Same-sex marriage
In 1849, California had its gold rush. Now, with the Supreme Court mandating same-sex marriage and overruling a significant majority of the voting public, we can say that now, over a century and a half later, we’re having our fools rush. Like it or not, same-sex marriage is now the law in California.
On another list I follow, the majority of those contributing were wringing their hands over the thought that an initiative to amend the State Constitution has qualified for the ballot, and the fear that their fellow Californians won’t “do the right thing” and vote it down. However, they are buoyed by the hope that the flood of same-sex marriages over the next five months will make it infeasible to undo, no matter what the voters decide.
I’ve held back in that forum — there are plenty of other things that are more fun to fight about. But one comment, where someone referred to marriage as a “magic word”, got me to thinking, and to asking a question no one else seems to ask very often:
Why should a society have an institution like marriage in the first place?
When I proposed that question, the first answer I got was another question:Â “Do you have any idea how hard it is to raise a child when you’re a single parent?”
Aha! It’s about children. If you’re entering into a marriage, it’s for the sake of any children that may issue.
The next sound I heard was a bit of back-pedaling, and a statement that childcare was part of the reason for marriage. After all, if we consider it purely as an institution focused on children, it becomes a lot harder to justify same-sex marriages.
What about other reasons?
Well, another person mentioned inheritance. Marriage provides clear rules of inheritance. But then so does having kids, and so does having a will.  If you want someone to inherit your property when you die, you can arrange it without combining two lives into one.
Love and commitment are frequently mentioned criteria. But you can love whomever you wish. You can love more than one whomever. You can move in to a building together and form a commune. You can make public statements of commitment, and invite friends to witness, and have a party, and make a big to-do over it. Why do you need a to tell a bureaucrat at the hall of records you love this or that person? He’s not going to send you any wedding presents.
Child care? Sharing of household duties? Sharing of resources? Our culture has all kinds of legal mechanisms for this sort of thing without requiring that people join their lives together. Day care center and school staff don’t have to marry the parents of their charges — it’s enough to have a binding contract for services. If you want to build a support structure around the parents of a child, where resources can be shared, the family could form a corporation. That takes care of community property, and inheritance.
Marriage is more than just love and a ceremony of commitment. It’s more than a way of sharing resources and labor. It’s even more than building a structure to raise the next generation. There is a magic inherent in marriage that people seem determined to ignore. There are religious roots.
A big clue lies in a special privilege extended to married couples — neither member of a married couple can be compelled to testify against the other in a court of law.
This is an amazing privilege. It’s very rare in our society. I can think of three other areas where such a privilege exists: doctor-patient, lawyer-client, and priest-penitent. And even these only apply during communications that take place while the doctor, lawyer, or priest are engaged in their profession with their clients. Lawyer-client privilege doesn’t cover remarks I make in a casual conversation with a friend who happens to practice law. But a spouse is never off duty in this regard. Everything that passes between a husband and wife is privileged, and none of it can be compelled in a court of law.
Why create a special relationship in the law, and endow it with this kind of power?
In the Bible, and in other religions, marriage combines two lives into one. In many senses, man and wife become “one flesh”.  If we take this seriously, we realize that compelling a man to testify against his wife is the same as compelling the wife to testify against herself. Marriage is a religious and spiritual union of two individuals, far beyond anything mere law can achieve.
A society either believes this and acts accordingly, or it doesn’t.
With the latest ruling from the California Supreme Court, as well as the Massachusetts Supreme Court and several European nations, we’re seeing cultures abandoning this belief. Marriage is becoming one way of arranging one’s personal affairs, not much different from forming a corporation or legal partnership. The magic is going away.
And in the regions where the magic has been pulled out of marriage, people are increasingly not bothering with marriage at all. They either have children out of wedlock, or they decline to have them at all.
I suspect one of three things is going to happen in California, and in the rest of the United States.
1) The people will overturn same-sex marriage laws. Over the objections of the LGLBT community (the first “L” is “Liberal”), marriage will remain defined as one man and one woman. (If the people stand up to the Islamic community, it will remain defined as only one man and only one woman. We’ll see.) Status will remain quo.
