Divorce Does Not Justify Marriage Neutering

People arguing for the neutering of marriage cite the high divorce rate as a reason why a brideless or groomless couple should be able to get state marriage licenses for their voluntary association, or perhaps why we, the people, don't have moral authority to set marriage licensing requirements. After all, if it is God's will that marriage last for life and we as a society aren't following God’s will in that respect*, how can we invoke God's will when it comes to insisting that marriage uniting the sexes?  They argue that if we want to protect marriage, we should ban divorce, or they claim they're going to push for such a ban themselves.

If you want to circulate a petition to place an initiative on the ballot that bans divorce, go ahead.  Nobody is stopping you. You can vote for it, too. Be my guest. If you donate money to back it, I won't boycott your business.

One need not be religious nor believe in God nor believe that divorce is a bad to believe that authority over licensing requirements belongs with the people instead of the courts, or that state marriage licensing should be reserved for voluntary associations consisting of a bride and a groom. But in entertaining this appeal to the Bible or religious tradition, I still don't see that immorality in one thing precludes making a moral judgment at all. (If you fell down some stairs this morning, you should still try to avoid crashing your car into a wall.) If the political authority doesn't belong with the people, it belongs with nobody, as all authority of our branches of government is assigned to them by the consent of the people.  The answer is not to promote more immorality or fundamentally alter the nature of marriage. It is also disingenuous to invoke Scripture or religious tradition against those who hold such things dear with one hand and dismiss it with the other.

Yes, divorce is a bad thing. Even if it gets someone away from a sociopath - and people should get away from sociopaths - it is bad in the sense that there never should have been a marriage in the first place, and the divorce is part of the larger mistake. Marriage, ideally, should be for life. But that there is divorce has no bearing on whether or not state marriage licensing should be neutered.  It is an entirely different issue. I can cut an orange in half. I can destroy it. It can be eaten away by fruit fly maggots.  There can be a wax likeness of an orange fraudulently passed off as a legitimate orange. None of that makes an orange rubber ball an orange, even though it is round and orange in color. We even revoke the state-issued driver's licenses of some drivers because they have been horrible drivers, but that doesn't obligate us to issue driver's licenses to bus riders, bicyclists, pedestrians, or anyone who can apply for a state identification card, even though driver's licenses are considered more desirable.

Really, it is silly to say that because there is divorce, we should neuter marriage. It simply does not follow.  A state-licensed marriage is essentially a kind of partnership. Partnerships are dissolved all of the time.

The high divorce rate can be cited as evidence for a devaluation of marriage in our culture. But how would neutering marriage help that? To me, it seems, it would be kicking marriage while it is down.  Some may argue that "heterosexual couples haven't been doing such a great job with marriage, so why not let same-sex couples have a shot at it?" That may sound appealing to some at first, but it also does not make any sense, as bride-groom couples will still be able to get state licenses, and it is akin to saying "orange growers have been doing a lousy job, so let's throw rubber balls into the crate with the oranges."

Yes, the divorce rate is too high, and those who want to protect marriage should take steps to change that. There are ways of addressing that, but neutering marriage isn't one of them. That there are a lot of divorces in no way means we should forfeit our votes to judges or activists.


*From a religious standpoint, (which, we are constantly reminded, the state can't consider), any church that takes the Bible seriously should not be performing marriage ceremonies or recognizing the marriage of anyone who divorced a previous spouse without Biblical grounds.  (Biblical grounds boil down to abandonment – actual geographical or sexual abandonment or other forms, such as abuse of others or self or adultery.  If someone divorces you without just cause, that is abandonment.)

I do agree that divorce is detrimental to marriage.  To this end, I could see it as reasonable if a state decided it was going to change its laws so as to stop issuing marriage licenses to couples in which at least one of the individuals had previously filed for and received a divorce, say, two or more times.  Note - that means being the divorce initiator, not the spouse presented with the papers.  I could especially see it as a reasonable restriction if the state also allowed some other form of civil licensing for such couples.  Ultimately, however, no number of divorces changes the basic nature of marriage, or the state's interest in licensing it.

David Benkof on the Phantom Gay Past

Benkof, who has experience with homosexual behavior, has encouraged sharing this note.

The Phantom Gay Past

The idea that being gay is a naturally occurring orientation in a minority of the human population everywhere has achieved wide acceptance in our society. Many voters and legislators have been approaching the question of redefining marriage to include same-sex couples with that idea in mind.

The problem is, that idea just isn’t true. And the scholars who have provided us with the data showing that being gay is actually a product of Western society originating about 150 years ago are overwhelmingly gay and lesbian (and supporters of “marriage equality”) themselves.

These intrepid social scientists have examined the evidence of homosexuality in other times and cultures (documents, field studies) to see how the gay minority fared in other milieux. But such historians and anthropologists haven’t found much. Sure, there’s substantial evidence of same-sex relationships, love, and sex in pre-modern times, sometimes in very open contexts. But there’s no evidence of a same-sex oriented minority or even individuals with gay or lesbian orientations in any society before the 19th century.

(There isn’t any evidence of straight people either. As far as we can tell, in societies before the 19th century, even happily married people were assumed to be capable of enjoying intercourse with either sex, and only our own society includes people believed to be unidirectionally oriented. The best book on the recentness of straightness is Jonathan Ned Katz’s The Invention of Heterosexuality.)

The experts at homosexuality across the centuries and the continents have thus asserted, overwhelmingly, that being gay is a relatively recent social construction first arising in Western culture about 150 years ago. To my knowledge (and I’ve looked), there isn’t a single scholar with a Ph.D. in anthropology or history of any repute writing and teaching about homosexuality at a major American university who believes gays have existed in any cultures before or outside ours, much less in all cultures. These women and men work closely with an ever-growing body of knowledge that directly contradicts the “born that way” ideology that has been key to the spread of the belief that homosexuality is equivalent to heterosexuality in every way.

It can be lonely to be the one of the few people in gay circles with knowledge about the phantom gay past, while everyone else is certain gays have always existed. Professor John D’Emilio (University of Illinois-Chicago), the first scholar to write a doctoral dissertation on American gay history, lamented in the late 1990s that even while the social-construction idea has swept the academic world,

the essentialist notion that gays constitute a distinct minority of people different in some inherent way has more credibility in American society than ever before…. The core assumptions at the heart of [most recent gay] historical studies are ignored, even as the content of the history - the fascinating lives, the heroic struggles, the fierce oppression - are embraced and absorbed.

Historical perspectives

One thing that becomes clear in looking at the historical scholarship about sexuality is that today’s categories are weak tools for describing the past. A few years ago, I spoke with leading gay historian Martin Duberman, the founder of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in New York City. He put it this way: “Were people always either gay or straight? The answer to that is a decided ‘No.’” Instead, people from other eras who slept with members of their own gender “haven’t viewed that as something exclusive and therefore something that defines them as a different category of human being,” Duberman said.

Many popular attempts to portray an age-old history of homosexuality go back to ancient Greece. We do have a large body of evidence - from the poetry of Sappho to Greek vases that depict two or more men in flagrante - affirming that same-sex love, relationships, and intercourse were common practices in that culture. But did a gay minority exist among the ancient Greeks? The scholars say no.

Rather, the Greeks thought homosexuality was something everyone could and should enjoy, particularly men in the upper classes. In addition to a wife, elite men were expected to take a younger male as an apprentice-lover, with prescribed sexual roles (the younger male was always passive). This system was so different from ours that to describe specific ancient Greeks as gay and others as straight would show profound disrespect for their experiences, and violate the cardinal historical rule against looking at the past only through present-colored lenses.

