maiden who is betrothed, and has relations with her, you shall bring them both out of the gate of the city and there stone them to death: the girl because she did not cry out for help though she was in the city, and the man because he violated his neighbors wife.
(Exodus 21:7-11) When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she will not be freed at the end of six years as the men are. If she does not please the man who bought her, he may allow her to be bought back again. But he is not allowed to sell her to foreigners, since he is the one who broke the contract with her. And if the slave girl’s owner arranges for her to marry his son, he may no longer treat her as a slave girl, but he must treat her as his daughter. If he himself marries her and then takes another wife, he may not reduce her food or clothing or fail to sleep with her as his wife. If he fails in any of these three ways, she may leave as a free woman without making any payment.
And of course there’s no real sanctity of marriage for slaves:
(Exodus 21:2-6) If you buy a Hebrew slave, he is to serve for only six years. Set him free in the seventh year, and he will owe you nothing for his freedom. If he was single when he became your slave and then married afterward, only he will go free in the seventh year. But if he was married before he became a slave, then his wife will be freed with him. If his master gave him a wife while he was a slave, and they had sons or daughters, then the man will be free in the seventh year, but his wife and children will still belong to his master. But the slave may plainly declare, ‘I love my master, my wife, and my children. I would rather not go free.’ If he does this, his master must present him before God. Then his master must take him to the door and publicly pierce his ear with an awl. After that, the slave will belong to his master forever.
I’m sorry, I’m straight but I’d take a healthy gay marriage any day over the stuff listed in the Bible that you’re going to try to gild as traditional marriage. You can try to lie to me all you want, but these are the words in YOUR holy book. These are the words you SWEAR you follow to your death. Don’t sit here and pick and choose. After all, your God’s words are infallible.
Yes, Eric, the gays have an agenda, one I’ve already stated: that agenda is to live life as free people. That is it. I’ve said that. I mean have you even read that agenda? You’ll note that EVERYTHING on that list has to do with being equal to straight people, and to protecting themselves, just like any other group is going to want. Oh no! They want to fight AIDS! How HORRIBLE! What’s this? HEALTH NEEDS?! Oh no! HOW HORRIBLE! Legislation to make it so shooting a transgendered man point blank in the head with a semi-automatic doesn’t only lead to six years in prison (when everyone knows if a “normal” person had been killed they would be in there for life)?! HOW TERRIBLE. LOOK AT THAT AGENDA. PUBLIC EDUCATION? PRAISE BE, WE’RE DOOMED. Yes, I’m being overly facetious, but that’s because… well… it’s stupid. If you look at this post, you can say, OH NO THE CATHOLICS HAVE AN AGENDA, but really, you’re just trying to protect yourself. Granted, it’s a false evil, but still. I can understand why sexuality scares people.
Re: your research… It’s interesting, but the first thing I notice is how old it is. There’s no way they were able to attain a random sampling of GLBT people at that point. Find me research from within the past 5 years and I may change my mind. And that’s not dodging either–I’m a researcher myself.
1. Focus on the Words ‘Right’ and ‘Marriage’
Pavlat asserts that “the freedom to marry is not a right”. Unfortunately for this argument in the US, SCOTUS ruled unanimously on June 12, 1967, that, “The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men,” a “basic civil right.” (from http://lesbianlife.about.com/o…Loving.htm the 40th Anniversary of the Loving vs. Virginia Announcement” by Mildred Loving ) This argument is similarly overthrown by the European Convention on Human Rights, where recognized, which asserts in Article 8 that Everyone has the right to respect for their private and family life, their home and correspondence. So in fact, in the US, in the EU, the freedom to marry is a right. So much for that.
2. At this point, gay-rights supporters will often say that it is heterosexual couples who have damaged marriage. They are right, and we need to agree.
Fine. Move along. If Pavlat thinks the institution of marriage is “damaged” by being made equal (where a man and a woman have equal rights, obligations, and responsibilities in marriage, lifting the ban on same-sex couples marrying follows at a glacier’s inevitable pace) well, too bad for Pavlat.
3. Talk about Children’s Rights – There are some people who often don’t come up in discussions about gay marriage, but should: children.
Definitely! Given that same-sex couples can and do have children, there are only two questions remaining:
a. Do you believe that having married parents is beneficial to children?
If the answer to (a) is Yes, then:
b. What’s your motivation for arguing that the children of same-sex couples ought to be denied that benefit?
Pavlat argues that it’s reasonable to deny the children of same-sex couples the benefit of having married parents because, he claims, “It isn’t that gay people are necessarily bad parents, but that children thrive most fully when raised by a mother and a father.” There is no evidence for this view, but even granted for the sake of argument, it’s hard to see why Pavlat would think that children whom he regards as being already in the “inferior” situation of having same-sex parents, ought to be further discriminated against by having those children denied even the benefit of having married parents. Unless he thinks that it’s right to treat children unjustly because of the sexual orientation of their parents, of course.
4. Show that the Slippery Slope Is Real . . . and Happening Now
Pavlat offers as examples of the “slippery slope” which he claims is happening now, because of same-sex marriages, support of the marriage of computer avatars in Japan, a marriage between man and body pillow in Korea, and a marriage between man and horse in Missouri in 1999. Since all three incidents happened in jurisdictions where same-sex marriage is not legal, any evidence for the “slippery slope” is actually the other way: but the “slippery slope” is an argument that people ought to be denied civil rights – caused, real, actual, measurable harm right now (For example, see http://www.bilerico.com/2010/0…_scull.php Clay Greene and Harold Scull, together for 27 years until they were forcibly separated by Sonoma County, ironically just a month before the ban on same-sex marriage was lifted in California.) to prevent an unspecified, predicted, unproven harm that might happen because of the “slippery slope” in future years. FWIW, people argued against “allowing” interracial marriage, for the same reason. Pavlat bounces right into the assertion that if the ban on same-sex couples is lifted, this will somehow lead directly to the massive alteration of marriage legislation that would be required to bring polygamous marriage into the framework of Western equal marriage. Pavlat is unable to show any actual instance of this happening, in any country in which same-sex marriage has been made legal: unsurprisingly, since polygamy tends to be legally recognized only in countries where marriage is unequal. Equal marriage leads to same-sex couples marrying: equal marriage and poly marriage do not go together.
Chuck – I think you meant your post for georgie-ann, I sadly don’t know much about the bible. Although, if I were her I’m not sure I would bother, your tone leaves much to be desired.
A straight guy who hates marriage who is advocating for homosexuals who love and want marriage. Hmmm….
Good luck, georgie-ann
As I said in an earlier post, healthy, thriving societies have always recoiled from homosexuality. We no longer live in such a society. When marriage and family life are in the state they are in we must accept that we are in obvious decline. The progress made by the homosexual community is a symptom of that decline; the passage of SSM laws will simply hasten it.
In order for me to agree with your premise I would have to accept 2 of your assertions: first, that heterosexuals see the gay community through privileged eyes, implying that they have an unfair advantage. This is specious. There is a natural order to societies, and people who participate in those societies in a healthy way contribute to the greater good; this is a duty, not a privilege.
And secondly, that homosexuals comprise a legitimate minority. For that to be the case the dominant culture would have had to take something away from them that they once had, such as loss of language and culture etc. Homosexual culture has been, in fact, created out of whole cloth; you yourself have acknowledged that it’s so new that there aren’t even any reliable statistics to work with. Contrary to your concept of them having a culture forced upon them, the homosexual community has insinuated *itself* into the dominant culture and is now making unprecedented demands upon that society; this is vastly different from the American-melting-pot idea of assimilation.
It is a tragedy when *any* teen commits suicide; there are far too many. My heart of mercy feels for *all* teens today – they have to live in a culture that sexualizes them at such a young age that their childhoods are literally cut short. No longer is their innocence protected by the adults in their lives; through our pop culture and sex ed they have things foisted upon them at too young an age, things that only adults should have to grapple with. This includes sexual inclinations.
Sorry, Pterodactyl, but gays don’t have the market cornered on suffering. Because sexuality is the central theme in gay culture it gains a disproportionate importance in their lives – life without sex becomes unthinkable. But suffering comes to all of us in a variety of ways and to various degrees; how we deal with suffering is the key to a meaningful life.
If men are permitted to marry men, and women to marry women, can I marry my neighbors golden retriever? How about the elm tree in my back yard…..can I marry it? Why not??? Wouldn’t it be discrimination if I can’t marry now an elm tree, now that marriage has been redefined? Why only redifined for homosexuals? Why not us “tree huggers?”
slipperry slope……..3,000 men in Japan have been allowed to legally marry robots, look it yp.
Meg, could you list a few of the earlier “healthy, thriving societies” that have always recoiled from homosexuality? I hear that a lot, but never get any details.
The entire concept of “gay marriage” is an absurdity. If “marriage” were a mere love -n- romance contract, then gay marriage would makes sense. But marriage is a child-rearing contract arising from—and made necessary by–the procreative biology of heterosexual couples. SINCE heterosexuals produce babies from their sexual encounters, a permanent contract is required to protect everyone from the imminent devastation of abandonment.
Gays don’t have any of this. Gay marriage would be something to laugh about if gay activists weren’t so deadly delusional about it all.
Pterodactyl,
I would say that society still recoils at homosexuality, but this is being *aggressively* countered through indoctrination measures in public schools and Hollywood. Homosexuality is not natural, not normal. It is as much a disorder as any, and all disorders cause people to feel uncomfortable, whether justified or not.
sorry for abandoning you, but i lost track of this thread,…the straight guy sounds very bitter, hurt, and disillusioned,…these things happen in life,…those of us who know God turn to Him for healing,…truly positive restorative healing can be found nowhere else,…
i’ve heard a great description of sexual “couples” (hetero- or homo-) who, being obsessed with the sexual thing of compulsively using of one another for “fulfillment” (i.e., feeding off one another), can be described as “two ticks and no dog,”…it is ultimately futile,…and maddeningly frustrating, i’m sure,…
if it weren’t so angry, bitter and rebellious, it would be sad,…but as it is, it is off-putting and not really my problem,…
Meg, thank you for questioning my sexuality, but I don’t hate marriage. I have been married for 12 years and have a beautiful daughter. I treat both women in my life with respect, and we have an equal marriage. Susan and I are partners for life and I love both women with all my heart.
I also realize that two guys getting married in California DOESN’T threaten me, even if I lived next door to them, and I know enough about the Bible to know that the lily has in fact been gilded. Religious people make it out like the Bible is all sunflowers and daisies when there’s much in the Bible to be desired. Slavery (including beating slaves) is not condemned, and even Jesus is fine with beating slaves (see Luke 12:47-4
. And when people point stuff like this out, if only just to question, religious folk often say, “CONTEXT! CONTEXT!” But what about the context for the good stuff? What about the context for the homosexuality comments? No no, you see, to admit that maybe they are reading a mistranslation or, if they aren’t, that it doesn’t apply to today like the comments of slavery wouldn’t apply today, well that wouldn’t promote their biases.
Like I said before, marriage is a legal contract. If it were a religious union, then atheists couldn’t get married. The majority of the GLBT movement (there’s always a fringe group, even within the GLBT movement, though they try to deny it) does not want to touch weddings. Those are “sacred” for a reason–they’re religious ceremonies. If a church wants to deny a gay couple they have every right to. They can exclude them from communion or even the community itself. That’s their right to thanks to separation of church and state. And because of separation of church and state, they have no say in two people getting married.
And Bob… A dog is not capable of signing a contract. A tree is not capable of signing a contract. Therefore, in America, they have no legal standing. I don’t even know why people still bother to make this argument.
Ted, allowing gay marriage would not change the fact that heterosexuals have kids, inside and outside of marriage. Gay marriage isn’t going to up the number of gay people–those who are closeted may come out, but a significant portion of the population is straight and interested in having kids. Not to mention, not all married couples have kids, by choice, because of medical or money issues, and due to various other reasons. Use an argument that has grounds and we’ll talk.
I advise everyone to read the ruling against Prop 8. It’ll eventually be available in full, and you can read the 138 pages of reasoned argument on why there’s nothing to fear about gay marriage… unless you’re scared to. I’m sure many of Eric’s misinformed arguments will be debunked as well.
Thanks for the article Eric!
“I also realize that two guys getting married in California DOESN’T threaten me, even if I lived next door to them, and I know enough about the Bible to know that the lily has in fact been gilded. Religious people make it out like the Bible is all sunflowers and daisies when there’s much in the Bible to be desired. Slavery (including beating slaves) is not condemned, and even Jesus is fine with beating slaves (see Luke 12:47-4. And when people point stuff like this out, if only just to question, religious folk often say, “CONTEXT! CONTEXT!” But what about the context for the good stuff? What about the context for the homosexuality comments? No no, you see, to admit that maybe they are reading a mistranslation or, if they aren’t, that it doesn’t apply to today like the comments of slavery wouldn’t apply today, well that wouldn’t promote their biases”
The Catholic Church put the canon of scripture together, and has ultimate authority from Christ to “bind and loose”, which includes interpreting scripture and deciding what books were included in the bible. And the interpretaion of homosexual acts from scripture and 2000 years of Tradition has always said that homosexual acts are always sinful. Therefore, gay marriage can never be acceptable.
So the definition of marriage is the ability to sign a contract? By who’s definition…..YOURS???? remember….we’re now “redifining” marriage. My redefinition is that I can marry whomever or whatever I want, whether it be dogs, cats, water fowl or my kitchen table. How can you say that your “redefinition” is correct and mine is not? Where do you get your authority to say your right, and I’m wrong?? Isn’t that the original argument made by the gay community against heterosexuals? What about bigamy? If I can sign a contract with 12 women then therefore it is a “marriage??”
If marriage cannot be defined as being between a “man and a woman”….then how is it defined? why just stop at the gay communities definition of marriage? By opening up the definition of marriage, it makes it open to all kinds of relative definitions. I say if the gay community says i can’t marry a golden retriever or elm tree, then they’re just a bunch of bigots!! how dare they say I can’t marry a dog! We’re redefining marriage, so let’s open it up to all kinds of interpretation and redefinition…..why just include the gay interpretation??
Do you see where all this is heading……?
From the article “the Liberal Case Against Gay Marriage”:
“Restriction of marriage to heterosexual couples gives
reasonable recognition to the peculiar importance and solemnity
of generation and a related complex of human
experiences. It does not, in itself, constitute unjust discrimination
on the basis of sexual orientation.
There is something that a gay couple through consumating their marriage and having sexual relations can never do that a fertile heterosexual couple can do:
produce another human being (a baby) that is genetically a mixture of the man and woman. Society has always reasoned that this is one of THE key requirements in defining marriage. As the quote from the article above states, there is nothing discriminatory there against the homosexual couple……it is just a plain fact. When gay activists state that they are being discriminated against by being denied marriage, well, they’re not If we start redefining marriage as not recognizing this important fact……well what do we “redefine” next?
There is something that a gay couple through consumating their marriage and having sexual relations can never do that a fertile heterosexual couple can do:
produce another human being (a baby) that is genetically a mixture of the man and woman.
That’s literally never been a requirement for civil marriage in the US, though.
Society has always reasoned that this is one of THE key requirements in defining marriage
No, “society” never has. Even anti-marriage advocates didn’t dream this one up till relatively recently.
well, they’re not If we start redefining marriage as not recognizing this important fact……well what do we “redefine” next?
Goodness. Perhaps women past the climacteric might be allowed to marry. Or men who’d had a vasectomy. Or women who’d had a hysterectomy. Or couples who for whatever reason are not planning to have children genetically their own, but will instead adopt, or use AID or IVF, or just not have children at all.
Oh wait. This is already the situation for civil marriage in the US, and always has been.
If this rule were to become civil law – couples could only get married if they were interfertile and had children together – many mixed-sex couples would be banned from marrying. No anti-marriage advocate has ever suggested such a change in the law: anti-marriage advocates are only interested in banning same-sex couples, both with and without children, from marriage.
Obviously, you’re parsing and misreading what I wrote, Jesurgislac.
Read the original quote again. Obviously,most infertility is found out after the man and woman have been married. The man and woman entered the marriage covenant with the openness and expectation that their bonding sexual encounters in marriage will possibly produce children. A gay couple entering a marriage fully know that there is a zero percent chance that their sexual encounters will produce children. There is the difference that defines a marriage. you know the natural law argument.
This being a Catholic web-site, Jesurgilac, I have to ask: are you Catholic? Catholic teaching both scripturally and Traditionally has always said that homosexual acts are against the natural law and grave, sinful matter. Do you understand and follow that teaching? If you are not Catholic, I can understand why you would be ignorant of the teaching. If you are not catholic, would you like to further understand the teaching??
There is the difference that defines a marriage. you know the natural law argument.
But it’s not a difference that defines civil marriage. The Catholic “natural law argument” applies only to couples who want to marry as Catholics – it doesn’t apply to any non-Catholic couple, or even to Catholic couples who want a civil marriage.
, Jesurgilac, I have to ask: are you Catholic?
Why do you have to ask? I read and agreed to The Rules – I presume you did too. The Rules do not specify that anyone commenting here needs to be Catholic. Why do you ask?
If you are not Catholic, I can understand why you would be ignorant of the teaching.
I’m gay: obviously I’m aware of the Catholic justifications for discrimination against gay people and promoting homophobia over equality, civil and human rights.
But this post is about civil marriage. Plainly, “Catholic teaching” does not govern who can or cannot wed in secular law, in the US or in any other country.
Hey Jesurgislac,
The ONLY reason marriage contracts exist is because *heterosexual sex is wildly procreative,* generating mini societies that need to be governed by a social contract for obvious protective reasons (i.e., to ensure long-range nurture/protection of children, to ensure economic protection of dependent spouses, and to ensure that society does not get other people’s children dumped on their doorsteps). Gay sexuality, being incapable of procreation, has no need of contract law.
If humans produced asexually, there would not be a contract called “marriage.” It’s a reproducers’ contract (even though 1 or 2 percent of humans have the medical condition of infertility). The contract arose because of the life needs of the 99% of fertile heterosexuals and their babies, who require decades of nurture and training into adulthood.
“Gay sexuality, being incapable of procreation, has no need of contract law. ”
So adopted children, foster children, children conceived by donor, and stepchildren have no need of “decades of nurture and training into adulthood”? Only babies conceived by heterosexual procreation deserve married parents? It seems odd to discriminate against children because of their parents, but my main point still stands:
Civil marriage does not, and never has, required the two people who marry to have, to be able to have, or to intend to have, children. Either you intend to ban all non-interfertile couples – including mixed-sex couples – from marriage, or else this is not a valid argument for banning only same-sex couples from marrying.
Especially not, given how many same-sex couples have children, if you’re claiming that the purpose of marriage is to provide “long-range nurture/protection of children, to ensure economic protection of dependent spouses, and to ensure that society does not get other people’s children dumped on their doorsteps”. There is no reason to discriminate against children based on their parents’ sexual orientation.
Jesurgislac:
The reason why I asked if you were Catholic was not to attack you in any way, but if you understood the Catholic teaching on homosexuality. Hopefully I didn’t offend. Have you ever studied why the Catholic Church believes what it does on homosexual acts? Read Catholic documents, the Catechism, scripture interpretations on the subject? Give it a try, nothing to lose, but trust me there is much to gain on the Catholic moral teaching on the subject. Let me know if you are interested, I can direct you towards some good web-sites, reading materials.
The reason I say this is I find on a lot of these web-sites when someone is very negative and critical of Catholic teaching they have never even studied what the Church actually believes and teaches on the subject.
Jesurgislac,
All children are born of HETEROSEXUALS and need to be raised into adulthood. This is marriage. This is what the contract is all about. Marriage is a permanent family contract, not a temporal romance contract.
Marriage (civil and religious address the same biological phenomenon) absolutely assumes and anticipates CHILDREN, for marriage is the contractual pledge of exclusive sexual rights. (Do I really need to school you in human sexuality, namely that heterosexual sex exists to procreate the human race?)
Civil marriage absolutely expects and anticipates children, and therefore gay marriage contracts, which ignore children, are dangerous for heterosexuals. Gay marriage contracts do NOTHING to address the grave life and economic issues that heterosexuals have.
Next, no one needs to “ban” infertile couples. (What kind of suggestion was that?) Laws are written for the vast majority of normative cases, not the rare exceptions. No one writes laws to deal with every possible little exception to the rule–instead, our laws are written to manage the rule. And the rule in this case is *heterosexual fertility,* which encompasses nearly the whole human race.
Finally, same-sex couples do not have children. They cannot have children. The sexual biology doesn’t work that way in nature. Adoption with same sex couples is institutional gender discrimination, and it also deprives children of their nature-made normative right to have both a mom and a dad
Contraception enhances marriage because marriage is about a couple’s attraction to each other and not about destroying the wife’s health and looks through bankrupting and exhausting breeding for pedophile priests. Americans already outnumber American jobs 6 to 1, so abusing couples as breeders will only turn the U.S. into a Third World poverty pit much faster. Catholic-coerced over breeding in Mexico destroyed Mexico’s economy, and its overspill is now bankrupting our health care and stealing our jobs.
Most “gay” people are undiagnosed intersex victims of UNnatural Family UNplanning which scams wives into polyspermy fetilizations of older defective eggs during their “safe” cycle. I would rather have same sex gay parents any day over my brutally abusive, miserably Catholic “straight” parents.
Bob: Have you ever studied why the Catholic Church believes what it does on homosexual acts? Read Catholic documents, the Catechism, scripture, interpretations on the subject?
I’ve read “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual People”, some years after it was published (in 1986) and I had already witnessed with my own eyes and from many others’ direct experience the change from toleration and acceptance to discrimination and hostility that this Letter promoted. I’ve read Catholic interpretations of Scripture that they say justify treating LGBT people so badly: I’ve listened to Cardinals and Bishops justifying direct discrimination in abusive language from the pulpit, and I’ve listened to kids who have to go to Catholic schools who are trying to convince themselves that even though their teachers, priests, and parents believe they don’t deserve to live, they still shouldn’t commit suicide. So, yeah. I’m aware of what Catholics teach. I’m also aware that there are shining examples of individual Catholics treating LGBT people, adults and children, contrary to what Catholic doctrine teaches, with respect and acceptance: sadly I do not dare give any direct examples since doing so would unquestionably get these Catholics into trouble with their Church hierarchy.