2)  The State will continue to recognize same-sex marriages, and will require anyone who offers a benefit to married couples to offer the same benefit to same-sex couples. (If the Islamic community is noisy enough, the law will be extended to cover polygamous marriages — probably through the back door by bullying large corporations into compliance.) After a First Amendment fight where churches may or may not retain the right to grant religious marriages only to those who meet their religious criteria, they will quit having anything to do with civil marriages at all. If you want to be married in your faith, your priest (or priestess if you’re a Wiccan) will marry you. If you want a civil marriage, go to a justice of the peace and get your civil paperwork. But don’t try to pretend they’re the same thing.
3) The same as #2, except the churches are forced to go along. All forms of marriage lose their magic.
It’s interesting. Where marriage loses its magic, people tend to forego it. Without that magic, marriage really is “just a piece of paper”. And where marriage disappears, so does reproduction. Mark Steyn has written a book about the impact of lower reproduction rates, and those areas where marriage has gone out of fashion are declining.
Like it or not, a strong religious foundation for marriage, indeed for life as a whole, pulls people out of the present and turns their mind toward the future. And it’s this view to the future that gives us goals, and a reason to bring children into the world.
If you’re living for tomorrow, children are the future. If you’re living for today, children are a nuisance.
I don’t expect scenario #3 to take place in the US. Perhaps we’ll see both #1 and #2 in different states. If we do, we’ll see the states that preserve marriage outbreed the states that don’t. And the churches and other groups that preserve marriage and honor its magic in their own ways will prosper over those that don’t.
The future will be filled with people who consider children the future, and the people who consider them a nuisance will go extinct.
Hopefully, they won’t find a way to take the rest of us out with them.
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This is difficult for me to express as I know several gay individuals who are loving people and in many ways far more “moral” than many straights I’ve known in the past. However, when push comes to shove I would have to side with the heterodoxy (if there is such a word). Simply put, it’s the hetero union that works. While I know the current state of marriages as it exists today is in dire need of serious mending and we straights have no one to blame but ourselves, it’s an ideal that must be maintained strictly for men and women. Like many, my dissaproval of SSM is not derived from a religious standpoint (being non-religous) but of one that tugs at the heart as well as the mind, yet unable at this time to verbalize in full as to why. Gut instinct just tells me that it is not in the best interest of society to accept and validate it on the same par as that of heterosexual unions. One thing for sure, the argument against SSM cannot be won based on an “ick” factor or religous doctrine. It had better be based on a secular line of reasoning which I’m sure there is. In the meantime I too am trying to figure out this unfortunate dilemma.
Good eye there nowmen that’s the reason all California divorce lawyers are pro SSM “gaylimony” is as good as palimony and alimony now we’ll see men taking men to the cleaners or girls but this is their traditional habit once they’re clutching their prey, actually I think they’re already at it with a couple of women in NY or Mass and it’s pretty nasty. SSM was made legal in Belgium a few years ago and it was barely mentioned because it’s not worth the trouble, in the US what I found annoying is those religious organizations using this issue as a political weapon and the manipulation of the believers and those holier than thou leaders like Craig who’ll probably divorce his wife and marry his bathroom sweetheart in California, life is great and entertaining.
Let them be as miserable as everyone else. I can’t wait to see the SSM divorce courts fighting over child support, bank accounts, retirement and marital assets. It’s going to be a real joy to watch.
To Roger, I well understand you I just finished an answer to FathersHaveNaturalRights which might be published or not? I don’t know but hope and I wish you’d refer to that as my answer to you might be in the vein. Faggots have existed way but way long before some dude started thinking of writing a book called the bible, we are living today in the 21 century AD did we suffer from their homosexuality? Hitler put them in concentration camps with pink labels he was a great guy Hitler he also made it illegal to smoke tobacco in the streets have a good afternoon I’m going to sleep it’s 2:30 Hrs here.
Thanks to FathersHaveNaturalRights.
