Here I have outlined my reasons for considering it vitally important that homosexuals have a way of legalizing our unions. The question here is, should we have gay marriage or “civil unions/domestic partnerships”?

I think the latter might be a better idea. I can’t say for sure, but here are my reasons.

Up until the 60’s, the law recognized the fact that men and women are different. Men are larger and stronger than women; they can commit rape. Women get pregnant. Nature allows men to take their pleasure and walk away from it. Only civilization restrains this. Indeed, I used to say that civilization was simply a snare to force men to provide for women and children. Up until the 60’s, a man and woman getting married were not both entering the same contract. The man was agreeing to support the woman and their children, his wife for her entire lifetime and their children until they were grown up. The wife’s obligations were frankly far less onerous.

Only, thanks to no-fault divorce and the other follies of feminism, the scales have now been restored to the way nature set them. Women are expected to have premarital sex with a variety of partners, be prepared with birth control to prevent the natural consequences of this, and to somehow achieve a highly unnatural psychological state that will protect her from the emotional consequences of this behavior. (Women have a less volatile sex drive because we have a far larger investment in every sex act and must have more self-control in that regard. Because of this, we are biologically designed not to take a casual attitude toward sex. The woman who can do so is very rare.) If she is able to get a man who can get all the sex he wants without committing to marry her, she is expected to hold a job herself to singlehandedly support any children who result once her husband takes advantage of no-fault divorce to seek out new pastures, while strangers being paid minimum wage raise her children for her. These are only a few of the many consequences of pretending that men and women are equal.

Yes, yes, equality in the sense that both sexes can own property and will be arrested for committing murder. But that kind of equality is the only kind that is in any way possible. If you don’t like it, blame either God or Darwin, according to your lights, but don’t try to pretend it away.

Untold suffering, particularly of the helpless children, has resulted from the alteration of marriage laws to pretend that women can “walk away” from sex acts the way men can. The law used to offer women some protection from the ruthlessness of nature. It no longer does.

Marriage law should acknowledge the fact that men and women are different.

If two men or two women can get married, obviously their marriage will not take into account the inherent differences between men and women. Neither partner has the same need of protection that a woman marrying a man needs. Sure, there’ll be at least a moderate power imbalance as there is in any human relationship, but nobody in a gay union is going to get knocked up. I think you’ll agree that an adopted child is a rather different issue. Very different from having a man give you two children and run off when they are one and two years old, as the father of two of my dearest childhood friends did, so that you must struggle to support them while he, miles away, remarries and produces a new brood.

So it concerns me that having gay marriage might further obscure the legal difference in marriage for men and women. Maybe it wouldn’t. Still, as I have tried to show, there are some important differences between a gay and a straight union. (Also important similarities, as detailed on the page of my homocon site I linked above.) Considering what a disaster the obfuscation of the distinction between men and women has been thus far, I am hesitant to take this risk. Phrases like “domestic partnership” seem to me utterly lame, and if I ever find the right woman, I will refer to her as my wife, not my “partner”, a term I find appallingly cold. But from a legal standpoint, I have to say that it might be the better option.

The planned nature of a gay couple’s reproduction is an important part of it. Put it this way: heterosexuals have to have a social and legal system in place that will protect any children who result from their activities because children might happen even if they don’t intend it, even if they believe themselves to be infertile, even if they are using birth control. (I know several people who have children because their birth control method failed.) A gay couple who goes to the trouble of adopting or having a child via artificial insemination is by definition making plans for them. It requires enough effort that they just aren’t going to be blindsided by suddenly having a few toddlers all of a sudden. Feminists seem to imagine that the majority of heterosexuals are going to plan on their own for their children the way homosexuals have to do, but biology ensures otherwise.

There is another issue, and one that will no doubt get me in trouble, but why stop now? And it’s the power differential between men and women.

In Western civilization, which has the benefits of Hellenistic humanism and Judeo-Christian faith, there is a concept that the weak should be protected. This eventually resulted in the concept of chivalry, that men simply because they are men are obligated to protect women. Feminists hate this because they want women to be equal to men, but unfortunately for them, nature has no intention of cooperating with their desires. Outside Western civilization, where there is no sexist notion of “chivalry”, women are beasts of burden and property in a way that women haven’t been at even the most oppressive times in European history. (Note that Spanish-speaking cultures tend to be far more sexist than other European cultures and then remember how long Spain was occupied by Muslims.)

In Western civilization, men believe that women are weak and therefore men should do the hard physical labor. In Africa, Asia, Arabia, men believe that women are weak and therefore men can compel them to do the hard physical labor. In Western civilization, parents believe (or did, before the 60’s) that little girls are weak and therefore their brothers should be instructed to defend them from bullying children. In Africa, Asia, Arabia, parents believe (still) that little girls are weak and therefore you might as well put them to death so that you’ll be able to have more boys. In Western civilization, men believe that women are weak and therefore should be courted and romanced into marrying them and having sex with them. In Africa, Asia, Arabia, men believe that women are weak and therefore may be bought from their fathers without their consent and forced to gratify their owner-husband’s desires. And these are not memories of the distant past, these are things that are going on in the millions today while Western feminists whine about glass ceilings and sexist word choices. Already the depradations of feminism have ensured that the girl who escapes co-education without having been sexually assaulted is a rare creature indeed. The one “advance” is that we seem to have a gender-blind policy for killing babies, while in China and India female fetuses are far more likely to be aborted.

In short, when men stop holding doors for women, the suttee is not far behind.

(Note: the only major exception to this rule is Japan, which was occupied by *cough* a major Western power and forced to mend its ways. Other Western oppressors forced Indians to give up the suttee.)

So changing the laws to pretend that civilization does not depend on men protecting women - an ethic rooted in a decent man’s need to protect women from his own baser impulses - is opening the gate to a host of atrocities. This is why marriage always conferred different obligations on men than on women. Take a gay couple and neither has that inherent, biologically-based, inescapable need for protection from the other. So where do they fit into this? A gay couple would pretty much have to have identical legal obligations to each other, unless we’re going to amend the laws to recognize concepts like “butch” and “femme” or “blonde” and “brunette”. I can just imagine the drawn-out divorce cases now: “Your Honor, the hormone tests prove that Ms. Smith is the ‘brunette’ in this marriage.” “Objection! Ms. Jones was the one who played softball, plus she has short hair and wears pants!”

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