The reason I say this is I find on a lot of these web-sites when someone is very negative and critical of Catholic teaching they have never even studied what the Church actually believes and teaches on the subject.
I find that a lot of heterosexual Catholics are genuinely not aware of the kind of abuse and discrimination which Church doctrine leads to, and tend to lay the blame on LGBT people making “demands” rather than on the Church hierarchy for being hostile. As for example, when Catholic Charities decided to deny health insurance to spouses of employees, the blame was laid on “Gay marriage” rather than on Catholic Charities making a decision that put promoting homophobia above the corporeal work of mercy, caring for the sick.
Ted: All children are born of HETEROSEXUALS and need to be raised into adulthood.
So the children who are born of lesbians do not need to be raised into adulthood?
Marriage (civil and religious address the same biological phenomenon) absolutely assumes and anticipates CHILDREN
Some (not all) religious marriage may assume/anticipate children: civil marriage does neither.
Next, no one needs to “ban” infertile couples. (What kind of suggestion was that?)
Yours, if you’re claiming that that couples who can’t have children can’t be allowed to get married.
Finally, in biology class you might remember that same-sex couples do not have children.
And yet, I can think of half a dozen of my close acquaintance who do.
Eric Pavlat: OK, so: still no response from Jan, from whom georgie-ann asked for scripture. Her original comment was at least interesting, though I found it bizarre that she apparently thinks that the European Commission on Human Rights, in 1950, supported gay marriage.
The ECHR (section
on respect for family life, has been held to apply to LGBT people and therefore to support recognition of same-sex relationships, including civil unions and/or marriage, for many years.
I recognize that this is a long and busy thread, Eric, but this seems to be the basic flaw in your argument: as a Catholic you are required by doctrine to discriminate against LGBT people and promote homophobia over all corporal works of mercy, but no secular law is required to uphold religious rules of discrimination. Indeed, in the US, the state is obliged to hold itself neutral and prevent people from any religion from attempting to persecute others for not following their religious rules.
Civil marriage is not ruled by the Catholic church, nor by any religion. It is available to any couple legally free to wed, and there is no justification in secular law for arguing that this should not apply to same-sex couples just as it does to mixed-sex couples.
Note that I am making the clear distinction between secular law and civil marriage, and religious doctrine and religious marriage. Your article appears to be arguing that religious doctrine should govern civil marriage.
Well, Jesurgislac, if that was your expereinences I’m sorry to hear. If any Catholic acted this way to you they were wrong and not livig up to the true doctrne and teaching of the Catholic Church. Read the section on homosexuality in the Catechism (i’ll try to post it later), it’s actuall very caring and pastoral. My personal experience is that because many priests and nuns have a homosexual tendancy they are actually very compassionate and caring to the gay community.
Christ has asked us to “put on a new cloak” and turn from our past sins. The Church teaches that adultery and fornication are sinful, and takes us away from Christ’s love. As a heterosexual married man, I cannot live a lifestyle of adultery and fornication. Any tendancy I might have towards those sins is disordered because it takes me away from the love and graces of Christ. “Love the sinner hate the sin”. The Church doesn’t hate or discriminate against the person that lives in sin, Jesurgislac, but must point out to that person in Christian love that their sinful actions will take them further and further away from Christ.
Here Jesurgislac is the teaching on homosexuality from the Catechism:
Homosexuality refers to relations between men or between women who experience an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction toward persons of the same sex. It has taken a great variety of forms through the centuries and in different cultures. Its psychological genesis remains largely unexplained. Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity,141 tradition has always declared that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.”142 They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.
2358 The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God’s will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord’s Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition.
2359 Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.
As fallen humans we all have a tendency towards sin. adultery is a sin. Stealing is a sin. Murder is a sin. Pedophilia is a sin. Performing homosexual acts is a sin. Etc., etc….. When we are living in sin life is not good because by our free will we’ve turned from the love of Christ. Life is wonderful when we conquer and turn from sin and run towards the loving arms of Jesus and His grace. Every day I have to overcome my sins, it’s a struggle. But when I live in my sins life is horrible, I’ve run from Christ. When a priest or friend tells me that the sinful life I am leading is wrong he/she is not being discriminatory against me or attacking me. He is actually showing me love by helping me to a better life, one towards Christ. When the Church says that homosexual acts are wrong, they are not discriminating, attacking, or being “homophobic.” they are being loving by pointing out that there is a better way, one that leads to eternal life with Christ.
If any Catholic acted this way to you they were wrong and not livig up to the true doctrne and teaching of the Catholic Church
As I said: that would be two Cardinals and a Bishop, acting strictly according to the “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual People” in promoting homophobia, cruelty to children, and discrimination against LGBT people above corporal works of mercy.
The Church doesn’t hate or discriminate against the person that lives in sin, Jesurgislac, but must point out to that person in Christian love that their sinful actions will take them further and further away from Christ.
It’s very difficult to convince non-Catholics that promoting hatred, bigotry and discrimination, as the Catholic Church does towards LGBT people, is somehow what Jesus would have wanted. Indeed, it’s impossible, without promoting the idea that you get close to Christ by hating others, by urging children in your power to hate themselves.
When a priest or friend tells me that the sinful life I am leading is wrong he/she is not being discriminatory against me or attacking me.
If a priest tells you that as a heterosexual married man your sexual love for your wife is wrong, you should separate and refrain from having relations with your wife or with any other woman because your God regards your love for your wife as disordered, and if you have children your priest tells you that your parental care for your children is considered by your Church to be equivalent to child abuse, this is an attack: a hateful, horrifying attack. This is the discrimninatory abuse that the Catholic Church launches on LGBT people as a matter of doctrine.
That’s religion: one may (I do) feel compassion for the LGBT children of Catholics trying to learn to love themselves despite the message of hatred they receive from their priests and their parents, but religious freedom is a civil right, protected by secular law.
The political campaigning by the Catholic Church against the civil and human right of civil marriage, is not a matter of religious freedom: the Catholic Church ought not to attempt to govern the right of civil marriage.
Coming back to this point, Bob:
The Church doesn’t hate or discriminate against the person that lives in sin, Jesurgislac, but must point out to that person in Christian love that their sinful actions will take them further and further away from Christ.
If you sincerely believe that, Bob, then I’m not the one you should be arguing with: you should be arguing with Eric Pavlat, the author of the original post.
The whole point of Pavlat’s article is that the Church should promote discrimination specifically against lesbian and gay people by denying same-sex couples civil marriage. If you think the Church shouldn’t be doing that, take that up with Pavlat, as others have here and elsewhere.
Pavlat cites with apparent approval several examples of discrimination specifically against lesbian and gay people by the Catholic Church in his post: yet I don’t see you responding to those examples, protesting that the Church “doesn’t discriminate against the person that lives in sin”.
For example, Pavlat cites Catholic Charities in D.C. deciding to discontinue spousal benefits for their employees because they might someday have to provide spousal benefits to a a same-sex couple. That’s hatred and discrimination promoted by the Catholic Church, yet I do not see your protesting it.
For example, Pavlat cites Catholic Charities in Massachusetts being forced by Mass. Bishops to give up its adoption services, rather than continue to place children with same-sex couples when their assessment services concluded that a same-sex couple were the best placement for a specific child. So all children in need of adoptive parents in Boston were the poorer, because the Catholic Church promoted discrimination and hatred, yet I do not see your protesting it.
For example, Pavlat argues that children in kindergarten ought to be taught to hate and discriminate against each other’s families: that a child with gay parents ought to be made to feel inferior, and a child with straight parents encouraged to feel superior, rather than – Pavlat objects to – all kindergarten children being encouraged to regard each others families as equally valid. This I particularly find horrific: children of kindergarten age ought to be encouraged to be respectful of each other’s families, not encouraged to denigrate or bully another child because of their parents. Yet I don’t see your protesting Pavlat’s endorsement of kindergarten bullying.
For example, Pavlat argues that secular marriage commissioners and secular JPs who want to discriminate in the performance of their civil duties ought to be allowed to so. You claim that the Catholic Church “doesn’t discriminate against the person that lives in sin” – yet I don’t see your protesting Pavlat’s endorsement of discrimination.
For example, Pavlat argues that a couple who manage a bed and breakfast who want to exercise discrimination and deny paying customers the use of their business premises, ought to be allowed to do so. Yet I don’t see you protesting Pavlat’s endorsement of discrimination.
For example, the right to free assembly is a basic civil right: no mayor or civic authority in a free country ought to be allowed to prevent people from peacefully gathering in public places to protest, celebrate, or campaign. Yet Pavlat argues that mayors who attempt to prevent LGBT citizens from exercising that basic civil right in the form of Pride Marches or Festivals, ought not to be fined. I do not see you protesting Pavlat’s endorsement of this discrimination.
The Rules, I note, require us to assume our mutual goodwill. I think that’s a good rule. So, with all goodwill: if you believe the Church should not discriminate against those living a “sinful lifestyle”, why are you not arguing with Pavlat’s Catholic endorsement of active discrimination?
OK………you might be right Jesurgislac. I’ll have to re-read the article. Time permitting, I’ll try and do that and give a comment. If, for example, Pavlet argues that mayor’s that try to prevent LGBT from marching should not be fined, well, his premise is wrong.
As far as the B&B example, that’s a tough one. It’s similar to the Methodist Church in NJ that is being sued because they denied a lesbian couple from being married on their grounds. On personal moral grounds, is the Methodist justified? the B&B is not a religious institution, but obviously the owner is uncomfortable. Maybe the gay couple should recognize their discomfort and go elsewhere? I think Christ would let them stay, but they would be drawn to his unique love and want to get to know him better. On a legal discriminatory basis….I honestly don’t have an answer to that.
I’ll try to get back……boss is getting suspicious to what I’m doing!
God Bless!
One more note, there is a situation in Massachusetts where a lesbian couple has a child in a Catholic grade school. The child is allowed to remain, and I believe that I read that it is being handled in a very “loving, pastoral way.” I’ll have to google the story and come up with more on it. But obviously, very germaine to the topic.
5. Show that Gay Marriage is Harmful
….
Same-sex marriage has already hurt a number of private citizens and social institutions in the United States and Canada as well:
…
* several Canadian mayors were fined thousands of dollars for refusing to declare “Gay Pride Days” in their cities;
The right to free assembly is a basic civil right distinct from the basic civil right of freedom to marry. LGBT have been celebrating Pride since 1970, considerably before any jurisdiction recognized even civil unions between same-sex couples. Pavlat conflates the two, and complains that LGBT people ought not to have their right to free assembly recognized, identifying the right of free assembly for LGBT citizens as an example of “damage” done by gay marriage!
the B&B is not a religious institution, but obviously the owner is uncomfortable. Maybe the gay couple should recognize their discomfort and go elsewhere?
Well, I’m sure that the couple who run the B&B, if legally required to let in people they hate, would probably behave towards gay couples (or black couples, if that’s their prejudice) in an ugly way, thus ensuring that gay couples would sooner go elsewhere than stay to be abused.
But the better solution would be for anyone who thinks of running a B&B to accept that their personal prejudices – whether racist, homophobic, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic – ought not to interfere with their business obligations. Ought B&B owners who were anti-Catholic have the “right” to turn away Catholic couples, just because their Catholicism made the B&B owners uncomfortable? I don’t think so!
One more note, there is a situation in Massachusetts where a lesbian couple has a child in a Catholic grade school. The child is allowed to remain, and I believe that I read that it is being handled in a very “loving, pastoral way.” I’ll have to google the story and come up with more on it. But obviously, very germaine to the topic.
I never denied that some Catholics behave towards LGBT people in a way that’s completely contrary to the discrimination advocated (for example) by Pavlat in this post, such as where he complains that kindergarten-age children are being taught to respect everyone’s family and parents equally.
…..and honestly Jesurgislac I do know several Catholic homosexuals that are being lovingly and compassionately pastored to by the parish priest. The best analogy for the Catholic Church is a “hospital for sinners.” Everyone that walks in to Mass on Sunday morning is a sinner, including myself!!. But they come to the Church to listen to the Gospel and receive the sacraments to learn how to overcome sins. my sins are a cross that Christ wants to help me carry. But I have to change my life to His teaching, even if initially I don’t understand that teaching (and of course, I have to inform my conscience by learning why Christ’s teachings are this way and what does it mean), instead of trying to change Christ’s teaching to what I want in life. There are instances where Jesus stood tall on His teaching (john 6), and many disciples walked away because what He was saying was “too hard.” Christ didn’t back down and say “wait..wait…come back!! i’ll change what I said to make you happy!” He basically said that “I invite you to the truth of my teaching, and because I love you I gave you the free will to accept it or not.”
Bob: .and honestly Jesurgislac I do know several Catholic homosexuals that are being lovingly and compassionately pastored to by the parish priest.
So do I.
But, Bob, what does this have to do with Pavlat’s argument that same-sex couples ought to be legally discriminated against by the state, and so should their children in public schools? My point to you is that you claim the Church shouldn’t discriminate against “sinners”, identifying LGBT people as sinners, but you’re not arguing with Pavlat, who thinks the Church SHOULD campaign and politick for discrimination against LGBT people.
If that is what Pavlat is trying to do (legally discriminate)I agree with you, he is flat out wrong. The Church does, however, have it’s reason to protect what has traditionally been the definition of marriage, if that is what you mean by “campaign.” An anaolgy is the abortion issue. No catholic says that someone having an abortion should be attacked, discriminated against, or thrown in jail. But legalized abortion according to Catholic teaching is the murder of an unborn child, and the Church should do all it can to overturn such an unjust law.
And it’s been great “talking” with you Jesurgislac!
But I’ve been spending too much time on this site and my work is backed up and all I need in this down economy is to lose my job!
but thanks, and all the best!!
Bob
This piece is written for orthodox Catholics and offers them talking points for discussions with non-gay supporters of SSM. It is not, nor does it claim to be, a deeply comprehensive study on why/how homosexuality is wrong. On the contrary, it merely offers tactful ways for Catholics to navigate the discussion of this subject in a productive and meaningful way, while avoiding arguments and without falling into easy traps, such as the charge of bigotry.
Since the intent of this piece is not to discuss homosexuality in it’s entirety, disecting this piece point by point is a futile effort, an effort which leapfrogs over the heart of the matter – that homosexuality is intrinsically disordered and bad for society – and goes straight to the assumption that the only plausible reason people do not support SSM is because they are misguided, hard-hearted and bigoted.
This is clearly an overly simplistic and, ironically, bigoted perspective, one that intentionally and unjustly overlooks the real reasons the Church (and most major religions practiced in orthodoxy) and millions upon millions of good-hearted people have for not wanting to encourage homosexuality by changing laws to support SSM marriage.
Gays would do well to understand why the term homophobe – the term which has ended more discussions and has quieted more Catholics than any other in recent times – reveals more about the mindset of those opposed to SSM than has been acknowledged. Homophobia is defined as irrational fear and negative feelings or even hatred about homosexuals. There is healthy shame, there is healthy guilt and, yes, there is healthy fear. In recent years, negative feelings have been brushed aside as useless, things to be discarded in the pursuit of happiness, but they are actually very helpful in keeping destructive (or sinful, to a Catholic) behaviors in check. We often end up hating what we fear because we believe what we fear can harm us. Perhaps that is the heart of the matter.
We are asked to stretch our own understanding of homosexuality to a more charitable view all the time; perhaps it is time for homosexuals to offer us this same courtesy in regards to opposition of SSM.
Bob: The Church does, however, have it’s reason to protect what has traditionally been the definition of marriage, if that is what you mean by “campaign.”
No: I mean Catholic support for legal discrimination against lesbians nad gays, such as the Proposition 8 campaign in California, and other attempts (successful or not) to ban the freedom to marry for same-sex couples. No one is attempting to argue that the Church’s definition of Catholic marriage should change: but Catholics such as Pavlat are arguing that lesbians and gays should be legally discriminated against by being banned from civil marriage.
meg: On the contrary, it merely offers tactful ways for Catholics to navigate the discussion of this subject in a productive and meaningful way, while avoiding arguments and without falling into easy traps, such as the charge of bigotry.
Perhaps fortunately for the cause of human rights, this article does the usual very bad job of trying to advocate for legal discrimination, and an equally bad job of ducking the obvious point that only a homophobic bigot would think it right to legally discriminate against lesbian and gay people.
There is literally no one who is arguing that Catholic priests should have to celebrate marriages contrary to their beliefs.
The notion that Catholics should be able to impose their religious beliefs on others and deny them basic civil rights is just plain wrong, no matter what kind of quibbling arguments are used to justify it.
and goes straight to the assumption that the only plausible reason people do not support SSM is because they are misguided, hard-hearted and bigoted.
Well, yes. In Pavlat’s entire post he was unable to come up with any reason whatsoever for supporting a ban on civil marriage for same-sex couples that was not either implausible, misguided, hard-hearted, or bigoted. His suggestion that being gay should be compared to being an alcoholic was a particularly telling touch.
the real reasons the Church (and most major religions practiced in orthodoxy) and millions upon millions of good-hearted people have for not wanting to encourage homosexuality by changing laws to support SSM marriage.
I guess that is the crux of the matter. The normal range of human sexual orientation is gay to straight – people will have feelings for their own gender or the other gender, and these feelings are normal. The Catholic Church is required by doctrine to make people who have feelings for their own gender, hate themselves for having those feelings – to work to make people who are lesbian or gay think they are inferior and wrong and lost in sin, by telling them they’re “intrinsically disordered and bad for society”.
The high rate of suicide among Catholic gay teenagers is evidence of how successful this work by the Church is: kids brought up in the belief that they’re unfit to live, see no hope ahead and choose to die.
But while there exist, outside the Catholic Church, in the secular world, lesbian and gay people leading open, happy lives, respected by others, getting married, having children, doing good work – just ordinary successful happy lives, plainly not “objectively disordered” or “bad for society”, it becomes harder and harder to convince Catholic kids that they themselves have no hope of ever leading normal, happy lives, just because they’re lesbian or gay.
Hence the Catholic Church’s determination to fight legal equality and equal human and civil rights for LGBT people; to ensure that lesbian and gay Catholic teenagers grow up in the pit of misery and shame that leads so many of them suicide.
We can’t agree. We will never agree, unless the Catholic Church decides that it’s okay to treat lesbians and gays like human beings, that it’s for God to judge, not the Church, whether a person who is leading a normal, happy, caring life, doing good to others, is really “bad for society” just because she’s a lesbian, married to another woman, and bringing up their children to believe that they should love and respect everyone, regardless of sexual orientation.
Jesurgislac,
If gays are allowed to redefine marriage and be allowed to get marriage, would you agree that other goups that have been marginalized be allowed in,(groups such as NAMBI, bigamy groups have been making noise that if gays get the legal right to marry, they should also), and redefine marriage to their own particular definition?
Actually Jesurgislac, I fail to see the discrimination you discussed in the article. He actually puts forward a clear, concise argument. If a mayor has a moral problem with Gay Pride Days, maybem he should be fined and accept it, but he doesn’t have toagree with. Years ago a Nazi group applied to parade through a Jewish neighborhood in Illinois, and I believe the mayor refused to support it. In this circumstance (and based upon your argument) you’d have to agree the Nazi group should be allowed to March, but the mayor was totally in his rights to claim on moral grounds he did not agree with the March. If you were mayor of that town, would you have allowed the Nazi’s to march?
If gays are allowed to redefine marriage and be allowed to get marriage,
Actually, it’s the feminist movement that “redefined” civil marriage, and it took about a century, but it’s already happened.
In modern civil marriage both spouses have equal rights, responsibilities, and obligations towards each other: in mixed-sex marriage the wife is not considered the adjunct of her husband – her name, her citizenship, her property, her work, and her body are her own, not legally her husband’s. That’s the big redefinition of marriage that made same-sex marriage inevitable.
This has not always been the case. Once upon a time, a wife had distinctly different legal obligations towards her husband than a husband did towards his wife.
For example, before 1900, a wife might not have had the right to own property in her own name: as a married woman, until 1900 in many states of the US, anything a wife owned was the property of her husband and she might not even have the right to sign contracts in her own name: her husband would be required by law to do that for her. There were states in the US in which it was legally impossible for a woman to retain her surname after she married: she was required to change her name to her husband’s. It was federal law for quite a while that if a woman married a non-US citizen she lost her citizenship and acquired that of her husband. Before 1991, many states in the US did not define marital rape as a crime.
When marriage law presumes that a husband has legal rights over his wife which she does not have over him, and that she has obligations to her husband which he does not have to her, then the only way a same-sex couple can get married is if one takes the legal role of the husband, one that of the wife.
US marriage law now presumes no legal distinction between two spouses, so there’s no reason not to allow same-sex couples to marry. This is the feminist revolution, and it’s long since been won.
bigamy groups have been making noise that if gays get the legal right to marry, they should also), and redefine marriage to their own particular definition?
Equal marriage leads to lifting the ban on same-sex couples marrying. Equal marriage also precludes the possibility of poly marriage: marriage systems where the husband has the right to claim more than one wife are invariably systems which preclude same-sex marriage by having unequal rights, responsibilities, and obligations based on the gender of the spouse.
He actually puts forward a clear, concise argument.
Nowhere in the article that I read.
If a mayor has a moral problem with Gay Pride Days, maybem he should be fined and accept it, but he doesn’t have toagree with. Years ago a Nazi group applied to parade through a Jewish neighborhood in Illinois, and I believe the mayor refused to support it. In this circumstance (and based upon your argument) you’d have to agree the Nazi group should be allowed to March, but the mayor was totally in his rights to claim on moral grounds he did not agree with the March.
If you’re homophobic enough to see gays as equivalent to Nazis, sure. I’m not: perhaps you are?
Great Jesurgislac, name calling………..why when you can’t answer a question properly do you resort to name calling? It looks like the fall back position when your argument fails or you have no clear answer is to go to the “homophobic” attack?
I’m done again…..this is going no where….goodbye!
Jesurgislac,
Lesbians do not produce babies. In nature, the sex of two females is incapable of reproduction. As you probably know, every child that exists has (1) a natural Mother and (2) a natural Father. You espouse a cruel practice of intentionally, systematically, institutionally denying children of the natural right to one of their own parents. That’s cruel and unusual punishment. We should never embrace a society that intentionally deprives children of their own nature-assigned parents.
