(no subject)

[tahnan]

I've been reading some of the articles by people who want to defend marriage from encroachment by people who are gay or polyamorous, in honor of Defense of Marriage Week. One such article ends:

If we cannot stand and defend this ground, then face it: The marriage debate is over. Dan Quayle was wrong. We lost.

Setting aside partisan lines: how desperate does your position have to be for you to invoke Dan Quayle as a source of intelligence and authority?

Comments

[navrins]

I still cannot comprehend why anybody feels their marriage is in any way threatened by allowing other people to have their own marriages.

Still don't get it.

[lilisonna.livejournal.com]

Read the article. Still don't get it. It really sounds, to me, like the people who are trying to "defend marriage" are looking frantically for some plausible reason to justify their opinion, and they haven't found one yet.

[bookishfellow.livejournal.com]

I have to admit I didn't read the whole thing...but I read a good chunk. I think the key sentence (at least in what I read) was:

The marriage idea is that children need mothers and fathers, that societies need babies, and that adults have an obligation to shape their sexual behavior so as to give their children stable families in which to grow up.

The unspoken assumption here is that homosexual behavior=bad, heterosexual behavior=good. Anyone who doesn't buy into that assumption is living in a different conceptual universe and will, naturally, not get the argument.

[colorwheel.livejournal.com]

thank god for our universe.

[in-parentheses.livejournal.com]

That is, indeed, a completely different universe. In my universe, children need loving parents of whatever gender, societies need less population explosion rather than more, and adults do have an obligation to give their children stable families, but their sexual behavior has balls to do with it.

Sadly, I think most of the world lives in their universe and not mine.

Sam

[agrimony.livejournal.com]

I think the assumption is closer to the root of 'heterosexual sex=babies, babies=good. homosexual sex!=babies, no babies=bad'. However, marriage from the perspective of the legal system is a legal contract that has nothing to do with babies or lack thereof, so the ability to produce a baby shouldn't have any bearing on whether you can get married or not.

If they wanted to be really consistent, they should insist that heterosexual couples who cannot have babies or will not have babies shouldn't be allowed to marry either, but I don't think they'd push that. :)

[saxikath]

Articles like that one frighten me more than all the ill-formed rants you hear, because it sounds, on the surface, quite well-constructed and logical. And if you accept its premises, it is. But as bookishfellow says, the fundamental premises here are so different from the ones I accept that I can't see where there's any common ground for arguing.

There are a couple of statements that particularly made me jump, though. One in particular:

Our better tradition, and the only one consistent with democratic principles, is to hold up a single ideal for all parents... (emphasis added)

"No! Same and equal are not the same thing at all!" -- an approximate quote from A Wrinkle in Time. Since when is having a single ideal the only thing consistent with democratic principles?

Sigh.

[tayefeth.livejournal.com]

Yeah, here I thought that democracy was the governing principle that recognized that everyone has different ideas. I mean, if everyone has the same ideas and ideals, why bother with voting?