A while back I used to think that same sex marriage wasn’t an issue for me. Let them have the same heartbreak, legal issues, divorce etc. that men like I have had. Be careful what you wish for and all that.
Now that I’m seriously committed (or should that read: “I should seriously be committedâ€ÂÂ) and will marry again, I think differently.
The cultural erosion that would result from same sex marriage affects everyone in society, especially children. Denis has framed the issue around the ramifications to men, and indeed this would further deteriorate the father/husband role in marriage but especially in child raising. As prisons swell with a disproportionate amount of men raised without fathers we can’t sit back idly and pretend a problem doesn’t exist. Yet, in the name of equal rights, we are contemplating yet another tweak of societal engineering that will follow the rule of unintended consequences resulting in even more crime, poverty, violence and abuse. The fact that more children are abused in fatherless households escapes the discourse and any mention of the negative aspects is met with ad hominem, debate-ending attacks of homophobia.
Quantas airlines has a policy of not allowing men to sit next to unaccompanied, underage children. The mere possession of a penis, it seems, is enough to presume a man capable of pedophilia. Given this prejudice against men it’s not difficult to see why men get the raw deal in court when it comes to child custody that they do. How would a court decide, let’s say in a case in which a man-woman couple are divorcing, who gets custody if it were revealed that the man was intending to marry another man? What if the roles were reversed and the woman was planning to marry a woman? Or if after a divorce the man would marry another man could the woman deny visitation based on a presumption that the child would be in danger of abuse? I find the scenarios of the man being denied custody or visitation highly likely. What then would the ACLU have to say; would the rights of the gay man, by virtue of being gay, trump his status of being a man and therefore a potential pedophile by nature? These are questions that should be discussed, especially by those pushing same sex marriage rights, but these proponents seem to think the only controversy is with right wing Christers who are obviously homophobic for not embracing their life styles.
Again: Be careful what you wish for.