Civil marriage assumes children because all marriage that has ever been is a sexual reproduction contract between HETEROsexuals. If heterosexuals reproduced asexually, there would be no such thing as marriage in any society. And in fact, I have yet to find any reason why gays need a contract. What are they contracting??? What goods and what risk are being protected by law?
Next, no one knows who has the rare defect of infertility. Moreover, all laws are written to address phenomena experienced by vast majorities—in this case, fertility. No society NEGATES or re-write it’s laws just because there are rare exceptions to the rule. In fact, re-writing laws to account for the circumstances of the exceptions destroys the usefulness of the law for those whose circumstances are the rule. I’m sure you’re an intelligent person and can understand this.
Finally, there is virtually zero discrimination against gays. In America, no one cares what adult people do in their bedrooms. The *worst* gays have to endure is having to live with some fellow countrymen who think that gay sex is sinful. Big whoop. We’ll all take it up with God at death. And if God determines that some sexuality is a gross perversion of His intentions, then we all have to face the consequences. You included.
Great Jesurgislac, name calling…
Yeah. You compared me to a Nazi. You claimed that when I and other LGBT people gather together for Pride, this is exactly comparable to Nazis gathering. I refrained from responding in kind, merely pointing out that this kind of insulting paradigm is homophobic. Now you have the chutzpah to complain that I’m “name-calling”? Sheesh.
Lesbians do not produce babies.
*sigh* Reality check: lesbians can, do, and have produced babies.
And in fact, I have yet to find any reason why gays need a contract. What are they contracting??? What goods and what risk are being protected by law?
The same as for any hetero couple marrying.
–
A general comment.
This post by Eric Pavlat was supposedly meant to provide suitably gentle and polite arguments to discuss the ban on same-sex couples marrying. Yet it appears that when people who oppose the ban show up to argue with the post and with people who support the ban, Pavlat’s suggested arguments tend to dissolve into shadows and dust: they rest on prejudice and ignorance, not facts and reason from those facts. I had hopes for Bob, but he descended into name-calling and then complained about me for identifying this as, well, rude.
Ted’s persistent assertion that lesbians are all sterile (and that, presumably, adopted and foster children do not need or benefit from married parents) is a classic example of the uninformed supporter of the ban: Pavlat’s sage advice does not appear to have helped Ted at all.
Perhaps Eric Pavlat might want to consider that if his arguments can be so demolished by the opponents who show up at random to debate them, he needs to reconsider his claim that he understands how to argue with supporters of the freedom to marry? (I suggested on my own blog that he take up knitting. Giant rainbow scarves are love.)
Jesurgislac,
Use reason here: Lesbian couples never in history have produced a single baby. Nature doesn’t allow it. Any laboratory baby they artificially create has *a real father and mother* couplet, and every child has a natural right to its actual father and mother. Intentionally depriving them of this is cruel.
You are being dishonest in saying that heterosexuals have no need for contracts. UNLIKE homosexual sex acts, heterosexual sex acts create real human beings who are economic dependents and require decades of material care and provision (thus the need for contracts). Moreover, one of the spouses in a heterosexual couplet becomes economically dependent as a result of the 24/7 project of child rearing. So that person also needs the contract law.
Homosexual sex simply does not produce any such circumstances requiring contractual protections. Reality is reality. Nature is destiny, and heterosexual marriage is a contract rooted in natural biology. It emerges necessarily from the reproductive reality of heterosexual sex. There is no way around it. And it simply does not apply to homosexual sex acts.
Use reason here: Lesbian couples never in history have produced a single baby.
And yet, Ted: lesbian couples can, do, and have had babies. You cannot “reason” those babies out of existance.
You are being dishonest in saying that heterosexuals have no need for contracts.
You are being dishonest in transferring your assertion that lesbian and gay couples don’t need marriage contracts, as if I’d said the same thing of mixed-sex couples – which I did not. I fear that I cannot regard you as an adult trying to have a constructive and civil discussion.
It is very convenient to your argument for you to give the Catholic Church much more power than it actually has; then you use this purported power to call the Church bigoted and hateful. You know very well the Church simply doesn’t have the influence you ascribe to it. More than half of Catholics voted for Obama, for heaven’s sake. Most contracept, a good deal believe in abortion rights, not to mention that many or most are estranged on key doctrinal issues not pertinent here.
For you to accept the lack of influence of the Church you would logically then have to accept (causing your argument to fall apart) that just plain old everyday people – many millions of them, in fact – have serious concerns about passing SSM laws. They feel it in their guts, even if they can’t express their ideas intellectually, especially to people who keep telling them they are bigoted and hateful every time they open their mouths.
So your specious claim, coupled with your *profound* lack of understanding of the nature of sin and forgiveness in Catholicism, has kind of killed this thread. In no way are you “demolishing” your opponents. A lack of a response on a blog doesn’t always mean a win; sometimes people just get worn out starting from point A over and over again and leave searching for greener pastures in the form of more stimulating debate.
BTW, the fact that more than one SSM supporter has pointed to gay teen suicide on this thread to bolster their argument is evidence of just how self-referential and closed off the homosexual community is. Many teens commit suicide each year and this is a travesty. Are most teen suicides by gay teens? I doubt it. Do all gay teens who commit suicide go to Catholic school? Otherwise they have no way of knowing what Catholic teaching is on the subject of homosexuality; a very low number of Catholics even attend weekly Mass, and most priests don’t have the nerve to discuss the subject.
A gay teen’s suicide is more tragic than a straight teen’s? Shame on you.
Meg, the argument that the Catholic Church has too little power or influence to prevent lifting the ban on same-sex marriage is a tad disingenuous, given that this is a thread discussing the Catholic opposition to same-sex marriage.
FWIW, I think the only two countries in the world where the Catholic Church has definitely prevented lifting the ban are Italy – one of the few countries in Europe which does not even nationally recognize same-sex civil unions – and Ireland, where marriage wasn’t permitted for same-sex couples and civil partnership was passed over the direct opposition of the Catholic Church. The success in denying same-sex couples legal marriage across so many states in the US is down to a wider spread of homophobic Christianity than the Catholic Church, but Christians have specifically declared their opposition in religion to allowing same-sex couples civil marriage.
There is no secular justification for permitting a majority to vote civil rights away from a minority. So the “serious concerns” that are claimed for millions are flat irrelevant. Marriage in the US is a civil right: civil rights in a democracy are protected against the majority voting them away from a minority.
So your specious claim, coupled with your *profound* lack of understanding of the nature of sin and forgiveness in Catholicism, has kind of killed this thread. In no way are you “demolishing” your opponents.
I had no intention of demolishing my opponents. I read The Rules and agreed with them. I fully intended to engage with and demolish their arguments that Catholic doctrine justified denial of civil rights. I’m quite glad that no one could really come up with any attempt at arguing that civil discrimination can be justified with reference to religious doctrine.
As for the specific issue of suicide, it is an issue for anyone who has ever lost anyone to that horror: and teenagers are especially vulnerable to this kind of mistreatment. That heterosexual Catholics do not wish to consider how the teachings of their Church encourage lethal despair among teenagers, is … sad and shameful, I think.
I’ve said repeatedly, though, that individual Catholics, including priests and nuns, have acted with far more charity and grace than Church doctrine permits them to do.
Guys–I have six young kids. I can’t really reply to this many comments.
Thank you to those (especially Bob, Meg, and Georgie-Ann) who have stepped in and defended the faith.
Jesurgislac, your points are full of straw man arguments. Either by choice or because of some confirmation bias/misattributed congruence, you’ve repeatedly mis-stated what I state in the article. If I were saying the things you say I’m saying, I would disagree with me. If you follow that. It’s like something I once heard from Archbishop Fulton Sheen. He described a meeting with an atheist. He said, “Tell me about the God you don’t believe in. Odds are, I don’t believe in that god either.” I truly hope it’s that you’re misreading me unintentionally.
Chuck (from yesterday), you listed almost all the points from the DC group’s agenda except that they want to keep as many sex joints and strip clubs open as they can, with an aim toward eventually legalizing prostitution, an omission I find curious.
I really can’t keep up with this volume of comments; this will likely be my last comment, much as I wish it could be otherwise. I do find the ongoing conversation interesting.
Eric, I seriously don’t think I’ve ever seen what appears to be such a blatantly dishonest dismissal of an honest and serious set of critiques.
You don’t like seeing your views re-stated in plain English, with the focus on how LGBT people feel about being denied human and civil rights, instead of on how Catholics feel about having to treat LGBT people as equal citizens and human beings? Well, maybe you should consider that if you can’t bear to see your opinions re-stated in plain English, you should change your opinions!
Dismissing this all as “straw men” is … well, I’d say lazy, but I admit that the parent of six kids is entitled to blow off their blog in favor of more important childminding duties. But you might admit that’s what you’re doing, rather than trying to pretend I didn’t make good valid points.
Now go read your kids a story and think about how you wouldn’t want any of them teased or bullied or humiliated because of their parents, so never again use the argument that children in kindergarten ought to be taught their parents are inferior just because they’re gay.
To answer your points:
Catholics are duty-bound to oppose SSM even if we are only a tiny group. If you knew more about Catholicism you would know this. You have many misconceptions about the Church and it’s teachings.
The word homophobe doesn’t bother me and shouldn’t bother any Catholic. I’ve already explained why.
Gays don’t comprise a legitimate minority, this was discussed here a day or two ago; therefore they aren’t being denied rights of any kind. The wishes of every self-proclaimed minority cannot possibly be catered to in a sane society.
Since you claim that gay teens are commiting suicide over the fact that they are gay, this is an issue of sexuality, is it not? The blame lies firmly in the hands of those who seek to sexualize teens in the first place. This is not the doing of the Catholic Church; actually, gays are the ones lobbying for the lowering of the age of consent, etc.
Any priest or nun who works with gays without encouraging celibacy is doing untold harm. In Catholicism charitable correction is demanded; omitting it can actually be sinful. Gays will always get charity, etc. from any good Catholic religious, but may not always hear what they want to hear.
And that’s it for me. If you have anything new to add, I’ll still be reading this thread but I think at this point we’re going round and round. I appreciate that you stuck to The Rules and I tried to do the same. It’s been interesting.
Jesurgislac,
Lesbian sex does not (not ever, never) produce babies. Please quit using a total fantasy for your justifications.
Next, gay sex does *not* require any contract, for gay sex does not place either partner at grave risk of long-term economic dependence. In contrast, heterosexual sex acts DO place the partners at immediate grave risk of long-term economic dependence and commitment. Thus the need for a contract. And in fact, marriage is the contractually agreed upon right to exclusive sexually reproductive acts with another. Heterosexual sex, being reproductive, requires such contracts. Gay sex, being infertile, does not.
As to your claim that a majority can’t vote civil rights away, you’re just way off. First, there is no “civil right for gays, children, relatives, etc. to marry.” Your fantasizing of it doesn’t equate to reality. Second, we live in a democratic society where the majority makes the laws. Sorry if you don’t like that. (Also, you have no basis for saying the majority has it wrong.)
Finally, since you are at a religious Web site, I will point out that you must stand before God and face judgement alone. This is inevitable and imminent for every person. I urge you to reflect deeply that you are a mere creature now in the process of dying, and take note that the Creator alone calls the shots in this Universe—we do not. Therefore turn away from evil and cling to your Creator, that you may find mercy, forgiveness, love and life everlasting. This is a commitment that all people ought to make each day, for our opinions and deeds will be as vapor in the presence of God. Time is short. Judgment is at hand for every man. You never know when today is the last for yourself. For all you know, tonight may be the last. Do the right thing and reform yourself to comply with God. You will be happy if you do.
Catholics are duty-bound to oppose SSM even if we are only a tiny group.
Actually, Bob (upthread) asserts the opposite, that the Catholic Church does not support discrimination. As denying same-sex couples civil marriage is legal discrimination, it would appear that Catholics can legitimately differ whether they’re dutybound to promote homophobia by opposing equal civil rights for same-sex couples, or dutybound to oppose discrimination by supporting same-sex marriage.
The word homophobe doesn’t bother me and shouldn’t bother any Catholic.
Thanks: so it’s okay to identify Catholic promotion of homophobia as such, as it doesn’t bother you. To be fair, I think it’s simpler to identify “Catholic promotion of homophobia” than to identify Catholics promoting homophobia as homophobes. I know there are priests who were very reluctant to cease pastoral support for LGBT people and start talking up the nastiness as the 1986 “Pastoral Letter” required them to do: and by the reluctance I identify them as “not homophobes”, though by their actions, they certainly became promoters of homophobia.
Gays don’t comprise a legitimate minority, this was discussed here a day or two ago; therefore they aren’t being denied rights of any kind.
Outright denial of the rights of a minority group, by claiming that they don’t exist and therefore shouldn’t be allowed equality, is never a successful tactic in opposing civil rights. I would recommend you not try this one in future.
Since you claim that gay teens are commiting suicide over the fact that they are gay, this is an issue of sexuality, is it not?
But that’s not what I pointed out. LGBT Catholic teens in particular commit suicide at a higher rate than other LGBT teenagers not because of their sexual orientation or gender identity, but because of the promotion of homophobia by priests, parents, and even Catholic schools. Teenagers are especially vulnerable to contempt and abuse. Blaming the teenagers for being gay is a form of abuse.
Making the age of consent equal across sexual orientations has been generally successful in ensuring that gay teenagers in particular can go to trustworthy adults for help without being abused.
Any priest or nun who works with gays without encouraging celibacy is doing untold harm.
Because it’s less harmful for gays to commit suicide than it is for them to live happy, product to get married and start families? I disagree. Teenagers deserve to be told that, if they want to, they’re going to be able to find the right person, fall in love, and live together. Insofar as priests and nuns are instead telling gay teens that they’ve got to live frustrated, unhappy, miserable lives or go to hell, they are responsible for this leading to teenage suicide.
This idea that gay teenagers have got to be told to be celibate has of course led many into becoming priests – it’s estimated that as many as 50% of priests in recent years are gay – because if the Church is telling them they must be celibate, they feel they may as well be so for a good cause… and then they discover they’re sharing seminaries with a host of other young gay men and start having affairs, but so it goes. Some people may be genuinely called to celibacy, but the prevalence of affairs among young gay men in Catholic seminaries seems to demonstrate that it would be better to recommend a chaste gay married life rather than counselling an impossible and undesired goal.
Gays will always get charity, etc. from any good Catholic religious, but may not always hear what they want to hear.
Being told “God wants you to be miserable and frustrated” does not constitute charity for me, though.
Ted: Lesbian sex does not (not ever, never) produce babies.
Fantasising? Not me, bud. I never mentioned “lesbian sex”. But lesbians have, will, do, can, are having babies. To argue that those babies don’t exist is a fantasy. To argue that those babies don’t need to be nurtured to adulthood is discrimination against those children because of the sexual orientation of their parents.
Jesurgislac, you’re intentionally misleading yourself and others when you say “lesbians (i.e., lesbian couples) are having babies.” They are *not* “having babies,” for nature prohibits it. I repeat: nature prohibits same-sex couples from “having babies.” Their sexual activity is not capable of reproduction. Do you understand this incontrovertible fact? I’m not sure you do.
In actual fact, lesbian couples are stealing away babies from their rightful natural parents, which is a cruel and immoral practice. How would you like it if YOU were intentionally, institutionally taken away from your natural parents and had no say in the matter? It’s evil. Children have a normative right and expectation to be connected to the people who sire them. It’s Mother Nature’s way.
Finally, I repeat to you that gay sex does *not* place the partners at any grave long-term economic risk, and thus does not requires contractual law. In contrast, heterosexual sexuality *does* place the partners at immediate risk of long-term economic duty and risk, and thus requires contract law.
Marriage is *not* a romance declaration. Instead, it is a necessary, binding family contract arising from and rooted in the biological reproductivity and duty of heterosexual sexuality. Gay sex acts simply do not contain long-range economic risks and duties.
Jesurgislac, you’re intentionally misleading yourself and others when you say “lesbians (i.e., lesbian couples) are having babies.” They are *not* “having babies,” for nature prohibits it.
E tuttavia sono nati.
We’re just rehashing. You’re working from the idea that Catholicism breeds hatred of gays (nothing could be farther from the truth; nowhere will you find more mercy) and that gays comprise a *legitimate* minority. I’ve already explained why I disagree with these two assertions, so we’re at an impasse.
But I will once more engage on the subject of teen suicide because your misunderstanding of the Church’s role, or rather lack thereof, is so complete; others may read this and be influenced by your faulty thinking. This is a sad reality of Catholicism: although Catholicism is the largest religion in the country, most Catholics who identify themselves as such no longer attend weekly Mass or understand/agree with Church teaching on a variety of subjects (including SSM etc.); since they no longer attend Mass, the children no longer hear sermons or have access to the sacraments. In effect, the average teen has no virtually no understanding of Church teaching on many subjects, including homosexuality. I’m telling you this as a practising Catholic and believe me, it’s not easy to admit.
So your assertion that the Church plays any significant role in teen suicide is preposterous. The insularity of the gay world (and your hatred of Catholicism) has kept you from having any clarity whatsoever on this subject, which has obviously become important on the list of SSM talking points. If you had any clarity you would be able to see that it’s the gay world, along with the prevailing culture in general, that is hurting these kids.
The prevailing culture sexualizes them at a very young age. Then a teen confused about his sexuality has unfettered access to gay porn through the internet, and let’s be honest, it’s filled with images of very young people better described as boys than men. Gay groups encourage young people to take a stand in the schools by starting gay clubs and attending proms, making them very real targets of other teens, who already are prone to bullying each other over something as simple as looks or athletic ability.
Most obviously, gays lobby to LOWER/ELIMINATE the age of consent, not simply to even out the ages with heterosexuals. These lobbyists are not working for the good of the teen but to extend access to those teens for *themselves*.
You don’t understand the damage that can be done to a young mind when they are asked to decide at a very early age whether they like boys or girls; or do they like boys AND girls? Or maybe they’re a boy but they want to be a girl? You also discount the very real possibility that the idea of performing, or actually performing, homosexual acts fills them with shame – not because of social taboos, which you know very well have mostly been lifted – but because these acts are inherently disordered and sinful. Shame may cause them to take their own lives, but not because the Church has told them to hate themselves.
“Because it’s less harmful for gays to commit suicide than it is for them to live happy, product to get married and start families?”
Seriously, those are the only 2 options – die or get married? This is totally disingenuous, and honestly seems a little ironic in a time when half of all babies are born out of wedlock. Gays have made unimaginable progress in the last decade and have every reason to rejoice.
last comment was for Jesurgislac…
Jesurgislac, here are some examples of straw men, begging the question (presupposing that which much be proved, here abbreviated BtQ), and ad hominems:
-”the Catholic justifications for discrimination against gay people [BtQ] and promoting homophobia over equality, civil and human rights [straw man, ad hominem]”
-”[Some Catholics who are] treating LGBT people, adults and children, contrary to what Catholic doctrine teaches, with respect and acceptance [straw man and BtQ, both at once]”
-”making a decision that put promoting homophobia [straw man, ad hominem] above the corporeal work of mercy, caring for the sick.”
-”as a Catholic you are required by doctrine to discriminate against LGBT people and promote homophobia over all corporal works of mercy [straw man, BtQ, and ad hominem]”
The straw men: Find the parts in the article, or in Church teaching, where I or they say, “Be bigoted.” “Be discriminatory.” “Use homophobia.” You won’t find it. You’re putting your words in my mouth, acting like I and the Church say things we don’t say. Making up your own words for what I said only weakens your argument, for it shows that you can’t win based on what I and the Church actually say, so you have to make it up.
Working from a place of “They don’t want gay marriage and therefore they’re discriminatory homophobes” is a logical flaw; that’s the “begging the question” part. We are saying that it is possible to oppose gay marriage as a political position without homophobia, without bigotry, from a standpoint of science and sociology. To explain it another way, you’re assuming that all opposition to gay marriage is discriminatory homophobia, but that assumption is actually the claim you have yet to prove.
Also, accusing us of homophobia is an ad hominem attack.
However, I do have a concession to make later today. FIrst (not very dramatic, I know), I have to mow the lawn. Stay tuned…
You’re working from the idea that Catholicism breeds hatred of gays (nothing could be farther from the truth; nowhere will you find more mercy)
And yet, this entire thread – presumably with many faithful Catholics – has been full of people arguing that it’s wrong to treat LGBT people as equal human beings and fellow citizens. Inspired by hatred or not, discrimination and prejudice are not “mercy”.
So your assertion that the Church plays any significant role in teen suicide is preposterous.
If true, believe me, that would be a blessing. It seems odd for a Catholic to argue that Catholic LGBT teenagers ignore what the Church teaches and so cannot possibly be driven to suicide because of this, but you presumably know your own community best.
and that gays comprise a *legitimate* minority.
Again: no matter what your justification for claiming this, I have to say that trying to pretend a minority has no legitimate basis for claiming equal human and civil rights, is never going to work as a strategy for denying such rights.
-”the Catholic justifications for discrimination against gay people [BtQ] and promoting homophobia over equality, civil and human rights [straw man, ad hominem]”
Ah ha. So you avoid discussing the issue of whether it is right to discriminate against LGBT people – and the children of same-sex couples – by pretending that discrimination against lesbians, gays, and their children, is not really discrimination: you avoid discussion the issue of Catholic promotion of homophobia over equality, civil, and human rights by pretending that it isn’t happening.
Yet your post is supposed to be lessons in how to communicate with people who do not agree with your stance on same-sex marriage.
If you dismiss other people’s opposing opinions as “straw men” because you do not wish to deal with them, you really aren’t even faking a wish to communicate.
Find the parts in the article, or in Church teaching, where I or they say, “Be bigoted.” “Be discriminatory.” “Use homophobia.” You won’t find it.
Okay, let me run through them again.