Another example in which the evidence of same-sex relations has been misinterpreted as a gay minority involves romantic friendships among women in upper-class European and American society in the 18th and early-19th centuries. We have many letters, some explicit, expressing deep love and passion between women, many of whom were also married to men. But the scholars who have examined this body of evidence don’t consider these women lesbians. First, it’s unclear how often the women in romantic friendships had genital relations with each other. But even those who did thought about sex, gender, and intimacy in ways so different from today that scholars have spurned the viewpoint (nearly universal among non-scholars) that two 18th-century women who wrote each other love letters and shared a bed were obviously lesbians.

So when in history did the gay minority first appear, and why? Historians have two major approaches to these questions, and there is plenty of room for further exploration of this important question. The first approach (growing out of the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault and reinforced by the 1970s studies of female sexuality by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Lillian Faderman) focuses on the late-19th-century medicalization of homosexuality as a mental illness or psychological condition. Psychiatrists and sexologists in Germany, Britain, and the United States began to pathologize patients who expressed same-sex desires or described same-sex experiences. These labels then led to gay or lesbian identity among those stigmatized, which in turn led those not so labeled to take on heterosexual identities. (An unfortunate byproduct of this process has been the diminishment of open non-sexual affection between heterosexuals of the same sex, to avoid suspicion of homosexuality.)


The other approach, which I find more interesting, explains the rise of the gay minority in terms of economic and demographic trends in Western society. D’Emilio’s landmark 1983 essay, “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” applied a Marxist analysis to the question, arguing that as subsistence became possible outside the nuclear family, young men, especially in cities, were for the first time able to experience same-sex eroticism in ways that could lead to gay identity. Scholars have also looked at the changes in middle-class mores that sanctioned limits on fertility, thus allowing individuals to envision life outside an opposite-sex marriage. And gay history pioneer Jonathan Ned Katz (formerly of Yale) has pointed to the increased “sexualization of commerce and commercialization of sexuality” during the second half of the 19th century, in which entrepreneurs made money from sex-oriented literature, films, bars, baths, and other merchandise and establishments.


While both major approaches place the rise of the gay minority somewhere in the mid- to late 19th century, it’s clear that in many places gay identity didn’t develop until much later. For example, the studies of Newport, Rhode Island, and New York City by outstanding Yale historian George Chauncey include many individuals involved in same-sex activities in the few decades before the Second World War who cannot fairly be called “gay.” Nationwide and certainly worldwide, there are still places where the age of the gay minority would best be counted in years, rather than decades or centuries. In any event, it seems clear that ours is the most sex-obsessed society in history, so perhaps it makes sense that it’s the first in which people form identities around the sex to which they find themselves most attracted.


But even without terminology or cultural identity, one might object, on a basic level some people in earlier centuries desired their own sex and thus were, essentially, gay or lesbian, right? Katz says no. “The existence of the words and our use of them can’t be separated from the feelings and the acts,” he told me in an interview a few years ago. In his opinion, “it’s literally true that homosexual feelings and acts didn’t exist before those concepts.”


Anthropological perspectives


Lesbian and gay anthropologists report much the same lack of a gay minority in their studies of cultures around the world. In fact, anthropologist Esther Newton (SUNY-Purchase) noted in an essay that in her field, “there is really no essentialist position on sexuality, no notion that people are born with sexual orientations. The evidence, fragmentary as it is, all points the other way.” Thus, Newton wrote, “Western lesbian and gay anthropologists, for the most part, have not run around the world looking for other lesbians and gay men.”


Instead, they have found that different cultures have a panoply of different understandings of sex, gender, and desire specific to their own people. For example, the Native Americans known as berdaches or two-spirits have generally taken on feminine dress and social roles, and almost exclusively partnered with non-berdache men. They also often had prescribed religious and military tasks. To call berdaches a “gay minority” stretches the definition of “gay” to a point where anthropologists refuse to go.


Another good example involves many Arab, African, and Latin American cultures, in which sexuality is organized around the femininity or masculinity of the sex object and/or the active or passive sexual role, rather than the biological sex of the individual desired. Such cultures have plenty of same-sex activity, but many of them didn’t have a gay minority until very recently.


Research on sexuality in such cultures rarely reaches the popular press. Columbia University anthropologist Carole S. Vance has pointed out that we see headlines announcing a “gay brain” but no similar reporting of the social science that shows sexual orientation to be uniquely Western.


Vance has a helpful model for thinking about same-sex behavior across cultures. She told me in an interview that she sees being gay or lesbian in American culture as a “package” that includes at least three elements beyond sexual practice: erotic attachment, emotional interest, and cultural membership. But in other cultures, she says, “same-sex sexual behavior can happen without these other elements, or with only some of them.”

Our gay/straight (or gay/straight/bisexual) system can seem logical and obvious to us because we exist within it, but anthropology provides an important corrective to our ethnocentric assumptions. Newton asserted without hesitation that she knows of no non-Western cultural system that divides people into four categories (i.e. men who like women, men who like men, women who like men, and women who like women) as ours does.


The social scientists I spoke with in preparing this essay spoke disparagingly about the natural-science studies purporting to show sexual orientation as “hard-wired.” Newton considers a study showing a link between sexual orientation and blinking rates to be ludicrous: “Any anthropologist who has looked cross-culturally (knows) it’s impossible that that’s true, because sexuality is structured in such different ways in different cultures.” And Duberman told me that in his opinion “there’s no good scientific work that establishes that people are born gay or straight.” While a Ph.D. in history or anthropology does not make a scholar an expert at hard science, these academics’ comments do demonstrate how strongly gay and lesbian social scientists reject of the “born that way” viewpoint.


Nonetheless, the gay community and the wider society increasingly hold the opposite view. In particular, organizations promoting gay equality have promoted “truths” about gay history and culture that have no scholarly basis. For example, pro-gay and coming-out literature tends to make a big deal of the supposed ubiquity and timelessness of the gay minority. Perhaps the most outrageous example is on the Web site of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (pflag.org). One Q and A in the Frequently Asked Questions section reads as follows:


Is there something wrong with being gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender?

No. There have been people in all cultures and times throughout human history who have identified themselves as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender (GLBT). Homosexuality is not an illness or a disorder….


The fact that the leading organization coordinating straight support for the gay community, in its basic introductory document, completely misrepresents the known facts about history and anthropology before even addressing what we know about medicine and psychology shows how powerful, and important, social science is in shaping people’s attitudes toward homosexuality.


Can the gap be bridged?


It’s no small problem. The gay community - and to a growing extent the wider society - believes that all societies have included some gays and lesbians, which makes sense because being gay is supposedly something hard-wired to turn up in some fixed percentage of our species. Yet despite serious searching, scholars (most of whom would love to be the first to find a gay minority outside our era) have come up empty. If there’s no evidence of gays and lesbians in other societies, how can being gay or lesbian be something that happens naturally?


There are at least four ways to try to defuse the tension between the community view and the scholarly view, but I’m satisfied by none of them:


The difference is just semantics. It’s really not. Gay and lesbian historians aren’t just claiming that before the 19th century nobody was called “gay” or “lesbian.” They’re saying nobody was gay or lesbian (or straight). While various societies had different ways of thinking about and expressing maleness, femaleness, love, and sexual desire, the most common approach to homosexuality seems to be a belief that it was something one could do, not something one could be.


Gays existed in other cultures but couldn’t come out because of homophobia. But we have loads of evidence of same-sex intercourse and love, which would be unlikely if the problem was homophobia and coming out. We have no convincing evidence that any of the people leaving such records were unresponsive to the opposite sex or considered themselves to be oriented differently from those who expressed passion for opposite-sex individuals.


