Be careful what you ask for
Activists agitating for same-sex marriage laws may not have thought through the extended consequences of legally re-defining marriage.
This argument is loaded with sobering thought.
The debate over whether the state ought to recognize gay marriages has thus far focused on the issue as one of civil rights. Such a treatment is erroneous because state recognition of marriage is not a universal right. States regulate marriage in many ways besides denying men the right to marry men, and women the right to marry women. Roughly half of all states prohibit first cousins from marrying, and all prohibit marriage of closer blood relatives, even if the individuals being married are sterile. In all states, it is illegal to attempt to marry more than one person, or even to pass off more than one person as one’s spouse. Some states restrict the marriage of people suffering from syphilis or other venereal diseases. Homosexuals, therefore, are not the only people to be denied the right to marry the person of their choosing.
Okay, now exhale. Because if that didn’t catch your breath, you weren’t following the reasoning.
The author is not equating homosexuals marrying with all the other scenarios mentioned in that paragraph. Only to say that
marriage is heavily regulated, and for good reason. Why?
Because a marriage between two unrelated heterosexuals is likely to result in a family with children, and propagation of society is a compelling state interest. For this reason, states have, in varying degrees, restricted from marriage couples unlikely to produce children…
Homosexual relationships do nothing to serve the state interest of propagating society, so there is no reason for the state to grant them the costly benefits of marriage, unless they serve some other state interest. The burden of proof, therefore, is on the advocates of gay marriage to show what state interest these marriages serve. Thus far, this burden has not been met.
Maybe the angry mobs haven’t considered or even heard this kind of reasoning, but hopefully the California State Supreme Court will.
The biggest danger homosexual civil marriage presents is the enshrining into law the notion that sexual love, regardless of its fecundity, is the sole criterion for marriage.
Consider:
If the state must recognize a marriage of two men simply because they love one another, upon what basis can it deny marital recognition to a group of two men and three women, for example, or a sterile brother and sister who claim to love each other? Homosexual activists protest that they only want all couples treated equally. But why is sexual love between two people more worthy of state sanction than love between three, or five? When the purpose of marriage is procreation, the answer is obvious. If sexual love becomes the primary purpose, the restriction of marriage to couples loses its logical basis, leading to marital chaos.
And ultimately, society. The family is the foundation of civilization. It is crumbling, but in many countries the institution of the family is being shored up again. If the current surge of blind rage forces the legal sanction of same sex marriage, there may be no recovering from the ruins dead ahead.
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It seems to me that society as a whole has lost the understanding that marriage is about the next generation, and not the current one. All of those things that go into marriage: love, economic means, procreation, faith; are all an intrinsic part of creating and raising children. This means that marriage is all about self-giving. The arguments for homosexual marriage are ultimately about self. Every society that has become focused on the self-centered individual has collapsed. Thousands of years of historical examples show this. The negative reaction to the proposal for homosexual marriage is in no small part visceral – most people intuitively understand that marriage is a heterosexual institution. The enlightened view that homosexuals are entitled to marriage is based in either ignorance or out-right denial that marriage exists to ensure the security and viability of future generations – of our children. These enlightened ones believe that by bestowing the right to marriage on homosexuals that this is a compassionate act, but is it compassionate to men and women who have as their vocation being good parents, or to the children who need and require the emotional support of a mother and father? I am amazed that members of the judiciary, legislature, and executive branches of our various governments do not recognize this, or that empathy and compassion are frequently mistaken terms. We should have empathy for the homosexuals and their problems and show compassion by working to provide real solutions to homosexuality, and we should show compassion to our children by reserving marriage to heterosexual couples.