You advocate directly that the state shall discriminate against lesbians and gays by denying same-sex couples the freedom to marry. You claim (against all available evidence) that if same-sex couples have the freedom to marry, this may increase domestic violence: that same-sex parents, lesbian and gay parents, aren’t as good at bringing up children as mixed-sex or heterosexual parents: this is bigotry. Two examples of “damage” you offer are in fact examples of Catholic institutions deciding it was more important to promote homophobia than to engage in corporal works of mercy: Catholic Charities in Boston was compelled by Massachussets Bishops to discontinue placing children because CC in Boston had found that same-sex couples were sometimes the best couples for caring for a particular, difficult child. Corporal work of mercy: caring for parentless children – discontinued in favor of promoting homophobia – claiming against the direct evidence of Catholic Charities that same-sex couples can’t parent children. Likewise, even more strongly, the decision to discontinue providing spousal benefits, including health insurance, by CC in Washington DC, because it was considered more important to promote homophobia than to engage in the corporal work of mercy, caring for the sick. Your endorsement of these decisions to promote homophobia, your claiming that the promotion of homophobia is “damage done by equal marriage” is advocating the use of homophobia.
Most disturbing of all - public schoolchildren in states with same-sex marriage are taught as early as kindergarten that both options, gay and straight, are equally valid lifestyle choices;
Yes. We’re talking about kindergarten children being taught to respect each other’s families. Not only in states with same-sex marriage, but in any state where public schools are not prepared to have kindergarten-age children being taught young to despise and/or bully each other because of their parents. You are apparently advocating that in a kindergarten class where Mary and John and Yasouf and Kim are all kids in the same class, but Mary has two mothers and Yasouf has two dads and Kim’s parents are divorced and remarried and John’s only got a mum, that all the kids in the class – including Mary and John and Yasouf and Kim – should be taught that Mary and John and Yasouf and Kim have parents who aren’t leading “valid lifestyle choices” – as if kids that age understood that kind of language! Yes, kids that age should be taught that everyone’s family is equal - no kid that age should be taught bigotry about other kids’ families or parents, no kids that age ought to be taught that some of the kids have inferior families to the others. You’re advocating for bullying, bigotry, discrimination, and homophobia – against kindergarten kids who have offended you by having the “wrong” kind of parents.
I could go on – there are other examples – but this is no straw man: these are real kids, real kindergarten teachers, who have to make real decisions: are they going to make a little kid sad or angry by telling her “You don’t have two moms, I won’t allow you to talk about your family that way”? Are you going to encourage the class bully by telling the little kid who drew a picture of her family, her mom and her mom and her baby brother, by telling the whole class that this family isn’t a “real” family, isn’t a “valid lifestyle choice”?
That’s real damage you’re advocating. To real children. You can claim you think it’s only right to make these little kids sad or mad by dissing their parents, because they might otherwise grow up thinking well of their parents, of their family, and you want them taught that they should think their families are inferior and invalid families. But don’t pretend that’s not advocating homophobia, bigotry, and discrimination.
I do not pretend that every person will be convinced by any argument. I fear that at this point in your life, you are one of those people. I know that you have deeply-felt convictions.
I don’t think you understand what begging the question is. I don’t think you see the mindset you’re in as a mindset. Please go to Wikipedia and read the entry on begging the question and on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_questionConfirmation Bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias. At present, you can’t see that what you’re saying is illogical.
Maybe I could talk about it from the basis of being an English teacher. I think we have different definitions of “homophobia.” To me, that means “unreasonable fear or hatred of persons with homosexual tendencies.” I would hazard a guess that you have a different definition: “unreasonable fear or hatred of homosexual persons, causing the homophobe to oppose homosexual activity or rights.” Clumsy, but my point is that I think your definition of homophobia necessarily includes all opposition to anything pro-homosexual, while my definition is limited to unreasonable fear or hatred in interpersonal behaviors, perhaps extending to illogical opposition to certain societal issues.
Our difference seems to me this: To me, only some opposition to same-sex marriage comes from homophobia; to you, all opposition to same-sex marriage necessarily comes from homophobia. Does that make sense?
I think we have different definitions of “homophobia.” To me, that means “unreasonable fear or hatred of persons with homosexual tendencies.”
That’s one definition, and one that you are absolutely exhibiting, with every word of this post. All bigotry, all discrimination, I believe is ultimately sourced in fear, and this is a particularly irrational fear.
To me, only some opposition to same-sex marriage comes from homophobia; to you, all opposition to same-sex marriage necessarily comes from homophobia. Does that make sense?
Pretty much, yes. Your post does not convince me otherwise. (A further tiny homophobic detail: you suggest that if people say “but people don’t choose to be gay”, it is appropriate to compare being gay to being an alcoholic. That’s a tiny scrap of irrational hatred you’re promoting, right there.)
Jesurgislac, how committed are you to the idea that people find their true identity in their sexual attractions. You keep crying “civil rights,” but civil rights don’t apply to one’s sexual preferences. Civil rights are reserved for immutable physical characteristics that one always expresses in public (black, female, etc.), and “prefer gay sex” simply doesn’t belong in the same category.
Suggesting that one’s sexual appetites are a defining characteristic is pure modern social experiment.
I can’t imagine defining myself by my sexual attractions. I am not defined by my sex drive, and neither is anyone else. People who believe they are defined by their sex drives are victims of modern day propaganda techniques/brainwashing. It’s not reality. Better to define oneself as a creature specially made by the Creator, and made in His image, and called to imitate His holiness and goodness.
Ted, great point!
Jesurgislac, with that language barrier established and impossible to penetrate, there’s really no point in dialogue. Anything I say in support of my points–anything–will necessarily fall within your definition of homophobia and be dismissed. That’s not being intellectually honest.
Look, I have several gay/bi friends: people from my teenage years, current neighbors, ex-students, people on Facebook, and so on. They all know how I feel, yet they’re still my friends. One of our bridesmaids, my wife’s best friend from college, is a lesbian. Before we had kids, my wife did lab research for years at Johns Hopkins University, looking for an AIDS vaccine. She also volunteered for an AIDS Buddy program, befriending an AIDS patient for about a year and taking her on a day trip for her first-and-only trip to see the ocean. Afterwards, she volunteered at an AIDS hospice, working directly with the dying during her spare time. And yet, due to her political views, you would apparently paint her as having homophobia. That simply doesn’t compute; you’re obviously using a flawed definition.
Consider my position for a minute. Some people who disagree with my positions may just be anti-Catholic, but most of them will actually have intellectual, personal, or emotional reasons for disagreeing with me. May I rightly accuse of anti-Catholicism every person who disagrees with any Catholic position I happen to discuss? No, obviously not. Now flip it around; it’s the same with sexual issues, Jesu. You can’t legitimately say “You hate me” of anyone who simply disagrees with you. May I remind you of Rule #2, “Assume the good will of the other person”?
Enough said, I hope.
On another topic, the concession I mentioned earlier regards point #1. I originally wrote, “the freedom to marry is not a right.” I now see (partially due to you, Jesurgislac; thank you) that this statement was not precise enough, and was therefore incorrect. What I should have written was, “the freedom to marry anybody one wants is not a right.” I apologize for the error. As I said before, marriage is not unlimited: you may not marry a married person; you may not marry a nine-year old; you may not marry a close relative; and you may not marry a person of the same sex. (That last point necessarily takes us to the definition of marriage itself, ground that’s already been covered a few times.)
I’m also willing to strike the bullet point there about paying a fee, by the way. Maybe the editors will let me edit those few words on the article next week.
To sum things up, though, your definition of the word “homophobia” is inappropriately broad, making actual debate impossible. What you’ve done is created a world for yourself in which either (a) people agree with you or (b) people are homophobes, and that’s too narrow a world for me.
Eric said: “With that language barrier established and impossible to penetrate, there’s really no point in dialogue. Anything I say in support of my points–anything–will necessarily fall within your definition of homophobia and be dismissed. That’s not being intellectually honest. ”
This is an excellent statement about constructive dialogue. Perhaps the question Jesurgislac needs to answer first is, “What facts would force a gay marriage advocate to seriously rethink the position”? You see, at present, Jesurgislac is impervious to ALL FACTS, for he has not contemplated what, if anything, could upset his view. Some factual criteria MUST be established before dialogue can be potentially enlightening and/or persuasive.
I suspect the dialogue is at a standstill until Jesurgislac can provide the criteria by which he/she could be proven WRONG. Then, once those criteria are agreed upon, a productive conversation might be had. And then if the criteria is met, Jesurgislac must recant his/her position. (Or vice versa.)
Understand this point, Jesurgislac?
Perhaps the question Jesurgislac needs to answer first is, “What facts would force a gay marriage advocate to seriously rethink the position”?
First of all, Ted, thanks for finally dropping the claim that the children born to lesbians just don’t exist.
Second: Jesurgislac, how committed are you to the idea that people find their true identity in their sexual attractions. You keep crying “civil rights,” but civil rights don’t apply to one’s sexual preferences.
But when a group is denying people the right to marry based on their sexual preferences, as anti-marriage advocates are in the US and elsewhere, then plainly, you are applying sexual preference as a civil rights issue: you are arguing that the basic civil right of marriage (defined as such by the Supreme Court in 1967 as essential to the “orderly pursuit of happiness”) does not apply to lesbians and gays.
If a person’s civil rights do not change regardless of their sexual preference, that means all have the right to marry, regardless of the gender of their chosen mate. Your side, not mine, is making sexual preference a civil rights issue.
I don’t see that this is any better as a question.
There are no good arguments against lifting the ban on same-sex couples marrying. I’ve read any number of people arguing that same-sex couples shouldn’t be allowed to marry, from Maggie Gallagher to Orson Scott Card, and not one of them has come up with anything that justifies this kind of discrimination.
Jesurgislac, with that language barrier established and impossible to penetrate, there’s really no point in dialogue. Anything I say in support of my points–anything–will necessarily fall within your definition of homophobia and be dismissed. That’s not being intellectually honest.
I’m being perfectly honest, Eric. As I noted to Ted, I’ve read widely of the anti-marriage advocates. I have read people who come up with religious justifications, with gay-sex-is-icky justifications, with assertions that somehow lifting a ban on same-sex marriage will lead to Dreadful Things, and I have never read any justification for a ban on civil marriage for same-sex couples that wasn’t sourced in homophobia.
Look, I have several gay/bi friends: people from my teenage years, current neighbors, ex-students, people on Facebook, and so on. They all know how I feel, yet they’re still my friends.
I think that speaks very well for your friends. And it says, too, that despite your unfortunate homophobic bigotry, you are in other respects a nice person – you just believe that people whom you claim to hold in affection, ought to be discriminated against by the law because of your religious beliefs. Your friends may believe that you’ll change your mind eventually, that you’ll learn to accept them as your equals, that you’ll realize once DOMA is overthrown and your friends are marrying that in fact, their discrimination didn’t advantage you at all: lifting the ban doesn’t do anything to you or yours. Their charitable belief that you have the capacity to be a better person is, we can all hope, justified: you may learn from your friends that they deserve to be treated as legally your equals. If not, well, they haven’t lost anything by continuing to treat you with courtesy and kindness despite your beliefs about them.
May I rightly accuse of anti-Catholicism every person who disagrees with any Catholic position I happen to discuss?
You may rightly accuse of anti-Catholicism every person who argues that Catholics ought to be banned from civil marriage. You may rightly accuse of anti-Catholicism every person who argues that since being Catholic is a choice, this justifies legal discrimination against Catholics. You may rightly accuse of anti-Catholicism every person who argues that Protestants make better parents than Catholics. Flip that around, Eric, and see: it’s the same for lesbians and gays. I assume your goodwill: but I can’t assume you’re not homophobic when you’re arguing for legal discrimination against LGBT people.
Oh, and the comment I actually came back to the blog to make: you don’t just have to talk to “the left” about being against same-sex couples marrying.
Read more: Miami Herald
When it comes to any discussion of love the sinner, hate the sin I often sit back and consider how much energy the Christian places into each activity. In my mind it should be 99.99% of energy spent on love / 0.01% (or even less) spent on hate. Is it an act of love to agitate a grass-roots religious movement against loving consenting (gay) adults? Even if they are misguided, is the fruit that is produced by this mobilisation helpful or harmful to the members of same sex unions? Could your time be used differently to bless them more?
Beyond a photocopy of the catechism and a note saying “Ask me if you don’t understand”, is there really a need to create five extra talking points? If the person doesn’t agree with the original Catholic premise, why prostlytise by playing with the meanings of “Right” and “Marriage”? It actually amounts to a dishonest subterfuge as the contents of points 1-5 are immaterial to your connection to Catholicism.
Catholic marriage is already very insulated and safe, in as much as an Anglican marriage is not a Catholic marriage, an atheist marriage is not a Catholic marriage, a completely contracepted marriage is not a Catholic marriage. Yet the abundance of these non-Catholic marriages cannot tarnish or diminish its unique wisdom. It is false to say that two men or two women tying the knot has some special destructive powers that satanist marriages do not.
I look at the title and ask myself, why isn’t this essay called “Five Ways to Talk to Lapsed Catholics about Stopping Their Contraception”? But this would be too close to home, too real, too difficult but most of all it would deprive the reader of experiencing the Them vs Us pleasure. Identity cries out for definition and we never feel more ‘ourselves’ than when we are pushing away people, ideas, things that we don’t identify with. To surrender that pleasure to the Cross should be everyone’s primary goal before approaching politics.
Jesurgislac, perhaps you’re used to dealing with christians who don’t use logic and reason, but you’re at a Catholic site now where logic and reason are king.
First, I will not let you get away with your Orwellian talk that lesbians are “having babies.” To be factual, you should say that lesbians are perpetrating a fraud by which an opposite sex couple has a baby which is subsequently forcibly stolen from his true father. You’re trying to promote a kidnapping racket. Can you handle the truth here? Hello?
Next, society equally denies youths, relatives, groups, and gays the “basic civil right” of marriage (to use your language). And again, we do this because of the family-raising responsibility/duty of marriage. Marriage is not a love -n- romance contract, nor a mere cohabitation contract among friends; It is an exclusive sexual-reproduction contract necessarily entered into by heterosexual couples, due to their reproductive reality. In contrast, gay sex has no long-range economic consequences, and thus no contract law is required to address gay sexuality. Marriage is a breeders contract, for heterosexual sexuality *results in* a multi-decade, multi-person, high-cost, high-risk family enterprise. Gay sex acts have no such consequence and thus don’t require contract law.
Next, you said “there are no good arguments against lifting the ban on same-sex couples marrying…I have never read any justification for a ban on civil marriage for same-sex couples that wasn’t sourced in homophobia. ”
There most certainly are good arguments that have nothing to do with “homophobia,” but you are pre-committed to reject valid logical arguments, for your own personal agenda trumps reason, logic, and the common good of society. In other words, your agenda is all important, no matter how much harm will be done to society. But heterosexuals, whose lives and families are at stake in this debate, will not allow your agenda to trump their concrete economic and legal needs.
Gay marriage law is *gravely harmful* to heterosexuals and their children in the same way “no-fault divorce” law has been gravely harmful to heterosexuals and their children. Bad law destroys lives, and gay marriage contracts completely fail to address the unique needs and problems facing heterosexuals and the billions of babies produced through their sexuality.
Pterodactyl,
When Christians attack sins, they are doing so because all “sins” (i.e., wrongs, crimes) involve injustice against others that destroy both societal and personal tranquility and peace. Christians are hard on thieving (and thieves) because thieving harms victims and society, even if it benefits the minority society of criminals. So, out of love for the victims, Christians preach against thieving. You may call that hate, but we Christians call it love. We love people and don’t want their lives and property harmed, so we must go on offense against thieves and thieving. So it goes with all sins.
In truth, your approach to loving and blessing would mean NOT opposing thieves, thus allowing their harm to continue on unchallenged. Your love for thieves would equate to hate to the victims of thieves. Can you see this?
Finally, no one is stopping gays from hooking up or living together. Rather, we are stopping them from re-writing our marriage law in a way that causes irreparable harm to heterosexuals and their children. Good laws protect and preserve families, and bad laws destroy families. Just like “no fault divorce law,” gay marriage law is destructive when applied to the heterosexual family reality—it does nothing to hold the couple accountable to each other and their children for decades. Absolutely nothing.
By the way, Jesurgislac, have you spent any time or energy today contemplating that you’re dying? Have you spent any time preparing for meeting your Creator? Have you spent any time considering that the Creator is worthy of your adoration, friendship, and submission?
You have no ability to grant yourself life, and you are now presently dying. Go to the Creator to seek eternal life, mercy, love, and forgiveness for sins. You will be happy if you do, both in this life and the next. God is forgiving for those who confess their wrongs, seek forgiveness, and make a commitment to amend their ways. This applies to you and me both. Do it now while you have time. Like all creatures, you have no ability to grant life to yourself.
First, I will not let you get away with your Orwellian talk that lesbians are “having babies.” To be factual, you should say that lesbians are perpetrating a fraud by which an opposite sex couple has a baby which is subsequently forcibly stolen from his true father. You’re trying to promote a kidnapping racket. Can you handle the truth here? Hello?
There are five ways in which a lesbian couple can have a child or children.
One: by donor insemination. If this constitutes “kidnapping a child from its true father”, then many mixed-sex couples are likewise guilty of the crime of “kidnapping”, by using donor sperm to engender a baby. Is it really logical or reasonable to refer to the use of donor sperm as “kidnapping”?
Two: By step-parenthood. A mixed-sex couple separate, the children are living with one of the parents (usually the mother) who then re-marries, giving the child a step-parent. Again, if this constitutes “kidnapping a child from its true father”, many, many mixed-sex couples are guilty of it, and furthermore, this “kidnapping” is sanctioned by law: stepparents have a legal, recognized status and connection to the child. Is it really logical or reasonable to equate “stepparent” with “kidnapper”?
Three: By fostering. A couple who wish to provide a caring home for a child in need of one, may offer their services as foster parents to their county or state. They are then assessed and regularly visited to ensure they are caring for the child properly. For the most part, most foster carers offer their parenting services out of goodwill and in a public spirit. To equate fostering a child with kidnapping a child seems neither logical, nor reasonable, nor kind, to the many, many fosterers who do their best for children in difficult circumstances.
Four: by adoption. Again, if adoption constitutes “kidnapping”, this means many, many mixed-sex couples are equally guilty. Here we’re on shaky ground, as I freely admit that often, sadly, a young woman who cannot afford to have a child at that time in her life is encouraged (in the US, by so-called “crisis pregnancy centers”) to have the baby in order to lose the baby to richer adoptive parents. International adoption is even more hazardous to defend morally as a general principle, since what it amounts to is that wealthy couples enter the system with enough money to buy themselves a healthy baby. Most of those couples are mixed-sex couples, and sometimes, yes, what is done to get the healthy baby does amount to kidnapping. Still: properly, adoption is a means of finding a couple or a single person who will parent a child who is in need of parents. That couple can be same-sex or mixed-sex, and ought to be assessed to find whether they will make good parents and whether they are the right parents for a specific child. To blankly equate the process of adoption with kidnapping, and trash all adoptive parents alike as “kidnappers”, seems neither logical nor reasonable nor kind nor just.
Ted’s claimed that this kind of trash talk about parents is “king” at a Catholic website. I would like Eric’s view on whether this is so, because to me, it seems hardly “kingly” to trash so many good parents as kidnappers. I’m finding it hard to see the goodwill I’m supposed to read in Ted’s trash talk.
By the way, Jesurgislac, have you spent any time or energy today contemplating that you’re dying? Have you spent any time preparing for meeting your Creator? Have you spent any time considering that the Creator is worthy of your adoration, friendship, and submission?
Have you? Is that where your accusations that all foster and adoptive parents are kidnappers came from – your belief that doing so validly prepares you for meeting your Creator?
Pterodactyl: You’re right, contraception is an important issue, which is why I wrote about it more than two years ago. http://www.catholicnewsagency…..php?n=516
You’re totally off-base about the Them vs Us mentality; my prior three articles in the “Five Ways to talk to the Left” vein were on abortion, euthanasia, and stem cell research.
But the concept of doing further research on contraception and formatting the information into a Five Ways article is an interesting one. Thanks for the tip; I may use it.
Yes, our biological connection to our parents matters; it’s part of our uniqueness and identity.
Situation #1 – Sperm donors are true parents to their own true children, whom they will never know or love because they have knowingly, intentionally, institutionally abandoned them. Likewise the children, who are being deprived of their own parents without any say in the matter, are left wondering their whole life why their actual parents abandoned them. It’s completely unjust. Sperm donation is the institutional violation of children and their natural right to be connected to the people who sire them; it’s both kidnapping and abandonment in a single stroke.
Situation #2 – Divorce and remarriage is breach of contract — the permanent betrayal of spouse and children. Kids almost never view a step-parent as a true parent. In fact, when the divorced parents separate and then re-marry, the original set of kids feel estranged in the new families that the parents go on to create. The NEW families and new kids gain the institutional priority and attention, and the first set of kids are left shuffling back and forth between two foreign families, neither of which is fully their own. At best, step parents are adult friends; at worst they are a constant source of tension, alienation, chaos, and depression. This is the tricky reality unleashed by the evil of divorce and remarriage (often multiple remarriages). Divorce is a grave breach of contract and must be punishable by law, as it was formerly. Real lives and economic well being are destroyed by divorce.
Situation #3 – Fostering is not immoral, for it admits a tragedy already took place (the true parents have either passed away or abandoned the kids), and now good people are stepping up to help the kids, never denying the validity of the original parents. Fostering is a best-case scenario in response to a tragedy, whereas sperm donation is the institutionalization of the tragedy itself. Sperm donation is intentional victimization of children.
Scenario #4 – Same as foster parenting. Adopted children are being helped after a natural tragedy or victimization has taken place at the hands of the true parents. Adopted kids pine for their real parents, though they learn with much hardship to accept what they cannot now change. In contrast, sperm donation is the institutionalization of abandonment and kidnapping. It’s demented.
I should add that gay adoption is also institutionalized gender discrimination, for it always discriminates against one of the sexes.
Moving along, you’re the one “trash talking” by calling people “bigots” when they have many valid, concrete reasons to reject gay marriage law. No heterosexual should ever seek to create a family using gay marriage law stipulations, just as no business partner should ever try to run a company under the stipulations of “a gentlemen’s agreement.” Both are devastating to the respective enterprises. Can you imagine what would happen to business if business law was abolished and replaced with mere gentlemen’s agreements?