Other societies had gay minorities, but they left no records. Doubtful. We actually have more evidence that dragons and unicorns existed in earlier history - because they show up in literary and other historical documents - than we do of gays and lesbians. We have records of so many aspects of people’s public and private lives, that it seems clear that if there were long-ago gay people, we’d know about them. For example, there are thousands of 20th-century letters and novels and speeches and diary entries that say some version of, “My parents want me to marry an opposite-sex person, but I don’t want to, because I only like my own sex.” But to my knowledge, there are no such 15th-, 10th-, or 5th-century documents.


By definition, people who want or have same-sex love and sex are gay, and people who don’t are straight, both today and in the past. It’s tempting to look at the past and see versions of our own lives and identities, but responsible history tries to understand the past on its own terms. Asking whether Shakespeare was gay or straight makes about as much sense as asking whether he was a Republican or a Democrat. Of course, none of this means that people don’t have sexual orientations today; it means sexual orientations are a result of our specific culture, and thus not basic human nature. Perhaps a good analogy is to computers: being gay or straight is the software and even the operating system of many people’s lives in today’s highly sexualized culture, but it’s not in anybody’s hardware.


Then what should we make of all the hoopla over various biological studies that point in the other direction? Most of those studies (few of which have been replicated) do little more than suggest that gay men are similar to straight women, and lesbians are similar to straight men in a variety of measurements - from finger lengths to blinking rates. The conclusions are tentative, and no “gay gene” has been found. While biology certainly plays a role in sexual behavior (as it does in every aspect of life), the natural-science data for a biological basis for sexual orientation is all preliminary and mostly disputed. Contrast that to what social scientists have discovered, with very little dissent: century after century and culture after culture with no gay minorities to be found, outside the recent West.


Clearly, all the research taken as a whole suggests that being gay or straight arises out of our specific social context, rather than being etched into our DNA. Of course, given the scant popular awareness about this situation, the idea that gays haven’t always existed can be completely unsettling. Many gays and lesbians have experienced their sexual orientations as unchosen and unchangeable, and therefore they are skeptical - and even hostile - toward anything that implies being gay isn’t part of human nature. And even lots of nongay people and organizations have built outlooks about homosexuality around a belief that the gay minority occurs naturally.


For example, the American Psychological Association (APA) argued in its Supreme Court brief in the landmark 2003 sodomy case of Lawrence v. Texas that “the sexual orientation known as homosexuality - which is based on an enduring pattern of sexual or romantic attraction exclusively or primarily to others of one’s own sex - is a normal variant of human sexual expression.”


Since the specific sexual orientation described is a recent, culturally driven phenomenon, it cannot be a “normal variant of human sexual expression.” Had the APA argued that homosexual orientation “appears to arise involuntarily among some people in our society,” it would have been closer to the mark. There were good, legitimate reasons (such as privacy) to oppose anti-sodomy laws. The supposed natural occurrence of homosexual orientation in the human species, however, was not one of them.


Nonetheless, the Supreme Court seems to have been reading more gay history than the APA, because the majority decision by Justice Anthony Kennedy shows familiarity with social-construction scholarship and to its credit cites both Katz and D’Emilio.


Such awareness is still rare, though, which raises an interesting question: How would the homosexuality debate change if both sides were to jettison the idea of a timeless gay sexuality and to incorporate the social-science perspective into their arguments?


A few possibilities:


The gay community can certainly make a case that non-discrimination policies and laws are justified whether being gay is natural or socially constructed. The fact that people didn’t have sexual orientations a thousand years ago doesn’t necessarily mean that people today shouldn’t have whatever family structures and consensual bodily pleasures they desire. Many left-wing gays already take this sort of stance, rejecting “born that way” as condescending and narrow. And several gay historians and commentators have noted the radical, liberationist implications of the viewpoint that, given the right historical or cultural environment, anyone could enjoy same-sex activity.


Advocates of the traditional nuclear family may, instead, fight for their preferred social construction in the public square. More broadly, religious and other groups who oppose homosexuality on moral grounds might move away from attacking individual gays with “it’s a choice” rhetoric and instead aim at changing the socio-cultural aspects of our society that not only encourage people to build identities around sex, but that also block them from imagining life any other way.


It’s a whole new conversation, one that’s touchy and hard to predict but long overdue.

The Heart of the Marriage Neutering Issue

David Whiting of the Orange County Register wrote a piece on neutering marriage and that prompted some letters from readers which the paper was willing to print.

Russ Neal of Huntington Beach:

Legalizing same-sex marriage means that people objecting to this transgression will be compelled to treat it as legitimate.

This is at the heart of the issue. It isn't just that someone who objects to homosexual behavior will be forced to endorse it. We will all, whether we have a moral objection to homosexual behavior or not, be forced to treat brideless and groomless pairings and marriage identically. State marriage licenses are issued on our behalf. The marriage neutering advocates don't want us to even have a word that notes there is a difference. It would be official government policy that there is not. Public schools (and many other schools, if not all) would be prevented from teaching that marriage is different from this pseudomarriage, and homosexuality advocates would be unrestrained in pushing their worldview in the schools as official curriculum. Parents would have no ability to opt their child out. Adoption agencies would not be able to give preference to placing children with a home that is inclusive of both sexes. No government agency, nothing associated with a government program or funding, would be allowed to make a distinction, unless of course it was to somehow provide a targeted advantage to same-sex couples. Soon after, no business, private employer, or private property owner would be allowed to make any distinction.

If California's constitutional amendment (Proposition 8) was allowed to stand, and California's domestic partnership and other laws were kept in place, same-sex couples would retain their treatment as spouses by the state government and everyone else, including businesses, could treat them as spouses. They're free to draw up legal paperwork, have ceremonies, change names, exchange rings, live together, share a life, and call themselves married. But the rest of us would not be forced to ignore the inherent difference between marriage and pseudomarriage.

The False Compromise

What if you were a California voter who had an earned degree from the University of California Los Angeles – a state institution – and someone else who did not attend the university nor did the coursework insisted that spending his time sunning himself on the beach was just as valid use of his time, and demanded he also be awarded the same degree from UCLA?

What if you, as a voter, said "no" to this idea twice? Would you consider it a good compromise if your degree was rescinded so that you and the beach bum would be treated "equally"? My guess is no.

The False Compromise is getting government out of marriage licensing entirely (or so they say), either by dropping the word "marriage" or not recognizing personal unions at all. Michael A. Lindenberger of Time Magazine took a look at that. First he mentions Jewish and Catholic rituals that do not get licensing from the state. But these rituals do not involve the sharing or transfer of property, nor do these rituals naturally tend to result in bringing children into the world, or subjecting them to an unrelated adult as head of their home. Those and other reasons are why marriage is different.

And for non-believers or those for whom the word marriage is less important, the civil union license issued by the state would be all they needed to unlock the benefits reserved in most states, and in federal law, for "married" couples.

This is coming from the assumption that any two people who claim to be a couple should have those benefits. Why are those benefits issued in the first place? There is a reasoning behind it. Domestic partnerships in California were not created for the benefit of the state – more to satisfy the demands of same-sex couples, many of whom ended up not satisfied by something that treated them as married. And thus, the people of the state thought they were helping people who turned around and used that help against them, using the partnerships law as Trojan Horse to neuter state marriage licensing.

Both sets of lawyers agreed that the idea would resolve the equal protection issue.

Sure – if you stop government issuing of any sort of licensing, then everyone has equal non-access.
Why try to pretend marriage is nothing more than a domestic partnership or civil union? Let's really go for "equality" and only have the state issue a Roommate License, and nothing more. After all, some platonic roommates depend very much on each other. And why should platonic roommates not be treated equally to lovers?

Take the state out of the marriage business, and then both kinds of couples - straight and gay - would be treated the same.

Why should three different kinds of voluntary associations be treated the same? Simply because someone wants them to be? If that someone is the people of the state, then that would be legal. But why should we do that?