I hear you, but to me this is not enough of an argument to be against gay marriage, let’s call it SSM as I just learned this acronym, to me as far as I know they have always been put down even when SSM was allowed in the Roman empire there were plenty of jokes about them, the thing is that they always existed throughout history even before Abraham took his tribe from Ur (that’s when the bible starts I believe)now we are in the 21 century AD (anno Domine-year of God)do you really think giving them the same rights will change anything in our society? it is just for us to say “yeah we don’t go for that shit” but they are human beings just like us and therefore deserve the same rights, we’ll not have more or less babies to continue our dreams whether fallacious or not. Now fatherlessness has also always existed due to war, business or estrangement it’s been such an accepted fact that judges in court would leave guardianship to a woman who behaves worse than a whore with a bad kinky side than leave the kid to a decent man I know it is wrong but it is hard to dissociate a woman from her child those are all part of the pre-concepts we have grown to believe in.
Enough of that I was Woodstock generation had I been an American I would a got my ass in Nam and yesterday they had a memorial in Fresno for them did you know they called them baby killers when they returned? I was anti Viet Nam war those who never returned were just burned on the altar of an arrogant LBJ government unfortunately mislead now we have another Texan and we have what I call Viet-Raq same shit same arrogance, it’s all right they’ll find space for another wall at Arlington I’m in for gay liberation and feminism because these are the only fighting groups who deserve acknowledgment I’m in for abortion because if they’d give an half assed education to those having an abortion it would be cut by 70% but of course our Christian belief forbids us the unmentionable let’s protect the life of an unwanted child who’ll end up on the street and in jail with no education but it’ll give more jobs to our heroes in the police so they can shoot another guy with 51 bullets, things are gonna change good? I ain’t sure, bad? Certainly not another one: young girls are their genitals on cell phones and now everyone (me included) is kinda shocked do you realize the damage such a stupid thing can do in the long term? that’s the way I might be thinking like the mainstream I guess but the thing is; I don’t participate with the kids anymore, I’m an old fart I don’t know what it’s gonna be 20 years from now it may not be better but certainly not as bad now.
2AM here
It is because “gay marriage” and “gay civil unions” are so antithetical to nature, and to every good thing about the human race focusing on faith in the future, that the government will have to take a very heavy hand to force it on society at large.
The government is prepared to do that, in much the same way that the unnatural condition of fatherlessness has been forced upon the West.
The responsibilities of ‘traditional’ marriage are far greater. Traditional marriage blends the genes of two separate people and their families, making them one. This is a much, MUCH greater role in the maintenace of any culture.
Gay marriage cannot, and will not do that.
Traditional marriages are the unions civilizations are built upon – because they produce new human beings.
Gay marriage cannot, and will not do that.
Traditional marriage passes genetic materials from their unions, which has been maintained for millions of years via life, to the next generation. This ensures the continuation of the species.
Gay marriage cannot, and will not do that.
And for this reason, the ‘gay lifestyle’ is actually a death style. It ensures that those that practice it will die at the end of their days WITHOUT passing the genes of their unions on to the next generation.
Darwin would emphatically state that gay behavior is selected against. Because in the world of biology, it is a genetic dead end.
Gay marriage, for all of the above reasons, will never be equivalent (regardless of what any court, judge, or legislature says) to Traditional Marriage.
While it may exist as a novelty legal arrangement, gay marriage is a marriage in name only. It is a hoax. A sham. A cheap parlor trick.
Herr Karl Lembke
Divorce lawyers should love SSM too.
To obtain a divorce one has to prove (all by himself) that he was cuckolded how humiliating for a man I never remarried. However the first word of “palimoney” came out of California, California is a real great state and I’m sorry not to have been born a Californian think of it they’ll soon introduce a brand new word it will be “gaylimoney” can you imagine Jack left John he felt abused he quit a job paying $100.000 a year to be a stay at home and do quilts and macrame and now feels lost and cannot find a job funny he but the businesses and the state are going to make so much money out of this the other states will realized it’s time to change the younger generation realizes this and things will change, I’m old I was brought up homophobic like, I was against the war in Viet Nam But I gave all the support I could to Lt Calley, I spoke and questioned German soldiers who where caught in Stalingrad came back in 1956 and had to spend 6 month in a hospital to be rehabilitated, and spoke with people from Patton third army who liberated Bastogne (the battle of the bulge) my own country, You should also think that plenty faggots died for freedom and yours and mine countries they deserve the respect and same rights as any other human being, I’m sorry but I’m upset by people having the ability to write using a featherless pen and a rotten inkpot.