Finally, I will repeat that foster parenting and adoptive parenting are a best possible response to tragedy or parental abandonment. Sperm donation, however, is the institutionalized manufacturing of the tragedy. It is institutionalized victimhood of children.
BTW, I will continue to urge you to consider deeply that you are a dying creature like the rest of us. You cannot escape death, and instead you must prepare for your death by seeking the Creator for life and forgiveness. Moreover, you are not the Creator, and you, as a mere creature, cannot overrule the will of the Creator. We must comply with the will of the Creator, knowing that our Creator loves us and has our best interests in mind with his commandments. They are for our good and the good of all society. Consider the ruin that has come to society through mass divorce, and consider that this is precisely why God prohibited divorce and remarriage.
Likewise, Ted. Do think about this set of questions:
41 Then he will say to those on his left hand, “Go away from me, with your curse upon you, to the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.
42 For I was hungry and you never gave me food, I was thirsty and you never gave me anything to drink,
43 I was a stranger and you never made me welcome, lacking clothes and you never clothed me, sick and in prison and you never visited me.”
44 Then it will be their turn to ask, “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty, a stranger or lacking clothes, sick or in prison, and did not come to your help?”
45 Then he will answer, “In truth I tell you, in so far as you neglected to do this to one of the least of these, you neglected to do it to me.”
46 And they will go away to eternal punishment, and the upright to eternal life.’
Nowhere in that set of questions and answers do I see any demand “How judgemental were you about lesbians and gays? How discriminatory were you against people who aren’t heterosexual? How far did you set yourself up as superior to others?”
The questions asked are all about direct charity. When you ask yourself “who is a stranger?” have you asked yourself: Aren’t these lesbians and gays strangers to me? When you ask yourself “How am I preparing for death?” are you asking yourself “What will I say if Jesus asks me – you saw me a stranger and called me names because I was caring for my child?”
Do you feel yourself so virtuous and self-righteous that you truly think you can afford to condemn other parents, other couples seeking marriage, whom you don’t even know, on the grounds that their sexual orientation gives you standing enough to condemn them without question? Is that how you are preparing for your death and seeking life and forgiveness from your Creator?
Mr. Pavlat contributed an excellent article. But he should have broadened his target, for it is no longer only an undefined “left” that is accepting of homosexuality. Many “conservatives” agree that there cannot be any constitutional exclusion from marriage. The blame lies not least with Catholics. We have not been able to get our viewpoint across well enough. Even the defense of Proposition 8 in the California district court was so weak that even a less biased judged might have overturned it on the power of the evidence and legal reasoning presented alone. One alternative would have been to present registered partnerships (civil unions) for homosexual couples, which would have given them certain rights (for instance, in cases of medical representation) to which no Catholic can object because of the inherent dignity of all human beings. But it would have stopped short of making the sacramental bond of marriage devoid of meaning, as is the present tendency in the U.S. Registered partnerships are the solution in many European countries (and maybe unacceptable to U.S. “conservatives” for this very reason). Now the U.S. can again be, together with Canada, the Netherlands and Sweden, among the vanguard of countries that go “all the way”. Would it have stopped lawsuits on the basis of the Fourteenth Amendment? Probably not forever. But it would have given us time to think and to prepare a better case. At the Supreme Court, no new evidence may be introduced. Based on what has been presented so far in defense of Prop 8, even some “conservative” justices may well vote to confirm the California verdict. Time to beat our breasts and – quickly, very quickly – to work on a viable strategy to save one of the most venerable of our institutions. Our bishops, our Catholic universities (hello!), our media must get involved. Mr. Pavlat’s suggestions are a necessary but not sufficient condition for success. This is a thorny problem, but the Catholic teaching on homosexuality is unambiguous and can be rationally defended. Why don’t we do it?
Jesurgislac, I have been following this discussion with interest and noticed that you chose not to address Eric Pavlat’s point about marriage not being unlimited. He wrote:
Eric Pavlat is correct: There’s never been a blanket “right to marry.” Laws discriminate. We all discriminate. Discrimination is part of making judgments and part of legislating. So, it IS accurate to say that it’s discriminatory towards gays and lesbians to deny them marriage licenses. Our laws also discriminate against people who wish to practice polygamy or polyamory or who wish to marry a family member or someone under age. As a society we discriminate all the time, in order to set boundaries and guidelines that we believe will (hopefully) produce a healthier, better society. This is no different.
To hold the position that marriage should be reserved to one man and one woman does not mean you hate LGBT people. It DOES mean you hold a position that discriminates about who can marry. But I would submit that everyone on this board, including Jesurgislac, believes in laws that allow and disallow people from doing what ever they want, even in the area of marriage.
Eric Pavlat is correct: There’s never been a blanket “right to marry.” Laws discriminate. We all discriminate. Discrimination is part of making judgments and part of legislating. So, it IS accurate to say that it’s discriminatory towards gays and lesbians to deny them marriage licenses. Our laws also discriminate against people who wish to practice polygamy or polyamory or who wish to marry a family member or someone under age.
Okay, let me cover this point too.
One: Marriage law in the US and in many other countries is predicated on marriage being between two people – creating a linked pair, who have mutual rights, obligations, and responsibilities.
Two: When a person marries, their spouse becomes in law their closest relative, above other kinship categories such as parent, sibling or nibling, sister or brother, even above your own children.
Three: Marriage is a contract made between two adults. While marriage can be terminated by divorce, marriage is always entered into on the presumption that it will be lifelong: a contract that can’t and shouldn’t be entered into by anyone who isn’t yet fully adult.
So: One: we do not permit three or more people to get married, because marriage legislation assumes pairs and changing pairs to “three or more” changes legislation so significantly that no country with equal marriage between twos has ever yet tried to scale that up to equal marriage between three or more. (Countries with legal poly marriage invariably also assume that marriage is not between equals: that husband and wife have different rights, responsibilities, and obligations. Among those rights may be the right of a husband to take a second wife, for example. Equal marriage leads away from polygamy, and towards lifting the ban on same-sex marriage.)
Responding to Two: Because marriage creates a kinship bond higher than any other kinship bond, it is not permitted to marry where a kinship bond recognized in law already exists.
Responding to Three: Because marriage is a contract between adults, entered into for life, it is not permitted for a child to sign a marriage contract. Countries which permit children to get married are invariably countries with unequal marriage, which regard both children and wives as the property of the patriarch, to be transferred from one patriarch to the other without change in status.
There are rational reasons for restricting the freedom to marry to two people, to people not already married, to adults, and to people not already linked by a kinship bond.
There are no rational reasons for a ban on same-sex couples marrying. There are only homophobic reasons, and rather random ones at that.
I’ll make this my final post, Jesurgislac, and you can have the last word.
I obviously agree with your scripture quote, but keep reading and you’ll find plenty of talk condemning sins (wrongs/injustices/ethical failings) and urging men to turn from sins (or face just penalties from a Just God). You can be certain that our human longing for justice reflects our Creator’s own demand for justice and uprightness. He will rightly and fairly Judge our sins and rebellions. No one can escape the Creator’s just demands, but our Creator will liberally pardon sinners who confess their rebellion and turn to God for forgiveness, light, and love.
Next, you are wrong to label me as “self-righteous.” To the contrary, I speak as a person fully persuaded of his own ethical and relational failure in many matters. I commit sins like everyone else. Yet this is precisely what salvation pertains to. Salvation is offered to help us become truly good and charitable as the Creator intends. I suspect if you pause and allow your conscience to remind you of wrongs you’ve committed against others, you too will see your need of salvation. Moreover, wrongs don’t just disappear; they must be addressed, recanted, and repaired. This is what salvation is all about. Salvation is about the transformation of our lives, leading to greater love and harmony with God and humankind. In fact, since human wrongdoing is the chief obstacle to tranquility and peace on earth, the rejection of evil and commitment to do right is the chief means of our restoration.
Since you’re here at a Catholic site, won’t you join us in recanting of our wrongs and seeking the ways of goodness, forgiveness, and restoration? We’re all guilty before God, but the Creator has loved us enough to call us to life-giving transformation. You, too, are called of God. Listen and don’t harden not your heart.
I wish you well. May God’s peace, grace, love, and forgiveness be with you.
Since you’re here at a Catholic site, won’t you join us in recanting of our wrongs and seeking the ways of goodness, forgiveness, and restoration?
Believe it or not, that’s exactly what I’m trying to do. I see Catholic opposition to civil marriage for same-sex couples as a great wrong: I hope someday you will recant that wrong and seek the way of goodness, forgiveness, and restoration.
Wolfgang’s assertion that Many “conservatives” agree that there cannot be any constitutional exclusion from marriage. The blame lies not least with Catholics. We have not been able to get our viewpoint across well enough.
The problem is not whether Catholics can get their religious viewpoint that same-sex couples can’t be allowed to have a Catholic marriage across. The problem for those attempting to use religious arguments as a justification for a ban on marriage for same-sex couples, is that in the US, as in all non-theocratic countries, no religious argument is valid in banning couples from civil marriage.
Attempting to do so is wrong – a wrong I would hope Catholics would recant and ask forgiveness for.
Jesurgislac,
Your phrase “no religious argument” is surely vague. Historically, the Supreme Court has used quotations from the Bible as arguments in its judgments. And as we all know, the understanding of the “wall of separation” between Church and state has undergone much transformation. In the 19th century, the exclusion of Catholics from public offices and functions was deemed constitutional — on grounds of their religion alone.
But more so, religion informs culture, and the courts have surely decided on grounds of public mores. The standards of the “common person” and similar tests show that culture is the indispensible foundation of a common-law system. In the United States, nothing has influenced culture as much as has (Calvinist) religion. So, formally your argument is correct, but materially it cuts too short. One argument that Judge Walker used was that the Christian religion no longer influences American culture (and therefore the public order) as much as it may have in the past, and that public sentiment therefore no longer stands in the way of recognizing same-sex marriages. This is an argument about an increasingly secular culture. When I beat on our Catholic chests, it is because we have assimilated to this culture in the U.S. for so long (although it can never be ours if we continue to be Catholics) instead of strengthening the faith-based subculture we once had.
I beg to differ from you and see no grounds on which to recant. Recant from what? I regard Catholic teaching on marriage as on other matters to reflect the truth about the moral order. Marriage between persons who cannot accomplish the purpose of this institution (regardless of the love they may feel for each other) can never be the sacramental marriage that can be celebrated in the Church. Jewish law thinks about it in the same way. If the state uses a semantic subterfuge to allow “marriage”, it only shows that it bails out from Western civilization. It can do so, but at a high price that future generations will have to pay, and hopefully only against the voices of faithful Catholics.
In the 19th century, the exclusion of Catholics from public offices and functions was deemed constitutional — on grounds of their religion alone.
Never from federal office, at least not legally, though you are right that conservatives in the 19th century, in several states including New York, wrote this unjust and unConstitutional provision into state constitutions.
This was unjust and wrong.
It seems strange to see Catholics who remember how historically they were the victims of discrimination and prejudice on grounds of religion, joining the forces of discrimination and prejudice and justifying this in terms of their religion.
I beg to differ from you and see no grounds on which to recant. Recant from what?
From attempting to deprive your fellow Americans of equal civil rights and liberties, such as the freedom to marry their chosen mate.
Jesurgislac, I appreciate your response. I agree that all the reasons you cite are rational ones for restricting marriage to people in certain circumstances. But I want to make two points of response:
First, Those may seem like rational reasons to you and me, but they are not rational to others. For example, there’s a movement of educated, professional people in this country who seek the right to enter into marriage with more than one person… They’re not huge in number. Yet. But they’re out there and growing in number. And they claim they should have no less rights to enter into a marriage of three committed adults for mutually beneficial reasons. In the stories I’ve read, many of these cases are a couple — often the same sex — sharing a life and home with another adult who may be the bio parent of the gay couple’s child.
On what basis are you going to deny such a claim to marriage rights? You claim it shouldn’t be based on gender. They claim it shouldn’t be based on number.
Our law of a marriage contract being between only two people is based in what? Legal precedent, historic cultural norms, western religious values. This is also what our definition of marriage between a man and a woman has been based on. What I think you need to understand is that for many people, it’s also not rational or wise for two adults of the opposite sex to marry each other.
My second point gets to the heart of the matter, in my view….
Marriage has always been a contract that regulates sex and the raising of offspring for the good of the individuals involved and for the community/society. Marriage is for the good of the couple, yes, but it is also for the well-being of children. Children are the future, and what we believe about how they should be formed and raised matters enormously. As a therapist and researcher, I can attest to the fact that most studies confirm what many have long suspected and therapeutic professionals have had to reluctantly admit: That the best situation for a child to be raised is by his or her biological father and mother who are in a life-long, healthy relationship.
Granted, plenty of heterosexual relationships do not cut the mustard on this. But we don’t go around claiming that single motherhood or fatherhood, or abusive homes, etc. are ideal, or that adoption is anything more than a good brought out of a tragedy.
So, to make same-sex marriage as “normative” as traditional marriage, is to make these two forms of marriage and family equal. And they are not equal for children. Women/moms and men/fathers are not interchangeable for the development of children, no matter how loving and committed two moms or two dads may be. It’s not about just about love.. love is not enough.
A society where marriage is simply a legal contract between two adults, with no link to children, is one that cares little for the future.
I hear people say “gay marriage is no threat to me or my marriage so who cares?” This is a sign that people no longer believe they have a responsibility to society, and to the welfare of children — who are the future. We get so bogged down in our little worlds, that the bigger picture, the long-term ramifications and shifts in fundamental things like marriage, disappear. As if the only thing that matters is that two consenting adults love each other and want to make a life-long commitment.
Okay, I have a moment here to add to recent comments by Becka.
It’s true that Jesurgislac’s argument necessarily extends marriage to groups, close relatives, youths, and even plain old friends. If marriage is mandated to be a “basic right” for anyone, then there can be no basis for prohibiting anyone from “marrying” — not youths, not close relatives, not college roommates, not anyone.
Fortunately, time will destroy the lunacy of the present-day social reengineering crowd. Nature, from which marriage is derived for heterosexuals, can’t be permanently changed or suspended. As a result, it’s a matter of time before the “gay marriage” movement disappears. Fascist anti-democratic government imposition (like that espoused by Jesurgislac) can’t contravene nature for long periods of time. Nature itself outruns and overwhelms the movement, and societies return to life lived in compliance with Nature.
In terms of actually stopping the madness of marriage redefinition, State Governments will do this through nullification of federal mandates, just as they are presently doing on healthcare, immigration, etc. Some 30-40 states have passed laws defining marriage as an institution for heterosexual couples, and this won’t be overruled by activist federal judges. Most states will simply opt out of the federal mandates.
For example, there’s a movement of educated, professional people in this country who seek the right to enter into marriage with more than one person… They’re not huge in number. Yet. But they’re out there and growing in number. And they claim they should have no less rights to enter into a marriage of three committed adults for mutually beneficial reasons.
In all honesty, Becka, while the right to equal plural marriage is not one I’m interested in being an activist for, and I know enough about marriage legislation to see how very, very difficult it would be to create, I don’t think it’s irrational for three people who all consider themselves equally involved with each other to want to be able to protect their three-way relationship by marriage. I don’t think it’s ever irrational for people who have committed to each other and who have children together to want to protect their family by marriage. I just don’t see it possible, in a legislative system designed for twos, to open it up to three or more without significant legislative effort.
By contrast, there is virtually no legislative effort involved at all in lifting the ban on same-sex couples marrying: it usually involves a short, straightforward court decision, or a shorter Bill. Legislation applying to mixed-sex couples equally applies to same-sex couples.
There is certainly no rational reason to withhold the benefits of marriage to same-sex couples and their children, because of poly relationships.
On what basis are you going to deny such a claim to marriage rights? You claim it shouldn’t be based on gender. They claim it shouldn’t be based on number.
If people in poly relationships can persuade the legislature to support their claim to marriage, and all the legislative effort that would involve, I would see neither point nor purpose in campaigning against it, providing there was no change to couple marriage. A mixed-sex couple who are married remain just as married when a same-sex couple have access to the same license and the same set of rights. There’s no change involved. If one member of a couple could add another person to the marriage, this would alter marriage for everyone. So it’s something that needs more thought: it’s not the same thing, and it shouldn’t be linked to same-sex marriage in the way marriage opponents so frequently do link it.
Marriage has always been a contract that regulates sex and the raising of offspring for the good of the individuals involved and for the community/society. Marriage is for the good of the couple, yes, but it is also for the well-being of children. Children are the future, and what we believe about how they should be formed and raised matters enormously. As a therapist and researcher, I can attest to the fact that most studies confirm what many have long suspected and therapeutic professionals have had to reluctantly admit: That the best situation for a child to be raised is by his or her biological father and mother who are in a life-long, healthy relationship.
I disagree with you about what the research shows and I think you would have to admit that many therapeutic professionals also disagree and say the best situation for a child is to be raised in a healthy stable relationship by adults who love the child – regardless of the gender of the adults.
As noted above, several times over: there is no requirement in civil marriage for a couple to intend or to be able to have children. Marriage rights, responsibilities, and obligations apply to both regardless of whether it’s a childfree marriage or a marriage with children.
But, all that said, even if I were to grant for the sake of argument that a child being raised by two mothers, one not biologically related to the child, or a child being raised by two mothers or two fathers, who are the child’s adoptive parents and not biologically related to the child at all, is somehow in an inferior position to a child being raised by a couple who are the child’s biological parents –
How does that justify denying civil marriage to same-sex couples?
If married parents are beneficial to a child, how can you justify denying the benefits of married parents to a child whom you say you believe is already in a less-than-beneficial position because their parents are not both biologically related?
Or, in more short form, if your priority is the welfare of children, why do you feel that children of same-sex parents fall outside your concern for child welfare? These children exist (regardless of what Ted says!) – you cannot prevent same-sex couples from having children except by major human rights violations. All you can do, as anti-gay campaigners generally try to do, is ensure that these children are denied the same benefits as the children of mixed-sex couples. Why do you think this is right?
Jesu., you’re talking about “legislative” efforts, but changes in marriage are coming from the courts. That said, here are some relevant polyamory/polygamy statements:
Law professor and
How is it possible that Jesurgislac thinks plural marriage would require “significant legislative effort” instead of simply getting passed through liberal court judges? And what a bigoted comment it is for Jesurgislac to say we have “a legislative system designed for twos.” How unfair is that??? How bigoted against “threes,” and for no valid reason.
No, Jesurgislac, the polyamorous community will sue gay marriage law in federal court, asking that it be struck down for being bigoted and hateful to groups. Did you know you are a bigot?
I know you see this is true, but your agenda is all that matters to you, so facts don’t matter. Consequences like polyamorous marriage and interfamily marriage don’t matter—so long as you get the state to endorse homosexuality you’re happy.
But wait until you see what happens when “marriage” is a word for every cohabiting group filing for a license. At that point, “gay marriage” will be meaningless as a social entity, for if everything is “marriage,” then nothing is marriage.
But in truth, 44 states have banned gay marriage, and states will refuse to comply with any attempt by the courts to impose it upon the American people against their will.
“All you can do, as anti-gay campaigners generally try to do, is ensure that these children are denied the same benefits as the children of mixed-sex couples. Why do you think this is right?”
To the contrary, pro-gay-marriage campaigners promote an anti-child marriage code, for gay marriage does not stipulate or even insinuate that the adult couple is agreeing to raise children. Gay marriage does nothing to address the rights of children. To the contrary, gay marriage advocates who talk about “lesbian families” are actually endorsing systematic institutionalized kidnapping and child-abandonment. SSM advocates are plainly anti-children.
Eric: Law professor and
Jesurgislac,
I get that you see marriage as purely a legal issue. But I am disappointed that you really missed my major points and didn’t address them at all.
I pointed out exactly why people believe it is irrational and unwise to extend marriage benefits outside the traditional marriage arrangement, but you will not interact with the principles involved. Perhaps you think you’re doing that, but you’re not.
You can disagree with the research all you want, but you better have some better evidence than your agenda to back it up. I supported gay marriage until I became a therapist and researcher and worked with children and families and was confronted with having to think about what marriage is for, and why it exists.
Yes, there are plenty of therapeutic professionals who support gay marriage, but some of them — and I know some — will still tell you it’s not ideal for kids. And I did say that the number of professionals who are admitting that a mother-father duo is best for the raising of kids is increasing as time goes on. (It is much like no-fault divorce. Most professionals believed a child was virtually unharmed by it so long as the parents had a “good divorce.” Then enough time passed for Judith Wallerstein to do the first major longitudinal study on the effects on divorce on children. And lo and behold she discovered something she didn’t expect to find — that no matter how civil and peaceful a divorce is, it is always harmful to the children — even when it benefits the adults — and it sometimes doesn’t show up until those children reach adulthood. Other studies have since backed this up.)
As I mentioned, love is not enough in any relationship, nor in the raising of children, and I would consider anyone who thinks otherwise to be naive.
Your point about married same-sex couples being better for children than unmarried ones exactly makes my point: It is not good enough to grant marriage rights simply because it’s a “lesser of evils.”
I answered exactly why it is justifiable to deny marriage rights to same-sex couples: because of the purpose of marriage, and it’s long-term consequences since it changes the definition of family and the raising of children. As I pointed out, this is not just about individual couples, it’s much bigger than that… it’s changes the culture, it changes how we understand family, raising children, and it alters the future. Many are not willing to gamble with such a fundamental and historical norm as marriage.
At this point, at least in this venue, you do not seem willing or able to interact with my arguments, or open to seeing this from other points of view. It is far easier to call everyone homophobic. That is not a helpful approach with an issue that many good and sincere people on both sides care so much about.
Jesurgislac: “The trend towards equal marriage makes a ban on same-sex couples marrying easy to change”
But I thought this was about civil rights?!? If this is about civil rights, then it’s wrong and unjust to keep in place the bigotry against groups, against family members, and against zoophiles.
Gay marriage advocates like you are bigots when it comes to these minorities. How hypocritical it is for gays to be bigoted towards those of other sexual preferences.
Did you realize you were a bigot? Have you always been a bigot?
I pointed out exactly why people believe it is irrational and unwise to extend marriage benefits outside the traditional marriage arrangement, but you will not interact with the principles involved. Perhaps you think you’re doing that, but you’re not.