And as Justice Chin considers whether he can craft a compromise with his fellow justices that would both uphold Prop 8 - and therefore the right of the people to amend the state constitution - and assert the right of gay people to be treated equally, he may find that the folks who cling hardest to the word "marriage" are the gay couples themselves. After all, what was the most sweeping part of the May 2008 decision Ming and his colleagues issued granting [brideless or groomless couples neutered state marriage licenses]? It was the idea that the word "marriage" itself is so strong that denying it to [same-sex] couples violates the most sacred rights enshrined in the state constitution, the right for all people to be treated with dignity and fairness.

This is a leap. What about single people or trios, or like I said, roommates? Are they not being treated with dignity and fairness because the state doesn't issue them marriage licenses? What about friends who aren't even roommates?

How can anyone who argues that state-licensed marriage is an unalienable right ever say it would be okay not to let anyone have access to that "right"? The False Compromise smacks of what some marriage defenders have said all along – this whole thing is more about tearing down the traditional family, including the esteeming of marriage – than it is about the rights of homosexual people.

There are reasons we, as a state, license marriage. Doing so is of benefit to the state. The kind of relationships that form marriage perpetuate society. We are under no obligation to treat different kinds of voluntary associations the same, no matter how much an activist group wants it that way. We should not forget that our soft-hearted acceptance of domestic partnerships has been met with scorn and a trouncing of our will.

Our Right Was Taken Away

This is another bad argument for marriage neutering.

In California, since the state Supreme Court ordered the neutering of state marriage licensing against the demonstrated will of the governed, and then refused to stay their decision until after an impending vote on a relevant constitutional amendment, same-sex couples were able to obtain state marriage licenses for several months. When the California Marriage Amendment was passed by voters, they were no longer able to obtain those licenses. So we have heard arguments that "our rights have been taken away" and that it isn't fair because "we used to have this right, but now we don't".

I like to make distinctions between actual natural rights and what is legal, allowed, or conducted under the auspices of the government. Not all freedoms are rights. Not all services a government offers are rights. The government performs services by the consent of the governed, and when the governed no longer consent, or correct a false consent made on their behalf, the service ceases.

Just because the government was passing out neutered marriage licenses doesn't mean it was a good thing or that there was an actual right to such things. State licensing is conducted on behalf of the people of a state. In California, we have partial direct democracy, in which we the people have retained some legislative abilities instead of allowing the elected legislatures to have all legislative power. Through our direct democratic process, we voted in 2000 via Proposition 22 to reaffirm marriage licensing as bride-groom only. The court decided there was a "right" for same-sex couples to obtain state-issued marriage licenses, but they overstepped their authority. Since when has a "right" applied to two people, but no more? Generally, two people have parental rights, but someone can even lose their "parental rights" by court order. How can there be a right to a state-issued license when it involves the consent of someone else? You may have a right to ask someone else for something, but that person has a right to say "no". Otherwise, it is a forcible intrusion on that person. In physical activity, we call that assault or rape.

While the Constitution of the United State of America does not enumerate all of the rights retained by the people, it does list such rights as freedom of speech and the right to bear arms. Yet, those rights to do nor force someone else to give us the use of a billboard, nor does it allow someone to yell "fire" in a crowded theater with immunity from prosecution. Gun owners can tell you plenty about how they were able to purchase and own and use certain arms in the past – but they are no longer allowed to do so legally. So even rights clearly enumerated in the Constitution have limits commonly recognized by courts.

This is not a strong argument for striking down the California Marriage Amendment (Proposition 8). It is akin to appealing to a court to issue you a diploma from the University of California (pick any one you like... Los Angeles, Berkeley, Davis) even though you've had no interest in attending classes at the university or performing course work. Instead, you have been very happy to study on your own terms with a professor in a warehouse. He refers to himself as a UC professor, but isn't. But unlike when you tried visiting a UC campus, you feel more comfortable in this warehouse, and you absolutely love your professor. And you believe you are learning. The court goes ahead and orders that you be given a UC diploma, and that others be able to obtain UC diplomas the same way. After all, those diplomas help in matters such as obtaining jobs with benefits and other things you want and enjoy.

Meanwhile, the people of California and vote in an amendment to the state constitution that restores traditional diploma-issuing when it comes to UC diplomas. If you want a UC diploma, you must meet the requirements. You don't have to go to a UC, but if you don't, you don't get a UC diploma.
You could argue that a "right" has been taken away from you. And you’d be wrong.

Neither the California Supreme Court nor the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals create or grant rights. No government does. A government can only recognize and protect rights, or by its actions, infringe upon rights. There is no right to a state-issued license. The people should retain ultimate authority in setting the licensing requirements.

Jerry Brown Signed the First DOMA

I'm reposting this entry I made early on in my contributions to The Opine Editorials.

The San Francisco Chronicle's political writer, Carla Marinucci, had an article discussing the fact that current California Governor General Jerry Brown, while Governor the first go-round, signed into law a bill codifying the legal definition of marriage as being a bride-groom pairing. There are lots of quotes defending Brown for his "progress" on the issue as he fights to remove California’s Marriage Amendment and prepares to run for Governor again. I found a quote in the article that stood out to me.

Veteran journalist Marty Nolan, who covered Brown for the Boston Globe in the 1970s and 1980s, said the defense represents Brown's longtime political mantra. "He's got a six-word answer - 'that was then, this is now,' " Nolan laughed. "It's an all-purpose shield."

This is an example of why we are supposed to be a nation of laws, not men, and we have a constitution and a representative republic. Opinions and votes can change over time, even if the truth and right and wrong do not. But we should not be held hostage to the whims of a single person. "That was then, this is now" is not a justification for a past or current action or policy, no more than saying "It's the twenty-first century." Yes, and the sky is blue. So? Was Brown wrong then? Is he wrong now? Why? Has a "right" to a state-licensed marriage for brideless or groomless couples emerged since the 1970s, or has it always existed and just not been recognized by flawed politicians? If the politicians were wrong then, what makes anyone so sure they are right now?

Shocker: MSM In the Marriage Neutering Tank

In news that should surprise nobody who is paying attention, the "mainstream" media has been shown to be in the tank for neutering marriage. I have previously pointed out that the MSM is lying about the issue.

Taylor Colwell had the Townhall Tipsheet update on this:

The Pew Research Center has released a study examining media coverage of gay marriage during the period leading up to, during, and after Supreme Court hearings on the issue.

In a period marked by Supreme Court deliberations on the subject, the news media coverage provided a strong sense of momentum towards legalizing same-sex marriage, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center. Stories with more statements supporting same-sex marriage outweighed those with more statements opposing it by a margin of roughly 5-to-1. In the coverage studied, the central argument among proponents of same-sex marriage was one of civil rights. Arguments against were more varied, but most often voiced the idea that same-sex marriage would hurt society and the institution of traditional marriage.

Almost half (47%) of the nearly 500 stories studied from March 18 (a week prior to the Supreme Court hearings), through May 12, primarily focused on support for the measure, while 9% largely focused on opposition and 44% had a roughly equal mix of both viewpoints or were neutral. In order for a story to be classified as supporting or opposing same sex marriage, statements expressing that position had to outnumber the opposite view by at least 2-to-1. Stories that did not meet that threshold were defined as neutral or mixed.

This reminds of something Dennis Prager says. Either studies reinforce common sense, or they are flawed. That's a paraphrase.

Of course, when it comes to reporting bias, the perpetual question is whether the media is a molder or reflector of public attitudes. On this matter, though, it seems pretty clear. Reporting bias in the Pew study was 47% in favor to 9% opposed; that study registers present public support as 51% in favor to 42% opposed. Media favoritism for gay marriage far outstrips that of the public at large.

