You’re kidding, right? Heterosexuality is abnormal?

And I thought that being human we have and make choices, at least as far as how we act. Are you saying that we are simply instinctive creatures who act on thoughtless emotion – the feelings of the moment? I, at least am made of better stuff than that. I can and do choose every day to act in ways contrary to my passing feelings in order to ensure long-term benefits. Even some *very* strong inclinations that just may prove harmful to me or to those around me.

As for the rest of your post, Homosexuality exists in the animal kingdom. True, but not as a normal pattern, it is the exception rather than the rule.

Marriages were always legal contracts. It had nothing to do about love or even families. I could care less what a church decides to do. We are simply talking about the legal definition or marriage, not the religious, and religions do not own the term marriage. It is Latin and wasn’t even said until the 13th century, so enough with the Christian right bullshit.

I have said NOTHING about the church, Christianity, religion, the Bible or anything else in my arguments, only that the concept of marriage is older than Christianity. “The Church” did not invent marriage, only attached some trappings and sacramental meanings to it. And the governments have added legal rights, responsibilities and protections to the marriage partners. But the basic concept of a binding, [ideally] lifelong relationship seems to come down to us from prehistory, or at least from the time of myth and legend. And that pattern has been overwhelmingly heterosexual.

Actually, not completely true. We’ve both had our wills written up, wiht power of attorney and “living will” provisions in which we both name each other as the primary person in charge, as well as the primary person to make medical decisions in the case of incapacitation.

These were drawn by a lawyer in Texas, probably one of the most regressive states next to Utah on same-sex rights, and they fulfill the laws requirements on who’s the primary and NOT to be brushed aside.

I d, however, understand your perspective in that anti-gay exclusive laws do great harm the US and their citizens. It’s going to change, as the anti-gay people reduce in numbers. Just look at where we are now, and where we were 20 years ago! The right side is becoming the majority, and soon the regressives will all be gone or overruled.

Um, excuse me, Homosexuality is NORMAL.
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Marriage is not only constitutional for gay people, but it’s for the betterment of society.
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To even mention saying, then you would have to allow incest, bestiality, and bigamy, is ludicrous. Those are not normal behaviors.
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It’s no one else’s business.
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Comment by fightindonkey — October 12, 2007 @ 1:11 pm

I disagree with most of what you’ve posted.

Your reference to the constitution is misleading. Marriage is not mentioned in the constitution. If you’re reference to the constitution means the rights under the 14th amendment, then you can be sure that neither the founders nor the amendment writers intended for those rights to include so-called homosexual marriage.

All the arguments for so-called homosexual marriage will be used to justify ; polygamy; polyandry; whatever polygamy and polyandry together would be called; pedophilia; bestiality; and robots. This includes your argument, “It’s no one else’s business.” as well as, “How does it hurt straight marriage?” and the every popular, “Other countries do it.”

In the New Testament book of Matthew, chapter 19, Christ confirms that a man and a woman are one flesh when they are married. This is a condition that exists between a man and a woman. Hence, marriage remains a relationship between a man and a woman.

There’s no government on earth strong enough to change that.

Comment by bitblt — October 10, 2007 @ 11:30 am

Aside:

http://www.breitbart.com/print.php?id=upiUPI-20071011-122541-6886&show_article=1

Researcher: Humans will wed robots
Oct 11 12:41 PM US/Eastern
MAASTRICHT, Netherlands, Oct. 11 (UPI) — The University of Maastricht in the Netherlands is awarding a doctorate to a researcher who wrote a paper on marriages between humans and robots.

David Levy, a British artificial intelligence researcher at the college, wrote in his thesis, “Intimate Relationships with Artificial Partners,” that trends in robotics and shifting attitudes on marriage are likely to result in sophisticated robots that will eventually be seen as suitable marriage partners.

Levy’s conclusion was based on about 450 publications in the fields of psychology, sexology, sociology, robotics, materials science, artificial intelligence, gender studies and computer-human interaction.

The thesis examines human attitudes toward affection, love and sexuality and concluded that the findings are just as applicable to human interaction with robots of the future as they are to the relationships between humans of today.

Honey, you’re way off. It was a money arrangement. It has nothing to do with procreation. You can get knocked up without a piece of paper. Must be nice to live in your fairy land.