Well, yes, I thought I was. You argue that because you think (and you think most people agree with you) that mixed-sex parents are best for children, children with same-sex parents ought not to be allowed to have married parents.
I asked you to explain why you feel that the children of same-sex couples ought to be denied married parents.
You don’t answer: instead you tell me I’m not “engaging” with your points? I don’t follow: how am I not engaging with your point that marriage is for the benefit of children, by asking why, in that case, the children of same-sex couples are to be denied that benefit?
Do you feel that those children don’t matter? Why?
I’m finding it really hard to assume goodwill from Ted’s posts, so I’m just not going to respond to them. Sorry.
Jesurgislac: “I’m finding it really hard to assume goodwill from Ted’s posts”
Really? Because I demonstrated you are guilty of the very accusation you hurl at others here, namely that Catholics “are bigots” on the issue of marriage? Your argument about bigotry rings hallow when you refuse to stand up for the civl rights of people whose sexual preferences are different from your own (i.e., the polyamorous, interfamily bonding, zoophilia, and even youths). You are willing to discriminate against all those groups and trample their “basic civil right” to marry. This makes you a bigot.
People living in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
Who pays you for your online activism on Catholic Web sites, and haven’t you learned yet that the Catholic Church cannot and will not ever embrace the immorality and rare disorder of gay sexuality? You see, Catholics understand that sex is short for “sexual reproduction” — that is, we understand that sex is naturally and intentionally ordered to the procreation and nurture of the human race. Moreover, we Catholics recognize that the state has a definite interest in uniquely protecting by law the social mechanism responsible for the creation and nurture of its citizenry: heterosexual couples.
To those Catholics still commenting: In the name of Jesus, please stop calling other people nasty names, making unfounded accusations, and so on. It is not befitting of Christianity (nor is it pragmatically useful). Re-read The Rules. Some apologies may be necessary.
Sorry if I hurt anyone’s feelings by posting this, but I feel it necessary.
Jesurgislac,
Here’s how you didn’t interact with my points:
You were claiming it is irrational for people to deny same-sex couples marriage rights. And I wrote:
But you didn’t address this.
I also wrote that:
You didn’t interact with this either; instead you shifted the argument to be about why I think children of same-sex couples should be denied married parents. And everything I wrote should have answered this.
So it’s very hard to nail anything down here because it feels like as soon as we try to address something head on, you hop over to another spot and raise a different, but related issue.
So I will attempt to do what I’m asking you to do and address your points/questions head on:
You write:
No where did I say most people agree with me… I said growing numbers of professionals agree that children are best raised and formed in their identity by bio parents of the opposite sex who are in a committed, healthy marriage. And I said research has shown this to be the case over the years. I’m not going to trot out all the studies and stats because this forum doesn’t work well for that, and, frankly, I don’t think you care. The point is, this is my opinion based on years in my work and research. That’s how I have come to my position. It’s not an easy position to come to because I recognize this is a painful issue for many same-sex people and I understand that.
You wrote:
Yeah, that’s right, I don’t think those children matter… That’s why I do what I do. Please…
I believe I already answered your question… Children deserve to grow up in a world where the woman-man marriage norm/ideal remains because it exemplifies the best situation for children. Even if it is not what a particular child enjoys, they can at least make sense of their challenges and circumstances. Otherwise, children are left, for example, trying to figure out why their sadness and longing for the opposite sex parent is just part of what’s “normal” and “fine.”
I am not claiming that every child of a same-sex couple will be damaged and messed up. I am saying that traditional marriage should remain as the cultural norm for the sake of a more stable, emotionally healthy society.
It may well be that the Supreme Court will declare it unConstitutional for same-sex couples to be refused civil marriage. But if so, the job of the therapist will only grow more important, frankly, because there are going to be unintended consequences in our culture that some saw coming but people preferred to ignore it. But I’m beginning to think people only care about what personally affects them — and they pay lip service to everything else. Such is the society we live in now. A historian I read recently said that any society that does not focus on what’s best for children is a society that won’t go on for very long. I have to agree.
Since you don’t think the desire for a polygamous marriage is “irrational”, which is tacit support, and you want rights for all LGBT, then you must think it’s healthy for children to be raised by any couple/group that falls under the umbrella of polygamy/LGBT. You claim that what’s good for children is very important to you. Have you forgotten that under the protection of the LGBT/polygamy umbrella could include: marriages made up of as-yet-to-be-determined numbers/genders of people; bisexuals, who are attracted to both sexes; transgenders, who have surgically changed genders but may still have gender confusion; transvestites; gays who work for the elimination of age of consent laws for their own gratification; individuals who publicly celebrate, on pride days and in pride parades, their participation in violent sex practices; etc. These are unstable groups, to put it gently, by any objective determination. Please help me understand why you would willingly place children in such homes.
And yet you would extend benefits to these groups. Maybe you could help me understand why. Life for these children will not be as idyllic as you think. Aside from the more obvious drawbacks, if you read some older posts, Eric Pavlat has provided links to studies done which have determined that children are many times *more* likely to be sexually abused in these situations.
We live in a Judeo-Christian society, the stability of which is based on traditional marriage/family life, or the living out of the natural order. Since you are actively pursuing the passage of laws which support SSM, I assume you recognize marriage as the principle good of that society, and therefore love and desire it for yourself, as it represents something very attractive: natural family life. But what these laws will do in the end is deconstruct marriage beyond recognition. You will end up killing what you love and know to be the priciple good, and the very basis of, the culture we live in. And, in the end, you still won’t have Marriage, only “marriage”.
But you didn’t address this.
Well, no. You didn’t come up with any rational or wise reasons why same-sex couples must be banned from civil marriage: you simply stated that there were such reasons, without itemizing them. There’s nothing there to address, except to acknowledge that people who oppose same-sex couples marrying doubtless feel as if this discrimination is “rational” or “wise” – but don’t seem to be able to come up with any such reasons to justify their belief.
I said growing numbers of professionals agree that children are best raised and formed in their identity by bio parents of the opposite sex who are in a committed, healthy marriage
No – diminishing numbers of professionals. More and more people who are professionally involved with families concur that children are best raised by couples who have a committed, healthy relationship. That’s from their own personal experience and from the studies done on lesbian and gay parents, and families headed by same-sex couples.
Children deserve to grow up in a world where the woman-man marriage norm/ideal remains because it exemplifies the best situation for children.
So you argue that children whose parents are same-sex couples, because you feel they are in inferior families, ought to be discriminated against legally and publicly because it’s somehow better for these children to be made to feel that their families are not “ideal”, and this need to make these children feel their families are inferior somehow justifies their being denied married parents?
I follow your reasoning, I guess, but it does come down to; you’re willing to sacrifice the welfare of the children of same-sex couples, and to publicly stigmatize the families headed by same-sex couples, because you feel that it’s better for society as a whole if the children of same-sex couples are made to feel that their parents, their families, are inferior.
If you believe these children matter, why would you be arguing that they ought to be made to feel inferior and legally discriminated against?
I am saying that traditional marriage should remain as the cultural norm for the sake of a more stable, emotionally healthy society.
Why do you feel that the price of a stable, emotionally healthy society, is legal discrimination and stigmatization of the children of gay parents? Presumably you’re not arguing that it’s more stable for children if their parents aren’t allowed to get married, so you feel that it’s better for “society” if some children aren’t allowed that legal stability: as you feel it’s more “emotionally healthy” if some children are made to feel their parents have an inferior relationship. Why is this inequality regarded by you as the mark of a “stable, emotionally healthy society”?
It may well be that the Supreme Court will declare it unConstitutional for same-sex couples to be refused civil marriage. But if so, the job of the therapist will only grow more important, frankly, because there are going to be unintended consequences in our culture that some saw coming but people preferred to ignore it.
I think the job of the therapist is important in any society. But especially important in a society such as you envisage, where you sacrifice stability and emotional health for some, in order to create – you claim – stability and emotional health for the majority.
Jesurgislac, you write:
Yes, I did explain reasons why some people think it is unwise and irrational:
- legal precedent
- historic cultural norms
- western religious values
- welfare of children
This is not a complete list, and just because you don’t like or agree with these reasons does not make them any less worthy. In fact, the onus should be on you to prove why something as historically associated with a stable and economically sound society as traditional marriage should be changed.
You wrote:
And are you in the therapeutic profession? Have you been researching marriage, family, divorce and child development for over 20 years? I am more than willing to concur that not everyone interprets the literature the same or has the same therapeutic experiences or values, but seriously, unless this is your area of expertise, let’s not play games here.
No, it’s just that I believe we should base fundamental things like marriage on principles… and that children are better off having their experiences validated, not by having society normalize what children often experience as a deficit. It’s really as simple as that on this point. If you can’t accept that, fine, but let’s stop talking in circles.
Any child in a single-paent family, an adoptive family, etc. grows up knowing the BEST scenario for them would have been different. And they should know and feel that, because it’s true. This world is not a perfect place, and parents and communities do many things to make up the gaps and help children flourish despite any lack in their family situations. But same-sex marriage, instead, pretends there is absolutely nothing inherently undesirable for children in that family environment. That’s the problem with it.
Jesurgislac, I do not seek to change your mind because it’s clear you’ve made it up already. I understand why same-sex couples want the right to marry. Unfortunately, I’ve yet to see much evidence that they/you really want to understand the reasons many are against it. Headway will never be made if all traditional marriage proponents are erroneously labeled homophobes. It’s a red herring. There are good reasons to be against changing the historic marital norm. There may be good reasons to change it. I have not heard them. The evidence seems to come down on the former. I’m guessing we’ll have to leave it at that.
Yes, I did explain reasons why some people think it is unwise and irrational:
- legal precedent
Not rational. There is by now widespread legal precedent around the world for lifting the ban on same-sex couples marrying: there is widespread legal precedent over the past hundred years for changing the legal definition of marriage.
- historic cultural norms
Historical cultural norms change. It was a cultural norm once for a father to give his daughter in marriage to a man of his choosing. It isn’t any more. It was a cultural norm once that a married woman was not legally allowed to sign contracts or be the executor of a will. To argue that same-sex couples must be perpetually banned from marriage because that’s the “historic cultural norm” is not rational.
- western religious values
It is neither rational nor wise to say that religious values must govern who can have a civil marriage. A rabbi has the right to say that s/he will not wed a Jew to a non-Jew in a Jewish marriage: but doesn’t have the power to say that they may not register a civil marriage. A Catholic priest has the right to say that s/he will not wed a divorcee (or two divorcees) in a Catholic marriage, but doesn’t have the power to say they may not register a civil marriage. The Religious Society of Friends has the power to say that same-sex couples must have the right to wed in a Quaker Meeting, but does not have the right to say that they will then be legally married until the civil law lifts the ban.
- welfare of children
That I did address.
You feel that the welfare of children is best addressed by stigmatizing and legally discriminating against the children of same-sex couples. I disagree.
I’ve asked you to address why you feel legal inequality and social stigmatization are best for the welfare of children, or else why you feel the children of same-sex couples don’t matter.
No, it’s just that I believe we should base fundamental things like marriage on principles… and that children are better off having their experiences validated, not by having society normalize what children often experience as a deficit.
But you’re unwilling to validate the experience of the children of same-sex couples who do not experience loving parents as a “deficit”. Why do you feel that happy, secure children of same-sex couples do not deserve to have their experiences validated?
Any child in a single-paent family, an adoptive family, etc. grows up knowing the BEST scenario for them would have been different. And they should know and feel that, because it’s true.
So again – you are unwilling to validate the experience of any child of a single-parent family, of a lesbian or gay couple, or of an adoptive family, who doesn’t agree with your perception of how they SHOULD feel? How is that conducive to their welfare?
But same-sex marriage, instead, pretends there is absolutely nothing inherently undesirable for children in that family environment. That’s the problem with it.
Actually, scientific studies of children brought up by same-sex couples demonstrate that there is absolutely nothing inherently undesirable for children in that family enviroment – and that is evidently your problem with it. It fits with your refusal to believe that adoptive children or children of single parent families can be happy and well-adjusted and believe their family is the best family. Possibly this is the direct result of your experiences dealing with children in need of therapy due to their experiences – famously, Ernest van den Haag said “I am reminded of a colleague who reiterated, ‘all my Homosexual patients are quite sick’ – to which I finally replied ‘so are all my heterosexual patients’.”
In my experience of caring for children in multiple different kinds of family (over about ten years as a professional childminder) all children naturally believe their own family to be the best: until or unless authoritative adults strongly tell them otherwise. Your urge to tell children of same-sex parents that their families are inferior, appears to source from your belief that they should feel that they are inferior – and yet, somehow, they don’t.
There may be good reasons to change it. I have not heard them
Well, I think legal equality, equal civil rights, welfare of children, are sufficient reasons. But I think, as you say, we’re talking past each other.
“The falsification criterion of meaningfulness: if a proposition is not falsifiable in any way, not falsifiable in principle, it is meaningless.”
–Peter Kreeft, Socrates Meets Kant
This idea is what I was trying to explain the other day when you said that all arguments against SSM are necessarily motivated by homophobia. It’s a non-falsifiable statement in principle, and it is therefore meaningless.
–Eric
Jesurgislac: There is by now widespread legal precedent around the world for lifting the ban on same-sex couples marrying
Ted: Widespread? Not hardly. I think 44 U.S. states (out of 50) have easily banned same-sex marriage by law. Your side is losing the legal precedent battle.
Jesurgislac: Historical cultural norms change.
Ted: The norm of “opposite sex” has never changed, nor is it changing at the present time. Less than 1% of humans will ever seek to “marry” someone of the same sex. Instead, you have a bunch of progressives trying to change the laws of the land against the unwavering trend of heterosexual marriage.
Jesurgislac: It is neither rational nor wise to say that religious values must govern who can have a civil marriage.
Ted: Actually, the Western legal structure is vastly influenced by Judeo-Christian values and principles. This is a perfectly fine reality, and in fact it’s the reason the Western justice code is so morally advanced when compared to other regions of the world.
Jesurgislac: scientific studies of children brought up by same-sex couples demonstrate that there is absolutely nothing inherently undesirable for children in that family enviroment
Ted: It’s far too early to begin pronouncing scientific results for such. Gay adoptions haven’t been around long, nor are they widespread enough to get any real research results.
But the real harm to heterosexuals and their children comes from the stipulations of the gay marriage contract. The gay marriage contract is by definition a temporary romance contract and nothing more. Such a contract is wholly unsuitable to the legal and economic needs of reproducers and their billions of children.
Ted: Widespread? Not hardly. I think 44 U.S. states (out of 50) have easily banned same-sex marriage by law.
In 11 countries: Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal in the EU; Norway, Sweden, and Iceland for the Scandinavian north: South Africa, Argentina, and Canada. Plus, of course, the United States, five states – soon to be six – and the District of Columbia. According to Article 4 of the Constitution, while regulation of marriage belongs to the states, each state in the Union must give full faith and credit to each other state in the Union: three states acknowledge this while not themselves regulating same-sex marriage. DOMA is unConstitutional law, and will hopefully soon be overthrown by the normal judiciary process which protects minority and states’ rights within the Constitutional framework. Eighteen countries around the world, including the US again, recognize same-sex civil unions with rights equivalent to marriage.
29 countries out of 192 is only 15%. But the tide would appear to be on the turn: not least because the doom-sayers who claimed that lifting the ban would lead to awful consequences have, in all cases, proven to be wrong.
Actually, the Western legal structure is vastly influenced by Judeo-Christian values and principles
“Judeo-Christian” is a nonsense (Israel is not included among the 29 I numbers earlier, but they recognize any civil marriage performed outside Israel, including the civil marriages of same-sex couples).
And regardless: secular civil marriage is not governed by particular religious rules. The Religious Society of Friends and the Unitarians and Reform Jews will all willingly perform marriages of same-sex couples; those religious marriages have no civil validity unless the jurisdiction they live in allows it.
But the real harm to heterosexuals and their children comes from the stipulations of the gay marriage contract. The gay marriage contract is by definition a temporary romance contract and nothing more.
And yet; in any country in which the ban on same-sex marriage is lifted, same-sex couples who have lived together unwed for decades show up to get married. Your assertion that life-long committed relationships are “By definition” temporary romances because the couple is same-sex makes a nonsense of the term “temporary romance”. How temporary is a romance that lasts thirty, forty, fifty, sixty years, until death separates them?
Jesurgislac,
It is only recently that some western nations have changed laws regarding marriage. 100 years is not long, historians would laugh — you need to go back further than that. Yes, historical cultural norms change and they should sometimes. However, when you’re going to change one that’s as fundamental to society as marriage, there needs to evidence that it’s the best the thing to do. You’re arguing that it’s better for culture to have same-sex marriage; it paves the way for a better future, healthier children, better societies. I disagree. As for western religious values, they have been the basis of western law for many, many years. Laws are based on judgements, on moral values. Religious and values INFORM law. That’s the way it’s always been.
As I said, you just don’t like these reasons so you call them irrational. Let’s move on.
You wrote:
I didn’t say anything about not validating any experience of a child. I’m saying that in my experience, once a child (whether adopted, single-parented, gay parented, etc.) reaches the developmental age where he or she begins to ask deeper questions about his or her origins and identity, there are feelings, loss, grief, questions, that usually come up. It is just a fact. Does that mean all these children are unhappy or in need of therapy? Of course not. It just means that we shouldn’t pretend a child’s origins and the role of both a mother and a father in the formation of a child is not important — it is.
Gay people are equal before the law right now… they can marry just like anyone else. They just can’t marry someone of the same sex. That is a restriction — or a preservation — that I think best serves children and society at large. But I also hold to the fact that marriage should remain between two people, and no legislating should change that to 3 or 4 or whatever, which I know you disagree with me on — but at least we’re both being consistent.
I don’t think we’re talking past each other, but I do think there’s nothing more to be said. I can vouch for the fact that I have wrestled with these issues for many years, coming to the conclusions I have. Perhaps you have, too. Whatever the case, thanks for the exchange and I wish you the best.
I’m saying that in my experience, once a child (whether adopted, single-parented, gay parented, etc.) reaches the developmental age where he or she begins to ask deeper questions about his or her origins and identity, there are feelings, loss, grief, questions, that usually come up.
But you are (I gather) speaking from your experience with troubled families, seeking therapy, am I correct? You are not (evidently) familiar with studies of families where the child is aware of their origins and identity and has no particular issues with it? (FWIW, everything I have read about adoptive children and children by donor, suggests that their disturbance about their origins / identity tends to source in their parents concealment – often with the best intentions – of the fact that they’re not biologically related to their parents. Discovering late on that you are adopted, or your father is not your biological father, seems to cause more difficulties than simply growing up knowing that you were chosen and how your parents got you. Mixed-sex couples are, it appears, more apt to attempt to conceal the truth from their children than same-sex couples are.
Gay people are equal before the law right now… they can marry just like anyone else. They just can’t marry someone of the same sex.
Oh, that chestnut. The absurdity of claiming that if a person is not free to marry their chosen mate, but only free to marry someone to whom they are not sexually attracted, from a range selected as appropriate for them not by their inclinations but by the government, is really ridiculous.
To argue that a same-sex couple who chose each other and lived together as mates for decades, are “equal” with a mixed-sex couple because the same-sex couple has the right to separate and choose opposite-sex partners if they want to marry, but not to marry each other, really argues that you have no notion what marriage is about – no feeling that marriage is the lifelong, loving committment of two people who pledge to love, honor, and cherish each other. You think that marriage is just “any two people so long as one’s a man and one’s a woman” – no committment, no love, no honor, no cherishing required.
If that’s your idea of “marriage”, well, there’s really nothing more to be said.
Remember, Jesurgislac, that you are referencing socialist countries in which the people have no say, but are ruled over against their will. I would agree with you that the socialists want gay marriage law imposed upon the people against their will, just like the gay judge in California is trying to impose gay marriage upon 7 million voters. Thank God the U.S.A. i hasn’t fallen fully into the control of socialist command-and-control despots. In fact, the U.S. is waking up to these imperialist activist judges who are repeatedly tearing down democracy and setting themselves up as little kings. The United States are rising up against Washington and its radical social engineers, some of whom are likely paying you to post here to persuade Catholics that gay marriage is “moral” and necessary for social justice.
Iowa, as you know, had a judicial activist overturn the will of nearly 70% of its people, and Washington D.C. is repeatedly denying the right of its citizens to put it to a vote, for D.C. knows the vast majority of its people reject gay marriage as grossly immoral, which we know it is.
Now, when are you going to let us know if you work for Media Matters? Do you work for Soros? Whose payroll are you on?
Civil marriage is governed by the tradition of all human history, and of Nature itself, which defines marriage as an institution for opposite sex people.
Finally, you are confused about what I said regarding gay marriage law stipulations. The stipulations of the gay marriage contract are approximately as follows:
No stipulations for raising children/family (devastating to heterosexual spouses and children)
No severe penalties for dissolution or breach of contract (devastating to heterosexual spouses and children)
No mention of–or protections for–economic dependents (devastating to heterosexual spouses and children)
Contract expected to end when the romance ends in approximately a few years, according to natural attractions (devastating to heterosexual spouses and their children)
As I said before, no heterosexual in his/her right mind should ever use a gay marriage contract to help establish family stability and economic well being. The contract does nothing to ensure either and much to foster the loss of both.
Jesurgislac, you wrote:
It is true that married couples have concealed info from children in the past in large number, but not much anymore. In adoption, for instance, social workers used to tell parents to not bring it up, just pretend that all is a normal bio-family in order to make it so. Well, it back-fired and that is no longer the advice anyone gives to parents, no matter who they are. Same-sex couples are a new phenomenon for the most part, and it’s much more difficult for them to conceal anything because it’s visibly obvious that a child’s origins did not originate from both parents.
My experience is both from my work, my research, and my personal life. I know many adoptive families and single parent families, as well as a few same-sex couples in my personal circles of friends and family.
I wrote and then you said:
I get your point, but my point was in response to your notion about being “equal in the law.” Marriage can not simply be what two or more people decide it means, it must have a definition and a purpose. And then those who can enter into that purpose should be able to participate in it.
Your response seems defensive. The problem is you believe marriage is just about the love and commitment of a couple. I believe it is far more than that — that it’s a societal institution that primarily preserves and promotes family life over the course of time, which ideally should consist of a mother, father, and children.