The most common media argument – that this issue is one of civil rights – merits a comparison of the gay marriage movement with that of black civil rights. As I see it, despite superficial similarities, the comparison breaks down once you get to the fundamental nature of the two movements. The black civil rights movement, at its core, was a cause championed primarily on a grassroots level. Massive demonstrations, strikes, and sit-ins precipitated change that eventually spread to journalism and government. Gay marriage, on the other hand, has not seen collective action on this scale. In fact, the push for gay marriage originated at the top and trickled down, whereas black civil rights was more bottom-up.

Of course, comparing someone self-identifying as homosexual and engaging in homosexual behavior NOT being able to get a state-issued license with someone of the same sex to someone who is born with an obvious skin color, the people of which had a legacy of being oppressed through enslavement, segregation, Jim Crow, and publicly supported, well-attended festive lynchings is hardly sensible.

Here's Salon's coverage.

Brent Bozell had a column dealing with this:

In many corners of the liberal media, the space for a social conservative to argue against "marriage equality" is vanishing before our eyes. It becomes twice as difficult the more and more anchors and reporters come out and declare themselves gay, and then the gay lobby expects those journalists to perform with perfect obedience to their agenda.

March in lockstep, or else!

In recent years, the promotion of homosexuality has gone beyond the "news" programs and became heavily entrenched in network entertainment shows, with entire programs devoted to gay characters and their struggle to overcome the alleged ignorance and oppression of religious villains. This easily explains why so many young people are dramatically pro-gay marriage in the opinion polls.

Yup. Homosexual characters are overrepresented on television, and almost always in sympathetic roles.

The official gay censorship lobbies -- from the Orwellian-named "GLAAD" to the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association -- define "fairness and accuracy" as being stories that try to scrape "fairness" away, treating opposition like used gum on someone's shoe. GLAAD created what they call the "Commentator Accountability Project" designed to discourage reporters and TV bookers from booking "hate" guests. 

Roll over or bend over. Whichever, shut up and obey. That's what has been going on.

There are nonreligious arguments for maintaining the bride+groom requirement in state licensing, ones that are in no way based on dislike of homosexual people or homosexual behavior, and some of these arguments are made by homosexual people. But you've never know it from the pop media.

Stand to Reason on Neutering Marriage

In addition to the video by Greg Koukl, checkout this blog entry, "Borrowed Capital", and "Same-Sex Marriage Challenges and Responses" by Greg Koukl.

(Crossposted to The Opine Editorials)

Neutering Marriage: Where We Are and What It Means

The Supreme Court of the United States of America heard arguments regarding two laws. It is possible that in June, they could issue a ruling that would invent a new federal right to get a state "marriage" license without a bride or without a groom, often called "gay marriage" or "same-sex marriage".

Less than fifteen years ago, no government in the world had neutered licensing to replace marriage. No President of the United States ever indicated a belief that a marriage exists without a bride or without a groom. President Bill Clinton, Democrat, had signed the federal Defense of Marriage Act into law, which had the support of many Democrats in Congress. Not a single great civil rights leader in history had ever called for a "right" to a marriage license without a bride or without a groom – not Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., not Susan B. Anthony, not Gandhi, nobody. None of the people who wrote and voted for the Constitution or the Amendments was ever on record as saying marriage was anything other than the uniting of a bride and groom. Running for President in 2008, Obama claimed to believe that marriage is between a man and woman, and he did not say that there was right to a state marriage license without a bride our groom. (He has partially changed his public position since then.) In Loving v. Virginia, which overturned scattered state bans in "interracial" marriage (which actually prevented freedom of association while Proposition 8 protected freedom of association), SCOTUS did not find that a brideless or groomless union was a marriage. In Lawrence v. Texas, which overturned laws against private homosexual sodomy, SCOTUS did not find that brideless or groomless union is a marriage. There are longstanding federal and state restrictions on marriage, including against polygamy and marriages between first cousins, both of which have a long worldwide history. (Some say that same-sex "marriage" should never be compared to polygamy or incest, and I agree – after all, the latter two have been historically and widely accepted as actual marriages.)

When SCOTUS heard the cases, only nine states and Washington, D.C. had neutered their licensing, something that was largely started by judicial activism with only one of those states doing it through a direct vote of the people that was initiated by the people rather than a judge or state legislature.

Most of the remaining states have constitutional amendments or state laws, many of them directly approved by voters, maintaining the bride+groom requirement in their licensing.

Yet here we are, facing the possibility that nine judges could force the neutering of state marriage licenses on all 50 states, even those where the people have recently voted to reaffirm the bride+groom requirement.

How did we get here?

I didn't follow the case involving the federal DOMA as closely as I did the case involving the California Marriage Amendment, which was adopted by voters through Proposition 8.

There was already a California law, signed by Governor Jerry Brown decades ago during an earlier term as Governor, stating the bride+groom requirement. In 2000, Californian voters directly passed Proposition 22, reaffirming this. California lawmakers passed law(s) creating state domestic partnerships in which same-sex couples (these partnerships were denied – discrimination! - to both-sexes couples unless at least one of them was a seasoned citizen of a certain age) would be treated by state and local governments exactly the same as if they were a married couple. Striking down Prop 8 did not give same-sex couples any additional "rights".

Then the Leftist marriage neutering advocates, including people who were sworn to uphold and enforce the law, decided to thumb their nose at the law by "marrying" brideless and groomless couples and then suing for recognition as marriage. That wound its way through the state courts.

Meanwhile, the voters of California decided to strengthen the bride+groom requirement by placing on the ballot a measure what would make it part of the state constitution. As that was heading for the ballot, the California Supreme Court ordered the neutering of the state's marriage licenses. Later that year (2008), California voters voted for Obama AND they adopted Proposition 8 to restore the bride+groom requirement, placing it in the state constitution.. For many months, long-term (and short term, for that matter) same-sex couples could have obtained "marriage" licenses, and thousands did. Snoozers were losers.

Of course, the California Marriage Amendment was challenged in court by marriage neutering advocates, and so it went to the California Supreme Court, then into the federal courts.

You can read all about this at these links to The Opine Editorials, where we covered it as it was happening:

On the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Proposition 8

On the Proposition 8 Trial

On the California Marriage Amendment

On Judge Walker - the federal judge who heard the federal trial over Proposition 8/California Marriage Amendment but did not disclose he stood to immediately and personally benefit from the results.)

(Click on the tags at The Opine Editorials and here on this blog for more on these subjects.)

It is possible SCOTUS may leave this matter up to the individual states, or may order states with "same as marriage" domestic partnerships, like California, to neuter their marriage licensing. There could be some other rulings other than a sweeping one.

If SCOTUS instead invents a "right" for brideless or groomless pairings to get a state marriage license regardless the state law, that will establish these can-of-worm precedents (because remember, we’re not talking about personal freedom, private behavior, and freedom of association, but rather demanding a state-issued license):

1) Minorities that are only distinguishable by their voluntary behavior or unverifiable claims about themselves will be specially-protected classes. Some might ask how this is different from protecting religious groups, but freedom of religion is specifically listed in the Constitution. Those who are in the minority in their sex-like practices will now be specially protected classes. What if someone finds it advantageous in a lawsuit to claim they are gay, even though there is no evidence they are actually homosexual? We certainly can't ask for proof, can we?

2) There will be a right to state-issued licenses and those licenses have to be recognized in all states. That should get very interesting when it comes to restrictions placed on the Second Amendment right to bear arms, or driver's licenses for people who refuse to actually take the driving test due to personal characteristics present since birth.

3) The equal protection principle applies not only to individuals, but to pairings (or groups) not similarly situated. If I had a business partnership, I'd sue for the same protections afforded to marriages (for example, not being compelled to testify against each other in court) and nonprofits.

4) Certain different behaviors must be treated by government as though they were the same. (Yes, a woman socially and sexually uniting with a man is behavior demonstrably different than a woman joining with a woman.)