There’s no fools’ gold here with SSM, and I didn’t invent the phrase “Go west young man” this is here to stay and will be accepted all over the US of A in 20 years maybe less.
The reasons for marriage, good question I got married to escape my social environment as did she (I was in love she wasn’t) Princely families married for land, alliances and whatever, bourgeoisie married for capital gain, common the majority marries to be part of society as it is the normal thing to do, but if one checks the laws one will find out that the laws have changed and a woman then has nothing in common with a woman now as you mentioned 1849 in those days there was a Susan B. Anthony and the change was slow as even today one hears about “my wife, my house, my car” that’s what marriage seems to me Oh also marriage as been used by governments as an incentive like tax rebates for families with more than 1 or 2 children.
Then you involve religion in marriage, well, the Roman Catholic church’s canon is very strict no divorce! This came in medieval times when women were dying a dime a dozen in childbirth and men could get married 6 or 7 times in a lifetime, ah religion it can help you accept the unexplained and comfort you in the knowledge that God is with you at all times and you will be saved (so were the German soldiers who died in the WWI with “Gott mit uns” on their buckles).
As for those churches who promote the real marriage (one man one women) I’ll tell you, think of me as a Taliban, I can have up to 4 wives, I can (all according to the charia) beat them if they don’t behave and the food better be ready when I come home and watch a rerun of the Pittsburgh steelers with Frank Tankerton while they’re cleaning the house, or hut, I could kill my own daughter if I think she were insulting my manly honor by kissing somebody I don’t like, don’t you think I would hate Americans trying to tell my wives they had equal rights and could act like sluts (you used the word first) do you think it is right to have a marriage annulment because my wife is not a virgin as has being done in France lately?
Before emperor Constantin 325 AD gay marriages were commonly accepted in ancient Rome and these people were no less religious than us If Rome fell apart it was because of greed and corruption NOT BECAUSE OF GAY MARRIAGES.
By the way on the tombstone of Nicholas Kazantzakis the author of Zorba the Greek there’s an epitaph “I hope for nothing, I fear nothing I am free” it is just outside the Heraklion cemetary as excommunicated.
So Herr Karl Lembke ich habe sie nicht so gerne, servous
Same sex “marriage” (and domestic unions, which are marriage in all but name) are falsely portrayed as an ‘over there’ thing, something which doesn’t affect anyone but the two people forming the union. Gay marriage advocates push this position with the line, “If you don’t like gay marriage, don’t get one!”
However, legal recognition of gay unions means legal endorsement of gay unions, and endorsement means enforcement. For example, a business giving particular benefits to a straight married couple will be FORCED to give the same benefits to a gay couple in a legally recognized marriage or domestic union. There goes the myth of it not affecting anyone other than the two people in the gay marriage or civil union.
Plus, where gay marriage and civil union laws are, ENDA laws will follow and prevent anyone from deciding not to hire individuals who have voluntarily proven their irrationality and poor decision making skills by engaging in medically suicidal gay conduct.
Where ENDA laws exist, schoolchildren will be taught that gay is good, that gay people are an oppressed minority, and that straight men are to be cast as the horrible brutish oppressors who must be the subject of more and more punitive laws.
SSM is yet another method by which singles and childless couples are forced to subsidize someone else’s dependent.
In this case, it’s the “partner”, who will reluctantly accept pension, medical coverage, Social Security etc. premised on the efforts of their partner – but without additional contribution. Pay the same, get twice as much back.
Since all finance is a zero-sum game (printing more money does not help – don’t tell Congress), whenever people are added to the pool of recipients, but not to the list of contributors, the following effects invariably occur:
1. everyone’s share is diluted
2. those who have no spouse or minor child have their future savagely looted – again.
Most importantly: remember that SSM is a feminist power play. NOW has been funding and handling the legal assualts, with occasional gay men propped up to make it look egalitarian.
NOW’s idea is to have women fill both marital slots, so they can have all the children they want with as many different studs as they care to sleep with, and collect a huge load of child support for every child. These “marriages” are a business arrangement, a predatory feminist shack-up based on power and distrust of pesky men.
This leaves men with no place in society. When everything is “for the children” and those children are chattel of women, the future of America is all too predictable.