Anyone can pledge their love to each other and decide to be together forever. I also think that legal contracts should be able to be entered into by people who wish to share or confer property, benefits, visitation rights, etc. But that doesn’t have to be and should be marriage. Equating same-sex marriage and traditional marriage is an experiment I believe will be harmful, in the long-run, and I don’t believe marrying who ever you want should be a right. It isn’t a right now — we don’t allow anyone to marry anyone else. Marriage is regulated for a reason that has to do with what is believed about children, sex, and the common good.
Becka said: “The problem is you [Jesurgislac] believe marriage is just about the love and commitment of a couple. I believe it is far more than that — that it’s a societal institution that primarily preserves and promotes family life over the course of time”
This is precisely correct, Becka. Gays see marriage as a romance contract, whereas history and the Catholic Church says it’s a family-raising society-making contract. The state has a definite interest in protecting by law the very machinery responsible for the creation and caretaking of its citizenry. That machinery is heterosexual couples, not gay couples. Nature has simply not entrusted to gays the responsibility of creating and caring for the human society. Nature gave this to heterosexual unions, and the state is absolutely correct to mark that and offer legal and economic protections for the unique society-building services it receives from heterosexuals.
None of that applies to gays. Nature has made the decision. Nature has discriminated with regard to the responsibility of raising each new generation of humanity.
Ted,
Love your last comment. Wish I’d written it myself.
My experience is both from my work, my research, and my personal life. I know many adoptive families and single parent families, as well as a few same-sex couples in my personal circles of friends and family.
And in your experience, you find every single one of the children of adoptive, single-parent, and same-sex couples, is miserable and unhappy as they grow up, compared to the sunny happiness of the children of mixed-sex bio parents? I don’t doubt your experience: BUT it sounds so statistically unusual that I feel that your prejudices tend to influence your experience.
Marriage can not simply be what two or more people decide it means, it must have a definition and a purpose. And then those who can enter into that purpose should be able to participate in it.
And your feeling is, that no one except couples who can and will have children together should be allowed to participate in marriage: sterile mixed-sex couples, any couple who intends to adopt rather than have children, ought to be banned from marriage, because marriage is only appropriate for mixed-sex interfertile couples who will have children together?
That’s not a rational reason for barring a lot of couples from marriage, including of course many mixed-sex couples. It would entail testing and questioning prior to marriage. No woman past the climacteric could get married again.
Your response seems defensive.
…no, my response was contemptuous. Sorry. People who argue that it’s “equality” to tell a long-term couple with children that they can just separate and each marry another person of the opposite sex, splitting up the family, are people who clearly don’t have any respect for married love or family life.
The problem is you believe marriage is just about the love and commitment of a couple. I believe it is far more than that — that it’s a societal institution that primarily preserves and promotes family life over the course of time, which ideally should consist of a mother, father, and children.
You’re not arguing for “ideally”, though. You’re arguing that by law the only kind of family a marriage is allowed to “preserve and promote” is one in which an interfertile man and woman can and do have children together. That marriage as a societal institution is of no benefit to adopted children, foster children, children by donor, stepchildren. You’re arguing for a narrow, limited view of marriage which is not allowed to be of benefit to any non-biological children of the couple. It’s not a “societal institution”, in your view: it’s privileged institution from which people can be barred by sterility, disinclination to have children, or sexual preference, and to which not all children are entitled.#
Equating same-sex marriage and traditional marriage is an experiment I believe will be harmful, in the long-run, and I don’t believe marrying who ever you want should be a right. It isn’t a right now — we don’t allow anyone to marry anyone else. Marriage is regulated for a reason that has to do with what is believed about children, sex, and the common good.
But again – you have not explained why you feel it’s for the common good of children to have parents who are barred from marriage. Not just the children of same-sex parents, but children who are adopted by either mixed-sex or same-sex couples, whom you feel fall outside your definition of “ideal family life” and so are not entitled to be included in your “marriage is for preservation and promotion” ideal.
Ted: None of that applies to gays. Nature has made the decision. Nature has discriminated with regard to the responsibility of raising each new generation of humanity.
No: Nature has not made the decision that some children aren’t entitled to married couples. Countries which bar same-sex couples from marriage have made that decision.
But again – you have not explained why you feel it’s for the common good of children to have parents who are barred from marriage. Not just the children of same-sex parents, but children who are adopted by either mixed-sex or same-sex couples, whom you feel fall outside your definition of “ideal family life” and so are not entitled to be included in your “marriage is for preservation and promotion” ideal.
Actually, that’s not fair. You have explained. You feel it’s beneficial for “the common good” for marriage to be a privileged institution, which some children who have in your view less than ideal families, ought to be denied: that children who are in your view living with less than ideal families invariably become miserable as a result and ought to have their feelings of misery validated by society telling them that they’re right to feel miserable, that their parents are bad for them.
I tend to feel that this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: not merely that you obviously tend to perceive “non-ideal” families as invariably miserable and “ideal” families as invariably happy, but also that children told relentlessly by adult authority that they ought to feel their families are inferior, probably will, eventually – and feeling that their parents are inferior and unfit will tend to make children who love their parents unhappy.
So yes: you’ve explained that for the common good, it’s okay to make some children miserable and deny them the same rights based on their parentage, because marriage ought to be a privileged institution to which all may aspire but not all are entitled to access or benefit from.
I just disagree.
For example, Becka, your idea is that Steven Lofton and Roger Croteau, and their five children – Bert, Frank, Tracey, Wayne and Ernie – are “legally equal” as a family because Lofton and Croteau, together now for 27 years, could separate, each of them marry a woman, and let the kids decide which home of their two fathers and their fathers’ wives they were going to spend Christmas and Thanksgiving at. You probably agree with the State of Florida that their five children are much better off not being permitted to be legally adopted by their fathers, but only allowed to be fostered by them, because they ought to be aspiring to a “better” kind of family – they ought to think of their home as an inferior one, and be thinking that they could have done better. (Married or Not, It’s a Full House)
Your ideas need to match with reality. You need to justify why you think it’s better to set some parents up as inferior to others, based purely on their sexual orientation, rather than because of their capacity as parents. Your judgement, for example, would suggest you feel that Christopher and Valerie Carey (for example) were an “ideal family” because they were married and interfertile, so their children were living with their mother and father (for the older daughter Quimani, till the day she died) while Steven Lofton and Roger Croteau are not ideal: that the Careys merited marriage so that their relationship could “promote and preserve” family life, while Lofton and Croteau do not merit marriage, because as Ted says, “Nature” means they’re not really living together for 27 years, rearing 6 children, and changing (they estimated) 20,000 diapers – they’re just having a transient romance.
That’s your view too, Eric? You feel yourself superior to Steven Lofton and Roger Croteau, because you’re rearing 6 children biologically related to you, while they only fostered 6 unrelated HIV+ children?
I notice you keep referring to gay people who already have children as wanting to marry. Almost half of all babies are born out of wedlock, without societal ramifications, to mostly heterosexual couples. I’m afraid the claim that not being able to marry is harmful to the homosexual world and their children isn’t compelling.
I know that you prefer this discussion to remain in a purely legal vein, but I’d like to hear your views on another angle of this topic. It seems that when the underside of gay life is mentioned you fall silent. I’ll try again, paraphrasing a comment I posted yesterday. This is important for you to address to back up your claim that the welfare and rights of children will be harmed by not passing SSM laws. You must be concerned for children yet to be born, not just children *already born* and in families.
You support polygamy and you want rights for all LGBT; it follows then that you must think it’s healthy for children to be raised by any couple/group that falls under the umbrella of polygamy/LGBT. The LGBT/polygamy umbrella provides the potential for children to be born into the following: marriages made up of as-yet-to-be-determined numbers/genders of people; and any combination of – bisexuals, who are attracted to both sexes; transgenders, who have surgically changed genders but may still have gender confusion; transvestites; gays who work for the elimination of age of consent laws for their own gratification; individuals who publicly celebrate, on pride days and in pride parades, their participation in violent sex practices; etc. These are unstable groups, to put it gently, by any objective determination.
As you would extend benefits to these groups, please discuss this underside of gay life in regards to raising children. And remember, if half of babies are now born out of wedlock, society is no longer attaching a stigma to children with unmarried parents, so you need a different reason for pushing for SSM.
Life for these children will not be as idyllic as you think. Aside from the more obvious drawbacks, if you read some older posts, Eric Pavlat has provided links to studies done which have determined that children are many times *more* likely to be sexually abused in these situations.
Jesurgislac,
I never said “every single one of the children of adoptive, single-parent, and same-sex couples that I know is miserable and unhappy.” I said that many children — even the “happy” ones I know — still struggle with identity issues and loss when they are not raised by their bio parents in a stable marriage. Maybe that’s hard for you to read, but it’s the way it is. And it is one of the reasons I don’t believe we should hold up same-sex couples as a normative, healthy unit for child raising and development. I am also not a fan of no-fault divorce because it harms kids, and we would be better off as a society taking marriage much more seriously.
I also never said only couples who can have children together should marry. I explained that I believe marriage ought to have a definition and a purpose, not simply be something anyone can do with anyone. This means marriage should be defined and structured on an ideal for family life, even if many people (through their choice or not) fail to conceive and bear children. This is because traditional marriage is the best structure for raising the next generation and also because it is a social and political structure that deeply affects culture and society on many levels.
(We have mainly been discussing this as it pertains to the welfare of children, but that is only one part of an argument against same-sex marriage. I think it’s one of the most important, though.)
Thanks for clarifying that it was contempt I was picking up on, and not simply defensiveness.I find more contempt in your recent responses, as well as putting words in my mouth and seemingly failing to understand many of the points I am trying to make in good faith. I will certainly grant that perhaps I have made them poorly, but a fruitful discussion is impossible if one person refuses to grant good will towards the other, speaks (writes) out of contempt, and misrepresents the other’s comments. So, given this is the case here, I no longer believe it’s helpful to continue to engage in this conversation with you.
This proves exactly the opposite of your point. Don’t bring your imaginary friend in the sky and his supposed rules into my life and the laws that govern the land.
Becka: many children — even the “happy” ones I know — still struggle with identity issues and loss when they are not raised by their bio parents in a stable marriage.
Ted: Absolutely true. Getting disconnected from one’s biological parents is *not* nature’s way, and humans struggle with it. It’s a tragedy and not something we should ever seek to engineer.
If you really don’t want to be called a bigot, stop comparing the gay rights movement by NAMBLA. Then I’ll stop viewing you as Fred Phelps.
We haven’t been monitoring this thread as closely as we should.
Let’s all return to the issues and get away from attributing motives to other commenters. See our Rules, linked below.
Thank you in advance.
Does this post “assume the goodwill of the other person”? You keep clicking that you agree to The Rules, yet posts like this keep showing up.
As to the content of your question, you show yourself to have less knowledge of of Catholic moral doctrine than I would have thought, given your claim of special knowledge in this area. You don’t understand that I will be judged more harshly than you will. You don’t realize that even major sins of yours will be overlooked, while my minor ones will be counted against me. You don’t “get” that I’m far more concerned with my own sinfulness than I am with that of others.
It may be helpful for you to look up act, intention, situation, objective sin, and culpability in a Catholic context.
In brief, the comparison should never be, “Where am I compared to so-and-so,” but instead, “Where am I compared to where God wants me?” I know that the way I’m living my life is inferior to God’s plan for me, and that knowledge is sufficient for me. Judging other people is God’s job, and I’ll leave that up to Him.
Eric: even major sins of yours will be overlooked…
Not to get off track, but did you mean because of ignorance or lack of willful intent? I don’t think we should assume too much good will (honest mistakes?) on the part of serial adulterers, thieves, liars, slanderers, atheists, and more. In most cases, people know enough to be guilty. There’s plenty of willful rebellion in the heart of men, even when individuals haven’t had much training about moral issues. And people develop affections for sins, even when they lack much understanding of the ramifications.
Any person dedicated to spreading moral evil with willful dedication, especially after having heard the truth, is unrepentant and on the way to final damnation. God requires all humans to respond to the truth.
Ted,
I believe God will show tremendous mercy to those who truly think they are doing good, yet who are ignorant of The Good.
Here’s part of the Gospel from last Sunday: “That servant who knew his master’s will but did not make preparations nor act in accord with his will shall be beaten severely; and the servant who was ignorant of his master’s will but acted in a way deserving of a severe beating shall be beaten only lightly. Much will be required of the person entrusted with much, and still more will be demanded of the person entrusted with more.” I think what I originally wrote lines up with that Gospel pretty well.
Catholics need to focus more on mercy as taught to/by St. Faustina. Pray for your enemies. Love those who persecute you and who call you names.
Remember the zeal of St. Dominic, staying in the chapel all night long, weeping and wailing, “Lord, what will become of sinners?” His main mission was among the Albagensians, which meant that he was especially praying for those sinners who “[spread] moral evil with willful dedication” (if you know anything about Albagensianism). It’s hard to go wrong following the example of St. Dominic.
–Eric
That the religious homophobes presented no facts or supporting data for their cause.
Totally clueless – like the writer of this article.
Lets start with rights then…
Does the church have a right to dictate restrictions upon a contract between two people and a governing body?
The answer is simple. If the governing body is the church then yes, otherwise no.
You are SO going to he’ll!
Chris P, the judge was a gay activist who magically found in the U.S. Constitution the right for gays to marry, even though it’s not in there, nor did it even enter the Founders’ minds.
Since the U.S. Constitution says nothing of gay marriage and thus has no jurisdiction in the matter, it’s a state issue, and California decided it didn’t want gay marriage. That’s all the data you need. States decide, and you can have your 5 states that accept gay marriage. We’ll keep our 45 that reject it.
So…I struggle with identity issues and loss. But I was raised by my hetero, dude and lady bio parents in a stable home.
Clearly, we can’t allow straight people to marry. Their children might experience life emotions such as loss. For that matter, we certainly can’t allow people to date or become friends, because those things can cause feelings of loss or issues with identity.
Won’t someone think of the children and ban all interpersonal relationships, once and for all?
Freedom is the right to do what we think we ought to do – not what some mullah, pastor, professor of ethics etc. thinks we ought to do (whether or not he claims to speak for an actually existing god).
“He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her” and “how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?”
The Catholic church has no business lecturing the gay community on morality when it is complicit in the cover-up of institutionalised paedophilia.
nonsense. Please see rebuttle here –> http://tinyurl.com/39mz29r
It is very telling that when you google the two words “intrinsically disordered” you come up with two basic results. First is the RCC definition of homosexuality, and second is a medical answer that says intrinsically disordered proteins are Nature’s response to the increased complexity of higher organisms and are associated with diseases such as Cancer.
Given the way my lesbian daughter and her family have been treated by the church, I have difficulty not equating the two.
No one is asking the RCC church to change its rules regarding homosexuals, you can believe what you want, although what happens to LGBT catholic teenagers is truly horrific, but that is something for your own consciences. What we families of LGBT people would like is for you to mind your own business, and stop trying to inflict your religious rules on the rest of us.
These are talking points more designed to comfort those making them than to persuade those who are skeptical – they are largely self-serving and conclusory in nature (and the so-called data is selective and not as solid as it would seem to those likely to resort to it in a fit of confirmation and selection bias).
The fundamental reason this approach is not viable is that it still treats gay folk conceptually, as abstractions, as a Them, rather than part of Us. If you truly treated gay folk as part of Us, you would have a radically different approach than the one of offering propositions for assent. This has consistently proven to be the Achilles heel of people striving to preserve the one-man/one-woman definition of marriage. And so far, it shows no likelihood of improving; instead, people are digging in further.
“One must pay the government a fee in order to marry. But rights are free and automatic, not available for purchase.”
That’s weird. Don’t we have the right to bare arms?
on the part of serial adulterers, thieves, liars, slanderers, atheists,
I just love that, putting atheists in the same boat as adulterers and thieves. How about murderers, are we better than murderers?
George H Bush thought we should not be citizens, so maybe we are worse than murderers, because murderers are still allowed to be citizens.
Eric: Does this post “assume the goodwill of the other person”?
Fair point, Eric. So can I rephrase this: Why do you feel Steven Lofton and Roger Croteau shouldn’t be allowed to marry? You assert in your post that people who think about marriage ought to think about the children: so, thinking about the Loften-Croteau family, and their six children (all born HIV+: one daughter died before her 6th birthday): justify why you feel those children are better off because their fathers are legally banned from marriage? If I assume your goodwill and your thoughtfulness, I have to assume you have thought with goodwill about those children of same-sex couples, and you have decided with goodwill that they are better off if their parents aren’t permitted to marry.
So, on what basis do you feel those children benefit by your goodwill decision that their parents shouldn’t be allowed to marry?
So this is basically a checklist of how to be a bigot without it seeming like you’re a bigot? Riiiight.
I notice you keep referring to gay people who already have children as wanting to marry.
Actually, what I reiterate – glad to do it again – is that civil marriage does not require a couple to be able to have children. No fertility test: no interfertility test: not even a stated intention.
But, when people argue that same-sex couples ought to be denied civil marriage because same-sex couples do not have children and marriage is solely for couples bringing up children, I have to point out that this argument would mean either that some mixed-sex couples would by definition be banned from civil marriage, if no one was allowed to get married unless they were able to have children together – or else (if adopted, foster, AID, or stepchildren were included) that some same-sex couples would have to be allowed to get married, since same-sex couples do have children.
What Becka seems to have moved on to is the acknowledgement that yes, some same-sex couples have children, but now she argues that for the good of society as a whole, those children’s parents can’t be allowed to marry, because it is better for the common good that some families are publicly stigmatized as inferior to others.
You support polygamy
No, I don’t. I think you’ve misunderstood something I said earlier.
and you want rights for all LGBT; it follows then that you must think it’s healthy for children to be raised by any couple/group that falls under the umbrella of polygamy/LGBT.
I think it is healthy for children to be raised in and by a supportive family, a stable environment, by people who love them and care for them.
I do not wish to stigmatize any such family: I think caring for children is too important to stigmatize. For example, leaving the issue of same-sex marriage aside: grandparents and their daughter bringing up the daughter’s children; two sisters bringing up their children together as unified set of cousins; foster parents bringing up foster children from multiple different backgrounds; To Becka and to Eric these may be inferior families because there isn’t the
“father, mother, and genetic offspring” which they see as the ideal to
be preserved and promoted at whatever cost to other families: to me, these are people fulfilling the parenting needs of children, providing a stable, loving family environment.
That’s what I see as healthy for children. I do not see it as “healthy” for any children, contrary to Becka’s theory, to pick out some families and declare them “less than ideal”, based not on how they function in caring for children, but whether the parents are heterosexual and if the children are their biological offspring.
And remember, if half of babies are now born out of wedlock, society is no longer attaching a stigma to children with unmarried parents, so you need a different reason for pushing for SSM
You need to address that to Becka and Eric. They are simultaneously asserting that marriage is the best environment for bringing up children, and that the children of same-sex couples should be banned from that environment by law. My discussions with them have led to the point where we at least understand each other: they think it’s best for children if marriage is a privilege which shall not be extended to all families, I think that deliberate inequality is neither stable nor healthy.
My position on lifting the ban on same-sex marriage is what it always was: it’s a civil right, defined by the Supreme Court as essential for the “orderly pursuit of marriage”, and it is unjust and irrational to say that same-sex couples have no right to marriage. Nothing that anyone has said here has changed my mind on that.
The LGBT umbrella [I've omitted the "polygamy" element since I see it as irrelevant to the case for lifting the ban on same-sex couples marrying] provides the potential for children to be born into the following: marriages made up of as-yet-to-be-determined genders of people;
True. Children can be born into marriages made up of two men, two women, or a man and a woman. The case against lifting the ban on same-sex couples marrying is that some children will be better off if their parents are denied marriage – since I’m presuming that you are not arguing that the children will be better off if they are never born at all.
and any combination of – bisexuals, who are attracted to both sexes;
Well, yes. But then, a ban on same-sex couples marrying would not prevent a mixed-sex couple who are both (or either) bisexual from marrying.
transgenders, who have surgically changed genders but may still have gender confusion;
Yes. The issue of whether someone who has changed gender is legally banned from marriage is perhaps a topic for another thread, but you might want to consider: Suppose Irene, who was christened Peter, but has since transitioned, wants to marry Colin: and suppose John, who was christened Susan, wants to marry Daniel. They all live in the state of Texas, let us say, which recognizes neither gender transition nor same-sex marriage. So John and Daniel can marry legally in Texas, because to Texan authorities John is still legally Susan and so not
banned from marriage to Daniel. But Irene and Colin can’t marry in Texas, though if they moved to Florida, where gender transition is recognized, they could do so. Merely banning same-sex couples from marriage does not resolve the issues to do with people who are transgendered still being able to marry and to parent children.
transvestites;
According to all surveys I have read, the vast majority of men who like to dress up in women’s clothing are heterosexual – and often married. Again, banning same-sex couples from marrying will not prevent a man who enjoys transvestitism from getting married and having children, if he and his wife want children.
gays who work for the elimination of age of consent laws for their
own gratification;
I’m curious. Do you feel that it’s okay for older heterosexual men to have sex with young girls? I don’t. Do you feel that because the most common breach of age-of-consent laws is older men having sex with young girls, this is a good reason for banning mixed-sex couples from marrying? I think that Ernest Willis, for example, is scum – but I would not argue from Mr Willis’s behavior to say that no straight man should be allowed to marry, nor even that Mr Willis should have been forcibly divorced
(unless his wife wanted to – and I’m quite surprised she didn’t!)
individuals who publicly celebrate, on pride days and in pride parades, their participation in violent sex practices;
If by that you mean people involved in BDSM, again – BDSM practices are by no means confined to same-sex couples. Nor should you assume, to put it mildly, that because someone shows up at a public parade – whether Pride or Mardi Gras or Independence Day or Hallowe’en – dressed in a costume that they would not normally wear in public – that this means they are inherently unstable.
These are unstable groups, to put it gently, by any objective determination.