5) Courts/governments have the authority to forcefully redefine organic institutions established long before the existince of those courts/governments.


Here's a basic argument against neutering marriage that is not religion-based.
1) Men and women are different. Even most of the people who try to deny this demonstrate that they understand this to be true. After all, if men and women were not different, all, or at least three, of the terms in "LGBT" would have no meaning.

2) The pairing of a man and a woman is different than the pairing of two men or two women. It is the only kind of pairing that is able to naturally produce new citizens (who, unlike the adults, do not consent to the relationship), even if not all do. This alone is enough to give the state more interest in the pairing of a man and a woman.

3) Men and women are different in personal relationships. If that difference matters enough to someone in picking a lover, how can it not matter when it comes to the parent-child relationship?

4) State licensing of bride+groom pairings provides children with a role model, guardian, and bonding partner from each of the two sexes that comprise all of society, legally bound to each other as well as the children; generally, this is good for children.

5) It is Constitutional, moral, common, and necessary to treat different kinds of relationships differently. Since all that is needed to enforce this requirement for a STATE-ISSUED license is a pair of STATE-ISSUED birth certificates, it can be done objectively and with impartiality to sexual orientation and without violating anyone's privacy.

6) One need not believe homosexual behavior, relationships, or people to be harmful, sinful, or inferior to accept any or all of #1-5. Indeed, there are people who identify as LBGT who agree with this argument.


Although marriage neutering advocates equate their campaign to civil rights for African-Americans, the comparison is insulting. Homosexual people certainly can't be described as a powerless minority akin to how African-Americans were 50-60 years ago, given how many already serve in elected and appointed positions at all levels of government, how they are treated throughout academia, their overrepresentation and positive portrayals in media, their socioeconomic status, widespread support by business including major corporations, so on and so forth. Unlike African-Americans, homosexual people were not taken from their homeland by force, systematically enslaved and denied status as human beings, systematically segregated by force of law, tortured and lynched by the thousands in festive events attended in broad daylight by entire towns (including children), denied their right to vote, etc.

Even so, heterosexuals would have just as much access to licensing a same-sex union as "marriage" as homosexual people, so how can it be about helping a suspect class?

Marriage neutering advocates are claiming they have unstoppable, growing momentum, and a clear majority of popular support with inevitable victory among voters. How can that be if they are a powerless minority subject to widespread, systematic animus? Which is it? Californians broadly supported homosexual people having the same rights as everyone else and pet legislative causes, but at the same time, voted to affirm the bride+groom requirement.

Clearly, we are talking about treating different voluntary behaviors differently. This is not the same thing as simply being able to look at someone and know they are female, or black, or an Orthodox Jew. We are told over and over again that we can't know whether someone is heterosexual or homosexual just be looking at them.

Many people who support retaining the bride+groom requirement in state marriage licensing have no animus for homosexual people or homosexual behavior. Some of them identify as LGBT themselves.

Other people who one claimed a gay or lesbian identity now live as heterosexual or claim to be heterosexual. I’ve never seen an African-American become a white guy. This is apples and oranges.

If SCOTUS does invent that new right, it will not be the end of what the fascists behind the marriage neutering movement will do. It will just be the beginning. Nobody will be allowed to hold up marriage as a bride+groom institution, such as in educational lesson plans. Other limitations on marriage licensing will be attacked, and marriage may no longer be recognized at all by government. Churches and synagogues who believe that marriage unites a bride and groom will be attacked. We’ve already seen indications of this before. Individuals will not be immune, either.

Will SCOTUS uphold the rights of California's voters? Or will it set dangerous new precedents? Do the people have a government, or are we all property of the government?

Abdicating Your Vote to Teenagers

Some marriage neutering advocates proclaim inevitability because of fauxmentum based on poll dancing and talking with teenagers. For example, one morning I was listening to Los Angeles-based talk radio host Bill Handel who was citing that younger generations don’t see what the issue is – why wouldn’t a man be able to get a state marriage license with another man? He used his own westside-of-LA-raised teenaged daughters as an example. There is probably some truth to that – teenagers haven’t matured enough and experienced enough life to understand the implications of the differences between the sexes and what marriage is and isn’t, and what it means and how it has an impact on individuals, families, and the community.

However, we don’t determine public policy based on the feelings and inexperienced, uninformed opinions of teenagers. Otherwise, we might replace Algebra, Biology, and History classes with porn screenings (they have to wait for university for that), eliminate curfews, lower the drinking, smoking, and driving age to 13 along with the age of consent for sex, and excuse stealing, lying, and cheating as long as it was for a teen’s short-term gain. Your child might not understand why you say “no” to a sleepover – it doesn’t mean you relent. Children do tend to grow up, and grow more socially conservative as they get older, marry, and have children of their own. (Having children of both sexes does much to educate many people on the differences between the sexes, if marriage hasn't already. Many boys are drugged essentially because they are not girls.) Some children need more help in understanding the realities of life than others, and it is up to their parents, first and foremost, to teach them.

Purposes and the Meaning of Words

Marriage is the one institution, the one voluntary association in which the Left or certain gender activists are okay with excluding women. Just try to form a legally sanctioned association while openly barring women from joining. Won’t be allowed. Unless that association is a marriage. The same lawyer who sues to force a male organization to accept women will sue to allow women to exclude men from a marriage. Why? Leftism is feelings-based, and the feelings of women and "minorities" are more important than those of white heterosexual men.

Great analogies are difficult for this topic because marriage is unique - at least, it is suppossed to be. That is part of the current issue at hand. I am convinced it is important to keep the legal definition of marriage in line with what human history universally demonstrated: marriage unites the sexes.

The issue is so polarizing now that it is difficult to convince the other side we're not bigots and do not hate people who identify as gay or lesbian or consider them less than worthy of having their rights protected. But I like to try.

Yes, Defending Marriage is Discrimination

Those of us who oppose marriage neutering are often accused of supporting discrimination.

I'd like to confess.

I'm guilty as charged.


Yes, defending marriage involves discrimination.

But those pushing to neuter marriage, or as they would put it, pushing for "marriage equality" – they discriminate as well in everything, including their position on marriage licensing.

The truth is, we all discriminate. We couldn't function if we didn't. We discriminate against staying in bed longer or getting up earlier. We discriminate between eating this or eating that. We discriminate in whether or not to ask any given person for a date or whether or not to accept a request for a date. In decisions large and small, we discriminate - and we should. In addition, all of our laws discriminate - separating what is legal from what is illegal.

So, yes, defending marriage is discrimination, but not illegal, unfair, immoral, arbitrary, or unconstitutional discrimination.

What our laws can't Constitutionally - and shouldn't - do is discriminate against individuals on the basis of their ethnicity, sex (with some exceptions), or, in many places, sexual orientation.

Bride+groom marriage licensing doesn't. Nor does neutered marriage licensing. But the burden of proof in most states and at the federal level, rests on those who are pushing to neuter marriage to show that bride+groom marriage licensing unconstitutionally discriminates, necessitating a change.

They have failed to do so. That an individual does not want to participate in something to which he or she has access does not mean the access isn't there.

Note that even neutered marriage licensing still discriminates – against groups of three or more, individuals who are already married to other people, couples consisting of close relatives, and so forth.

Setting some criteria for state licensing of anything is appropriate and constitutional. Marriage defenders usually have just one more criterion than the marriage neutering advocates – that both sexes are represented in this voluntary association that is seeking public sanction as marriage.

(This is modified from an entry originally posted at The Opine Editorials.)

Equal Protection

I have written about what I consider to be bad arguments that are frequently used to advocate marriage neutering, or against legislation that codifies again (or restores) bride+groom state marriage licensing.