Well, perhaps men who prey on much younger people – yes. But unlike you, I would say that all men who prey on the young are unstable: I would not exempt the older men who prey on young girls. For the rest – I think you’d find it difficult to prove objectively that everyone who shows up at a public parade in a silly costume is a member of an “unstable group”, which seems to be
your thinking – or that every married man who in private dresses up in “women’s clothes” is therefore unfit to be married or to have children. Nor, without a sexual orientation test which does not, in fact, exist, could you possibly prove that everyone who is bisexual is “unstable” or ban them from marriage.
I also never said only couples who can have children together should marry. I explained that I believe marriage ought to have a definition and a purpose, not simply be something anyone can do with anyone. This means marriage should be defined and structured on an ideal for family life, even if many people (through their choice or not) fail to conceive and bear children. This is because traditional marriage is the best structure for raising the next generation and also because it is a social and political structure that deeply affects culture and society on many levels.
Okay, so, again: Why do you feel that some children are better off if they are excluded from “the ideal for family life” – if their parents are denied marriage?
I’ve asked Eric the same question about a specific family, but I’m asking you generally: if you feel that marriage is about family life, if you feel that marriage is about providing a social and political structure for raising the next generation, why do you feel that children are better off if their parents are legally barred from marriage?
The presumption is that you either think the legal, social, and political structure of marriage is absolutely unimportant – it makes no difference to children if their parents are married or not, it only matters if they’re a male/female pair: or you think this structure is important, but that some children don’t merit access to it because of the sexual orientation of their parents.
Oh please. The Catholic Church has no right to tell people how they can live their lives or whether they can or cannot get married. Not everyone in the world is Catholic/Christian and they shouldn’t have to live by your arbitrary “moral” (and I use that term loosely) code. Whatever happened to seperation of church and state?
Also, there is so much dishonesty and distorting of facts and statistics in this article I just don’t even know where to begin.
I’ve read through this thread and I’ve seen opponents of SSM make arguments from three different categories: religious, sociological, and scientific. I’ll deal with them in that order.
A lot of the Catholics here seem very confused about the clear distinction between marriage as a civil institution and marriage as a religious sacrament. These are two entirely distinct things, would you not agree? So why are so many here attempting to use various religious arguments as part of their reasoning against civil marriage (an institution that has nothing to do with religion and that is not under the jurisdiction of the Catholic Church or any other religious group).
If everyone respected the separation of church and state, there would be no need for any sort of conflict on this issue between Catholic opponents of same sex marriage, and proponents of civil marriage equality rights. Basically, the wall of separation between church and state is an explicit recognition that in our society people have a right to disagree about religious ideas. People have an absolute civil right to not be bound by the rules of the Church if they don’t agree with them or believe in them. In return, the Church has a right to not have the state interfere in its affairs as long as they do not break the law (we can rationally and legitimately disagree about where that line is drawn, but there must be a line). This is a brilliant compromise that both protects people who are not adherents to a particular religion from having their freedom infringed upon based solely on religious rules that they do not recognize, AND protects people who do follow a particular religion’s right to live their life in a religious context. But it only works if both sides respect secularism as a principle. When Catholics try to institutionally interfere in the political arena, they invite others to use the political system to attack them, and the compromise breaks down. It can’t just be a one-sided thing, where religious people are free to play out their religious ideas in politics and apply them to non-adherents, but non-religious people are not free to regulate religion.
Civil marriage is a different institution from religious marriage, even though they use the same word. If SSM is legalized in a civil context, Catholic Churches will not be forced to perform their marriage ceremonies (now, and as long as the Constitution exists, a church can refuse to perform any marriage they wish). Likewise, someone who has a SSM in a civil context obviously doesn’t agree with the Catholic interpretation of marriage. So why should they bound by the Catholic viewpoint on it? Further, why should a church that agrees with performing same sex marriages that also have civil effect (there are even some Christian ones) be prevented from doing so?
If all the arguments against SSM now rest on so-called “scientific” or “sociological” grounds, then that is weak ground indeed. There is a reason that the proponents of Proposition 8 could not produce any credible evidence along those lines: none exists. Some sociological evidence exists that SSM is DIFFERENT from heterosexual marriage, but that doesn’t mean that it’s worse, and furthermore much of that evidence is related to the fact that gay couples face discrimination and bigotry in society (by that token, black people should never have been allowed to marry white people, even though the ban infringed on their basis civil rights, because there were a lot of racist bigots in society at that time). Furthermore, many of the “sociological” arguments I’ve seen here
Claiming that there is a true scientific basis for discrimination is laughable: homosexuality is a natural part of animal life on this planet (including human animals). There are many plausible theories about the possible evolutionary function it may perform, including natural limitation of population growth. But it’s just not true to dismiss it as “unnatural”, and the argument given in this post is not convincing in that regard. To say that “we’re better than animals” is no longer making a scientific argument, but a religious/philosophical one. There is no scientific evidence that the soul exists, so if you posit something like that as part of your reasoning you’re making a religious argument, not a scientific one.
Finally, I will add that a lot of the types of arguments made by Catholics in this post are a big part of why I am no longer a Catholic and now call myself an agnostic atheist (I don’t believe there is any evidence that anything supernatural exists, but I don’t discount the possibility that there is something like that, a non-falsifiable divinity, out there). I have a lot of respect for the way a lot of Catholics do good work for their fellow humans, and I respect the fact that the church at least pays lip service to rationality and reason (unlike many other Christian churches). But, sound reasoning can still lead to wrong conclusions if it’s based on faulty premises. A lot of the arguments I’m seeing here are starting with a subjective premise (same sex attraction is wrong/sinful), and reasoning from there. It doesn’t matter whether your argument is logical if that premise is wrong: you’re still wrong, in that case. So I would just offer the suggestion that if you want to understand why people like me have extremely strong intellectual reasons for opposing the Church, you subject ALL of your ideas to skepticism and logic, including your most fundamental beliefs (ie, the existence of God; opposition to contraception; belief in the Church’s Magisterial authority over you, etc). You might be surprised by where that leads you: plenty of good people disagree with you on these fundamental premises, and the Church has been very wrong before. Can you at least admit the possibility that you and the Church could be wrong on this issue rather than that everyone who disagrees with you is wrong?
Hi, Jes.
Thanks so much for your work here. You are doing a wonderful, patient job and making excellent points, with patience and care, above and beyond the call of duty.
And, besides, as Esquire’s interview with Newt Gingrich’s first wife reveals, Newt Gingrich remains a gift that keeps on giving, and giving, to the “family values” side.
Many people wrongly equate opposition to same-sex marriage with opposition to racial equality during the civil-rights movement
How exactly is it different? You are actively seeking to deprive a group you hate or fear from having the same privileges as you do. Doesn’t seem that different from racism to me.
They’ll need help seeing that one can oppose gay marriage and not hate gay people
…So if you don’t hate gay people, why would you oppose them having the same rights and privileges as a straight person?
In fact, many homosexuals live in relationships that are essentially polyamorous themselves.
Yet according to http://www.apa.org/topics/sexu…atisnature and Wikipedia it tells me that “Research indicates that many lesbians and gay men want, and succeed in having, committed and durable relationships. For example, survey data indicate that between 40% and 60% of gay men and between 45% and 80% of lesbians are currently involved in a romantic relationship. Survey data also indicates that between 18% and 28% of gay couples and between 8% and 21% of lesbian couples in the U.S. have lived together ten or more years.”
Living together for ten or more years sure sounds polyamorous to me :/
Jeez, if you going to be bigoted at least have the guts to admit you just don’t like the idea of those icky gays corrupting the world.
I agree with your post. The one thing I would add is that *even if it were true* that gay people were more likely to be polyamorous, or that being gay was a choice, that STILL wouldn’t justify legal discrimination against them. The government has to have a rational basis, at the very least, for any such discrimination. People are free to be gay, or to have sex with multiple partners, in our society even if some other people morally disagree with that. The point is that we have freedom of choice as free adults, precisely because churches and such no longer have legal power over us.
Furthermore, even if it were agreed upon that gays do “bad things” at a higher rate (something that is NOT agreed upon, let me be clear), it doesn’t follow that they should be denied civil marriage. There has to be a rational basis for why denying them marriage serves some reasonable legal function, and there isn’t, since marriage is not connected to notions like promiscuity or whether or not people will be gay in the first place. Denying them marriage will not cause fewer people to be gay, nor will it reduce promiscuity (in fact, it might do the opposite). I’ve NEVER heard a reasonable explanation from a same sex marriage opponent explaining a rational SECULAR reason why gay people should be denied civil marriage. All I’ve heard is vague stuff along the lines of it symbolically approving of homosexuality (not a rational basis, and if a religious objection, not an acceptable basis for law), or claims that it will harm children (denial of marriage will not stop gay people from having children).
Instead of trying to come up with talking points, SSM opponents might do well to actually consider the substance or lack thereof of their arguments against CIVIL marriage. They ought to consider whether they might be wrong in a serious manner, instead of just assuming they are right and plowing straight ahead with strategies to bury the opposition.
I’d like to hear any opponent of SSM explain something to me: why do you feel that religious objections have any relevance to a political debate over civil marriage?
John, I believe some reasons they feel religious objections have relevance might be because the political decisions in favor of gay marriage/equal marriage may influence a) followers to leave the church b) general culture c) policies on issues that pertain to charities and businesses connected to the church.
And I think they believe (as is their right to believe, though it is not a belief I share) that they are right and we are wrong.
When human beings make up their minds about a topic, when their belief “feels” right, it is incredibly hard to change their opinion. It’s hard even when one wants to change their own opinion and is faced with irrefutable facts.
I imagine trying to change my own opinion on something like the death penalty (I’m against it). What would make me believe that it was a good and proper thing?
In this case, there is deeply deeply held emotional beliefs that I am not sure can be changed by our side offering facts or examples.
We need to always act as strongly, kindly and ethically as Jesurgliac has done here. This person exemplifies polite and meaningful discourse, good listening skills, and remaining open to ideas, while remaining strong and standing up for all those who believe that consensual sexual activity, relationships of many forms, and families (made up of people who wish to be caring, stable and consistent) are a positive and good thing.
There have also been comments made by those opposing SSM which have been kind and open and I appreciate those as well. I disagree with them deeply, but I do appreciate that many are willing to at least discuss gently.
I think, for me, when it comes to arguments between those who hold religion to be the highest truth and those who don’t….well I rarely see any common ground. The language and frames are just entirely oppositional.
Peace.
I appreciate your response. I’ve tried to be polite and I’m willing to listen if people have any arguments that are better than those that have so far been offered. I don’t believe that opponents of SSM are evil, but I do believe that they are misguided and that they have not fully considered the impact of their beliefs on other people in our society. All I’m saying is that I’ve never heard any compelling argument for their position, much less been convinced to change to their position. I would be willing to change my views if they could offer a compelling argument or evidence.
But you’re right about how people get emotionally attached to their beliefs. I think that’s what this mainly all boils down to.
John, I suspect neurologically it is less “attached” and that neural pathways have been built and committed to, so much so that the idea of moving to a different position can cause deep anxiety and stress. This is not to say that positions cannot be changed, but it takes either a significant epiphany (perhaps in my example of the Death Penalty, losing a loved one to a murderer might change my view point) or a series of ongoing changes and environments (perhaps working in the criminal justice system for long enough to see things differently) to take a person’s core pathways on a 180.
See this website http://changingminds.org/expla…onance.htm or this one on framing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F…_sciences) or this one book by George Lakoff on the seeming forcefield between left and right morality, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Politics for more information on how the brain holds onto it’s decisions.
I think that for me, the issue comes down to the separation of church and state. Civil marriage, adoption, home ownership…laws that govern how all of us as a member of the country act, the rules we follow….those are secular and civil. Rules of a church, which one may choose to join and follow, are different. And I think it should stay that way.
Respectfully,
Elizabeth
Yes, homosexuality is just like marrying your anime body pillow! Homosexuals and body pillows are both capable of signing a marriage contract, right?
Your amazing strawman arguments make it hard to take you at all seriously.
The Catholic Church has every right not to marry homosexual couples, but it does not have the right to govern the United States of America.
Also, I found this article by Andrew Sullivan to be very beautiful and a wonderful case for support of SSM.
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/08/the-unique-quality-of-lifelong-heterosexual-monogamy.html
“I don’t believe that opponents of SSM are evil, but I do believe that they are misguided and that they have not fully considered the impact of their beliefs on other people in our society.”
John I believe this statement is something the other side feels as well. They believe we are misguided, perhaps not evil, but wrong. They think we have not fully considered the impact of our beliefs on other people (children in many cases) in our society. They believe they are offering love and compassion to gays and lesbians by trying to encourage them to NOT be gay or lesbian, or at the very least, not have sex. Not have families.
We do not see that as love and compassion. They do not see our actions as just or compassionate.
How do we ever come to any kind of middle ground? Understanding?
I’m not sure we can, and that is why I think a secular government which adapts and changes its laws under constitutional guidelines, with checks and balances and with as balanced of an eye towards keeping church and state separated is absolutely necessary.
And I believe dialogue and forthright, gentle conversations are valuable to all of us.
is the compromise position. If we simply all agreed to separate civil marriage from religious marriage, then everyone could keep their own viewpoints without infringing on other people’s rights at all. And that is essentially what SSM proponents argue: that the issue of civil rights and equal treatment under the law is separate from the issue of whether any church approves of a particular civil marriage or not. That is the beauty of our constitution: it allows us to coexist peacefully without necessarily agreeing on everything.
It’s mostly the religious side that cannot seemingly live with that situation. They view their religious beliefs as universal, and so they increasingly try to use the political system to push back against the fact that certain segments of our culture have rejected their views. I just wish they would realize that the separation of church and state is the very strongest thing that protects their ability to hold whatever religious views and practice their religion however they want without someone coming in and punishing them for it because they disagree. Without separation of church and state, perhaps some other religious group that disagrees with their views might gain control over the government and start legalizing discrimination against religious minorities. I don’t see why this isn’t obvious to everyone, given the wide divergence of views even just within Christianity. Mutual respect for the “cease fire” is what keeps the culture war of ideas from becoming a real war. But lately that respect seems to have been eroding on the religious side (a great example is the whole Ground Zero mosque controversy: way too many people seem to think it’s okay for double standards to be applied to a religious minority in that case. The people who are standing up for religious freedom in that case are generally not religious conservatives).
But, considering the source, it makes sense. You are losing the battle and will lose the war, sooner than you think. Keep trying with your hate speech, it just makes you look as bigoted and hateful as we all believe you are.
You people make me sick.
10 Reasons Why Gay Marriage is “Wrong”
1.) Being gay is not natural. Real Americans always reject unnatural things like eyeglasses, polyester, and air conditioning.
2.) Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.
3.) Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.
4.) Straight marriage has been around a long time and hasn
Dear Inside Catholic,
Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God’s Law. I
have learned a great deal from your website, and try to share that
knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend
the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them that
Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate.
I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the other
specific laws and how to follow them.
1. When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a
pleasing odor for the Lord – Lev.1:9. The problem is my neighbors.
They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?
2. I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in
Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair
price for her?
3. I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in
her period of menstrual cleanliness – Lev.15:19-24. The problem is,
how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offence.
4. Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and
female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend
of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can
you clarify? Why can’t I own Canadians?
5. I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus
35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated
to kill him myself?
6. A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an
abomination – Lev. 11:10, it is a lesser abomination than
homosexuality. I don.t agree. Can you settle this?
7. Lev. 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I
have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading
glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle room
here?
8. Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair
around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev.
19:27. How should they die?
9. I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes
me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?
10. My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev. 19:19 by planting two
different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing
garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester
blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really
necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town
together to stone them? – Lev.24:10-16. Couldn.t we just burn them to
death at a private family affair like we do with people who sleep with
their in-laws? (Lev.20:14)
I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident
you can help. Thank you again for reminding us that God’s word is
eternal and unchanging.
Your devoted disciple and adoring fan,
Jack
I’m Catholic, and I disagree with you on just about every point on your list.
1. Marriage is a right as defined by the supreme court. PERIOD. The supreme court decides what is and isn’t a right. They have declared that marriage is a right.
2. Marriage, whether damaged by heterosexuals or homosexuals is between me, my wife and God. The government roll in marriage is to regulate and facilitate marriage as a right as defined by the supreme court. Since there are economic benefits tied to being married, the government cannot trample the rights of people to marry. My marriage, witnessed by priest, consecrated in the church and enacted as a sacrament has nothing to do with civil marriage as defined in the laws we’re talking about.
3. This “What about the kids? Won’t you think of the kids?” is a straw man tactic plain and simple. The numbers of children raised by single parents approaches 33% nation wide. Are we then going to outlaw divorce? You’re clouding the issue by adding the homosexual aspect to child rearing especially by saying kids need both a man and a woman.
4. The slippery slope argument is also a straw man tactic. Legalizing gay marriage won’t lead to people marrying their horses or registering for 3 or 4 way marriages. These same arguments were used when the supreme court overturned laws banning inter-racial marriage, and there wasn’t a rash of people marrying livestock afterwards either.
5. I won’t even bother to go into refuting this claptrap.
In essence, marriage is a right that is controlled by the government. As such, it cannot be witheld from a group of people due to race, religion, sexual preference etc.
the simple test is: How would I react to this if it were aimed against Catholics? If the law was to read “Catholic cannot marry under law”, then I would oppose it. I oppose this with the same thoughts and actions.
As clever as those posts are, and as satisfying as it must be to pick at people (and with what seems like easy pot shots), that actually just does more harm than good.
Those facts or snippets of information are within a contemptuous post. While the biblical quotes are correct and I can certainly see that they make their point, it only insults your opposition, leading them to hold more firmly to their belief system.
Just like if we were at a rally and someone drove by screaming a nasty epithet at our gay and lesbian friends….not nice, not useful, not helpful.
I get it though. It feels good on either side to really stick it to the opposition. To hurt them like they hurt us and our friends and family. But those posts aren’t going to do jack to change anyone’s mind and in fact probably just push harder the opposite way.
That doesn’t mean I think we have to be weaklings in how we defend our position, nor do we we need to lie down and take abuse, but in this particular forum, I see no reason to stir the pot negatively.
Leviticus amuses me though, I do have to admit that.
If you’re going to lift your comments verbatim from somewhere else, you might at least give them credit. http://www.snopes.com/politics…rlaura.asp
While I agree that people should attempt to be civil, I also feel that the “hurt” associated with having your religion be ridiculed or mocked (deservedly so in the case of a lot of things in the Bible) does not even approach the “hurt” associated with anti-gay bigotry. The only “hurt” that comes from having one’s religion ridiculed is annoyance and anger at having to share a country with people who don’t agree with you. But the hurt that comes from bigotry is serious and concrete harm to people’s lives. It’s destroyed lives in many cases.
It’s hard to not feel contempt for people who actually want to destroy the lives of strangers just because they have an idea that those strangers lifestyle is not one that they themselves would choose. So arguably any ridicule and anger that get directed towards Christians as a result of this issue is self-inflicted. If they would just leave other people alone, there wouldn’t be anyone who cares what Catholics believe about gay marriage. But instead they do things like give money to anti-gay political campaigns (such as in the Prop 8 case). They go and campaign against people’s families. They spew venom and hide behind their religious beliefs as if that makes it okay.
I’m sure that all the people here who oppose gays really believe that they aren’t being bigots. But not everything is subjective. If it’s not bigotry, it sure has a similar effect when you’re using the political process to attack people you don’t know.
Believe me, John I get it. I feel a great deal of anger at SSM opposition. In fact, in my inbox I have an email from the HRC/Joe Solmanese featuring some images of what the opposition is proposing. Nooses and quotes from Leviticus are not nice. Whoever made those signs hates my friends. Hates my godparents. Hates me, basically, because I support my friends and so I am no better. I feel anger at that and I feel fear that people could hate so much. But then our entire human history is full of such hatred of “other”.
I just know how the internet works is all, and snark, sarcasm etc leads to pot shotting, leads to hate speak. I don’t know if you can ever say that one side “deserves” something more than another.
I’ve seen bile spewing forth from LGBT activists and I’ve seen hatred pouring out of the mouths of Christians, both.
I’m frustrated too, John. Very frustrated that this battle is being waged, that people have been bashed, killed, bullied, mocked, shamed…and for what? There is no good reason for it. Fear seems to be the only thing. Fear of change. Fear of re-establishing social norms and gender roles.
100 years ago we had children as young as 5 working in factories in this country at least (children are still working in factories around the world to make our goods but that’s another story). We don’t allow that. People change and laws change.
200 years ago, give or take, no one believed in “germs” until Pasteur proved that’s what caused infectious diseases. Science brought about change that improved health.
We allow for religious freedoms in ways never before seen. That’s a change too.
Women used to be considered property and I doubt any of the ladies on this thread would like to go back to not being able to own property, or controlling their own assets, or being forced to submit to sexual intercourse when they didn’t want to….
Society changes and adapts to new discoveries and truths. The adaptation and change causes intense systemic and personal anxiety.
This is why I am promoting compassion and gentleness during times like these. Cause they are hard on everyone. I’m not saying that we have to be nicey-nice all the time and never fight back. I’m just aware that certain forums are better for fighting. Internet forums? That never ever ends well.
I don’t want, above all, to “other” the people on this thread. It’s hard not to do, because I’ve spent a great deal of time reading it, digesting the arguments and it’s really tempting to be mean about it. I’ve decided not to do so here, to practice what they are preaching I suppose, since I’m an atheist of sorts.
But yeah, John. Being attacked sucks and sucks damn hard. I wish the world was a gentler place.
Best to you John. XO
If you took the time to actually read the snopes article fully, you would see that the original author of the letter is unknown, therefore, how could anyone credit it? I didn’t get it from snopes (try highlighting and copying text from their site), I got it from one of the 5 million sites that have it hosted.
Marriage is not a romance declaration. It’s a contract for reproducers who have come together to create and raise humanity out of their sexual union.
Gays are infertile and don’t need any contract for their sexual relations, for there is nothing at risk.
Admin, I think the claims here that Catholics are being “bigots” a violation of board rules. Seems like “bigot” is the preferred slander from the SSM advocates here, but it’s not a real argument and is a mere ad hominem.
Please consider erasing posts that levy the charge of “bigot” and accuse Catholics of “bigotry.”
Thanks,
Ted,
I find your attitude about marriage basically a reduction of marriage t