But there is one argument that marriage neutering advocates make that seems to be their strongest, at least in the U.S.A. It is some variation of an appeal to "equal access/protection". It packs the most emotional punch, given the desire of the average American to support “equality”.

But law is about logic and facts, not emotion.

Equal protection is a concept found in the federal Constitution, in the Fourteenth Amendment. In Section 1, is this text:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Emphasis mine. Notice that this applies to individuals. A simple reading of the text reveals that it does not apply to couples or any groupings. Under traditional marriage licensing, where both a bride and a groom are required, is there equal access (and therefore, protection) provided to homosexual individuals in relation to straight individuals?

Yes. Any man, regardless of sexual orientation, is allowed to be a groom. Any woman, regardless of sexual orientation, is allowed to be a bride. Both men and women have equal access to marriage licensing.

I understand that some individuals do not want to marry someone of the opposite sex, and want to get a marriage licensing with someone of the same sex. However, that someone wants something other than what is available does not mean what is offered denies equal protection and must be changed.
 
It is worth noting that under neutered marriage licensing, where the bride-groom requirement is absent, it is still equal protection as heterosexual individuals are also allowed to get licenses with someone of the same sex. However, any domestic partnership or civil union law that excludes male-female pairings while applying to same-sex couples denies equal protection to some couples. I do not have a problem with this, as I note it is Constitutional to treat different kinds of voluntary associations differently, and thus marriage applies to bride-groom couplings while domestic partnerships and civil unions can be applied to other kinds of couplings.

If, despite the plain text of the Fourteenth Amendment, one argues that equal protection must also be extended to couples instead of individuals only, such a change would have profound effects on many areas of law beyond marriage licensing. Suddenly, pairings/partnerships will have rights previously only recognized as applying to individuals. Such a change should require implementation by Amendment, but sadly, I think it is possible a court will create it by decision.

If equal protection must be extended to pairings, then doesn't that also mean presumably platonic pairings, such as business partners, partners in crime (especially those who do not want to testify against each other), roommates, friends, and siblings? And where is the justification to limit the equal protection to pairings instead of trios or larger groupings? A businessperson can form two different partnerships with to different partners. Under "equal protection for couples", surely we can't deny a bigamist what he or she wants.

While appealing to "fairness" and insisting that it is what they want and it would make them happy may be emotionally effective in manipulating public sentiment, the "equal protection" argument does not stand up to scrutiny from a Constitutional perspective. Individuals are allowed to pursue what they want, as long as it does not compell someone else to provide something without consent. When someone applies for a state marriage license, she is asking the people of that state for something. While another woman may agree to apply with her, the people of the state may not agree to provide a license.

(This was originally posted at The Opine Editorials)

The Race Card and Neutering Marriage

Marriage neutering advocates frequently cite prohibitions in the past against "interracial"* marriage as why African-Americans, judges, an all who care about civil rights should support the neutering of marriage laws and the replacement of marriage with a counterfeit. The claim goes that because African-Americans in some parts of the country in the past could not marry white people, they should identify with the inability for brideless pair of a groomless pair to get a "marriage" license, and they should fight for marriage neutering.

When one takes a closer look at the situation, though, if African-Americans, as a group, have something with which to identify in this case, it is actually the denial of their voting rights. More African-Americans were denied their voting rights than were ever prevented from marrying a white person.

For example, if the pollsters are to be believed, African-Americans, as a classification, strongly supported California's Prop 22 and subsequent Prop 8, which was adopted as a state constitutional amendment. And yet their votes were cast aside by courts based on a made-up "right" and based on a demand to treat different kinds of voluntary associations as though they are the same. In other words, they were denied their voting rights in favor of imaginary rights demanded by an even smaller minority.

"Interracial" marriage has been readily recognized to be marriage by every major religion (though not all sects) all throughout history around the world. Some places in this country banned it (a true ban, as I explain below... not simply "refusing to license"). Notice that the people who passed those laws did not also set up laws to ban same-sex couples from getting married – because such a thing had never been recognized in the first place. Indeed, in the case that shot down bans on interracial marriage – Loving v. Virginia, no mention is made of same-sex couples. Same-sex "marriage" is a modern invention modeled after marriage - which was not created by the state but merely recognized by the state - but missing the key element in marriage that is of the most interest to society. This modern invention is designed for the appropriation of government benefits (already provided to domestic partners in California and other places) and public affirmation (which should be up to the public).

If marriage is about forming a microcosm of society for the sake of perpetuating it – uniting both sexes that comprise all of society, giving children both a mother and a father legally bound to each other and to them, then "interracial" marriage is the same kind of voluntary association as any other marriage. However, two men or two women, of any race, are not. Skin color is incidental to marriage, while sex is inherent to it.  Thus, the comparison to same-sex "marriage" doesn’t hold up. "Interracial" marriage is how we got new citizens like Tiger Woods. Who has ever been conceived by sodomy between two men?

Today, people are able to live their lives together without a marriage license, while in the past, property owners and employers could refuse to deal with people who were "shacking up" and cohabitation could be prosecuted. Thus, a ban on interracial marriage was a form of segregation and a denial of the freedom of association. It was truly a ban. Now, people are free to cohabitate without social or legal repercussions, and keeping the bride+groom requirement in state marriage licensing and federal law will not keep them from doing so.

Having had wrong laws regarding marriage licensing in the past does not mean that all laws regarding marriage licensing are wrong. Most people calling for marriage neutering are in favor of some form of discrimination themselves when it comes to issuing marriage licenses. Everyone involved wants some form of discrimination, such as restrictions on the number of spouses, how closely related the spouses can be, and the minimum age to to marry.

Must a brideless or groomless sex-segregating couple be treated the same as a couple integrating and uniting  both of the sexes? Why, when so many laws treat different kinds of voluntarily associations differently?

In addition to rejecting the attempt to confuse the issue with a legitimate civil rights fight from the past, the African-American community should speak up in defense of their voting rights, and judges should recognize that marriage licenses are issued on behalf of the people of a state, and the people have the power to require that marriage be integrationist rather than segregationist.

*I maintain that we are all one race – human, and this “interracial” is an artificial term in this case, in my opinion.
(I originally posted this in a slightly different form as "The Race Card and Prop 8" on my previous blog.)

Neutering Marriage Devalues and Discourages Marriage

 ...and that is bad for children and therefore bad for society.



Some marriages are arranged. Most in our country aren't. Some are about love, some are about lust, some are about money. Some are about class. Marriage is about many things, but from a societal interest, it is – and always has been - about forming a microcosm of society for the purpose of perpetuating it. It is about joining the two sexes and providing any offspring with both a mother and a father – and that has been the universal core of marriage throughout all of human history.

In other words, licensed marriage on its most basic and level is about children.

But when laws are passed (or, in California and some other states, a court decision is issued) neutering marriage licensing, so that two men or two women can legally be designated as “married”, this is a statement that marriage, as an institution, can't be about children – because it takes both a woman and a man to make a child. Some marriages may be about children, but marriage in and of itself can't be about children - if there is a right for any two people to have a licensed marriage. Court rulings neutering marriage make the statement that licensed marriage is about feelings, or benefits, or hospital access, or any number of things that have been cited by marriage neutering activists - all of which can be addressed without a marriage license.

If marriage can't be about children, a disconnect is created in the public consciousness between marriage and raising children. Even libertarian atheist Tom Leykis, who insists that there is no benefit for a man to get married - that men can get everything they want without marriage - states that marriage benefits children. Do we really want official public policy that makes it clear that marriage is not about children?

Although we are already experiencing a significant level of illegitimacy (thanks to a disconnect between sex and marriage), divorce (thanks to a disconnect between commitment and marriage), blended families rife with jealousy, insecurity, and confusion, and a disconnect between coitus and reproduction (thanks to IVF), we still have a society that expresses that it is ideal to raise children within a marriage that created or adopted them and associates marriage with children. Except in gay circles, when someone says "We got married," one of the first questions people ask is "When do you plan on having children?" Paternity is, in many places, assigned to husbands by default when their wife births a child, even if she could have conceived the child by another man. Ex-husbands often pay child support for children that where there before he ever met their mother. Child support is expected from an ex-spouse even if the other ex-spouse is financially capable of providing for the child without assistance. Even many people who cohabitate and procreate out of wedlock get married, in large part, “for the sake of their children.”

Why?  Because children do best with a both a mother and a father, even more so if they are married to each other, and it takes both a male and a female to create children. Whether by design or as a consequence of evolution, children do best in having both that male and female parental authority as a model and with whom to bond. That child will, throughout her life, interact with both males and females. Even if you believe that our existence and the way we reproduce are sheer meaningless accidents, that socialization is important to perpetuating society in the best conditions.

Most, if not all, of the people who deny this appear to be motivated not by what is best for children or society, but what is wanted by some homosexuality advocates, fornicators, and divorced people politically and socially. Someone who wants a child but doesn't have a spouse (of the opposite sex) will try to justify their actions, and those who think a marriage license will bring their relationship and themselves whatever (approval, benefits, etc.) they are seeking will likewise deny the importance of having both a mother and father (1).

If marriage is about children, then it ought to be restricted to the kind of unions that can produce children (2). If it isn't about children, then it should be about whatever else benefits society.  Marriage neutering advocates say that purpose is creating stability in "sexual" relationships.  But that is in conflict with their own insistence that sexual behavior between two consenting adults is a private matter in which the state should not be involved.

If we are going to continue down this path of neutered marriage licensing, we should expect higher illegitimacy rates and perhaps increased divorce rates and/or lower marital rates (3), because there will be less of an association between child-rearing and marriage. If marriage is not about children, then a husband should feel no guilt in leaving the mother of his child if he feels she has neglected her vows. If our statistical analyses do not make the distinction between bride-groom marriages and other unions, then we can also expect a statistical increase in "marital" domestic violence, substance abuse, infidelity, and physical and mental health issues, as these are acknowledged issues of increased frequency in the "homosexual community". That would be something else that would make licensed marriage less attractive, along with the presence of or desire for children being less of an incentive.

If we are going to continue down this path where marriage isn't about children, then we should at least be consistent and not assign default paternity to husbands, or require child support if the custodial parent earns enough to provide for a child, or require stepparents (almost always fathers) to provide child support in the event of a divorce. This can probably have applications to inheritance laws, too.

I agree that the government should not be policing the bedroom. I can understand why we have no-fault divorce laws. But the government does have an interest in licensing bride-groom marriage that it doesn't have with same-sex couples. Citizens are better off if they have been raised within a lasting marriage with both a father and a mother, and less likely to commit crime or be dependent on welfare. We must not yield this beneficial construct to be sacrificed on the altar of homosexual esteem for those who seem to neurotically need the endorsement of their relationships by others. We must not allow marriage to be devalued by denying the core universal thread that has made marriage what it is.

Marriage may be about love, but it is primarily about children, and giving them a mother and a father.

(1) Neutered marriage licensing under the guise that same-sex couples have a “right” to marry will make it impossible for adoption agencies, social workers, fertility clinics, laws, and courts to give any preference to bride+groom couples over same-sex couples in placing children (or academia or others from presenting bride+groom couples as the norm or ideal). The advocates of this “equality” cite flawed studies to support their claim that there is no difference to children if they are raised by two men, two women, or a man and a woman, as long as it is two "parents". There are two ways to demonstrate that this must be false: A) If “two parents”, regardless of sex, are better than one, then point out that surely three parents would be preferable to two, and four preferable to three, and so forth, and ask if preference should be given to the largest group parenting arrangement over “couple parenting”, and; B) The homosexual person knows there is a difference between men and women - and therefore mothers and fathers - when it comes to personal relationships. Otherwise, the homosexual personal could just as easily be attracted to someone of the opposite sex.

(2) Yes, not all bride+groom couples choose to or can create children, but they are the only kind that can without the aid of a third party, while no same-sex couples have ever been able to create children alone. Regardless, bride+groom couples still form a microcosm of society by uniting the sexes, and we do not check fertility status of marriage license applicants as that would be a violation of privacy.  Indeed, sexual orientation is not a criterion either.

(3) The countries that have neutered their marriage licensing tend to be countries where marriages don't last as long, fewer people bother to marry, and children are more likely to be born out of wedlock. Although correlation does not prove causation, it is clear that the culture of these societies don't esteem marriage or raising children within marriage as much as ours - should we be striving to be more like them when it comes to marriage licensing? Results from marriage neutering are likely to be generational, and since no country had neutered their licensing as of 15 years ago, we have yet to fully experience the social effects.

Professor Lund Calls Out Bogus Claims About Studies

I previously noted that there are some bogus reports on unreliable studies claiming that couples missing one of the sexes make even better parents than, you know, the kind of couple Nature or Nature's God made reproductive.

Professor Nelson Lund had a can't-miss piece in the Wall Street Journal about this. I suppose he can expect a severed unicorn's head in his bed? Or maybe lots of glitter? Maybe that savage bully fellow (hmmm.. what's his name...) could do a Google bomb on "Lund"? Oh, if the West Wing was still on, they could totally make up a character that is obviously Lund, then have the character say something Lund never said, then have the President totally knock that stawman down! But Law & Order: SVU is still on. They can make the character a pedophile or murderer. You know, all of the real honest and sensible ways of debating public policy.

The claimed right to same-sex marriage is not in the Constitution or in the court's precedents, so the court must decide whether to impose a new law making marriage into a new and different institution.

Yes. Neutering marriage replaces marriage with something else. When you take water bottles in your water bottle factory and fill some with water molecules and some only with hydrogen and some only with oxygen, you can no longer say you are selling water and be honest about it.

A significant number of organizations representing social and behavioral scientists have filed briefs promising the court that there is nothing to worry about. These assurances have no scientific foundation. Same-sex marriage is brand new, and child rearing by same-sex couples remains rare. Even if both phenomena were far more common, large amounts of data collected over decades would be required before any responsible researcher could make meaningful scientific estimates of the long-term effects of redefining marriage.

If the MNAs get their way. by the time the evidence is in, it will be too late to do anything about it.

Social-science advocacy organizations, however, have promoted the myth that a lack of evidence, so far, of bad effects implies the nonexistence of such effects. This myth is based on conjecture or faith, not science.

Science says the pairing of male and female is different from other pairings. Why is the Left suddenly anti-science?

The prominent National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study, for instance, relied on a sample recruited entirely at lesbian events, in women's bookstores and through lesbian newspapers. Other studies relied on samples as small as 18 or 33 or 44 cases. The effect of parenting by male homosexual couples remains in the realm of anecdotes. Most research has relied on reports by parents about their children's well-being while the children were still under the care of those parents. Even a social scientist should be able to recognize that parents' evaluations of their own success as parents might be a little skewed.

No, only a bigot wouldn't take a Leftist homosexual person's opinion as absolutely factual!

There has been only one study using a large randomized sample, objective measures of well-being, and reports of grown children rather than their parents. This research, by Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas Austin, found that children raised in a household where a parent was involved in a same-sex romantic relationship were at a significant disadvantage with respect to a number of indicators of well being—such as depression, educational attainment and criminal behavior—compared with children of intact biological families.

One might expect this work at least to raise a caution flag, but it has been vociferously attacked on methodological grounds by the same organizations that tout the value of politically congenial research that suffers from more severe methodological shortcomings. This is what one expects from activists, not scientists.

Even science must take a dive for the sake of Leftism's drive for esteeming homosexual behaviors. Go read the whole thing.