That’s nice, but if your partner is sick, dies, or you have children, you have no rights, and will be pushed aside. Yes, it does matter, whether you want to be legally married or not. It is important.

And you think homosexuals are going to be “encouraged” to be straight? They are the traditional family. If your child turned out to be gay, you wouldn’t want them to have the same rights as every other person? People don’t jump on a bandwagon and suddenly think, “Let me try that gay marriage thing even though I’m straight.” It doesn’t work like that. Marriages were always legal contracts. It had nothing to do about love or even families. I could care less what a church decides to do. We are simply talking about the legal definition or marriage, not the religious, and religions do not own the term marriage. It is Latin and wasn’t even said until the 13th century, so enough with the Christian right bullshit. Unless we all live under the same laws, we are not truly free. We are trumping one’s personal view over another. You are free to live how you wish with legal protection, just as another person. Homosexuality is normal, it cannot be changed, has been around since the beginning of time, and will end up being in your extended family, or even your child. You are literally fighting over a word and wishing to lump a group of people into another category and phrase. That is not what America is about. It’s the same as segregating blacks from whites in schools. You still got an education, but you were separated. This is the same thing with marriage and trying to push people under a civil union phrase, which doesn’t even cover all the same legal benefits. You can still be fired in this country for being gay, and the Right wing religious nutcases are protected. Yes, we should be pushing marriage, FOR ALL PEOPLE. It works for the betterment of society. You should have the right to get married if you wish. Gay people are still going to be together regardless, and should have all the legal benefits that go along with that, just as anyone else.

Naw, we’re really not all that different. Except I’m about a decade younger than you! ;-)

I was raised very strict Southern Baptist, and was a Republican until my last year in the Army in 1990. My politics may be on the other spectrum than yours, but that doesn’t mean I don’t respect someone just because they disagre with me!

I would like to marry my partner of 7+ years, but marriage is in the heart, not on a piece of paper. In my eyes, we’re married.

I don’t know that we are any better off now – it all seemed so innocent then (it could have been just me). The Kennedy and King assassinations, VietNam, race riots, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon (both were equally corrupt in my book). There was so much turmoil from 1964 through 1972. As a nation, I don’t think we have gotten over any of these yet.

Comment by Democrat Soldier — October 11, 2007 @ 11:38 am

Finally! Thank you for a thoughtful and civil response. We are not really all that far apart after all. I am not so much for negative laws (prohibitions) as I am for positive encouragement to do right.

True, the rampant divorce rate, as well as the runaway numbers of never-married mothers with absent or derelict fathers is a *VERY* serious problem. A problem that we have not seen the end of yet. History shows the most productive, responsible people tend to come from stable intact homes, while most of the troubled ones come from some form of broken families.

And a lot of this seems to come from a “What’s in it for me?” attitude that is so common on both the right and the left. Life is hard, and marriage doubly so, but as long as I focus on “Me” more than on “Us”, then divorce, abandonment or abuse become more attractive than working through the rough stuff. And there can be a lot of it.

BTW, my dad’s best man was a black man who had a white wife (my parents married in 1949). I remember meeting them in 1955, when I was 5. I never knew what a n*****r was until high school, and even then I thought a ‘coon’ was an animal that ate the catfood off the porch. I had to have the prejudices explained to me.

Well, I can see where you’re coming from, but I still disagree with your surmise. I recall my grandfather telling me that the US started down the wrong track when they began repealling laws that outlawed inter-racial marriages. “It’s going to make marriage mean nothing at all if they allow blacks and whites to marry!”

Of course, his perspective was proven wrong by history. I’m not comparing your belief directly to his, as there is a difference.

Traditional marriage is “diluted” (to use your terminology) more by couples that decide to solve a problem with divorce than ever same-sex marriages would. In fact, encouraging monogamy, which is a founding principle of marriage, would do more to strengthen marriage than any “exclusive” laws would.

No. I didn’t say that.

So, because we don’t “practice” traditional marriages “well”, we should outlaw any other types of marriages, because we have to keep practicing “unwell” marriages before we can allow any other marriages?

Comment by Democrat Soldier — October 11, 2007 @ 7:39 am

I thought it would have been obvious, having read the previous posts here.

So many people want to use the hypocrisy of some of the heterosexuals as a broad brush to say that the hetero marriage is not, nor should be, the ideal. I don’t buy that argument. The existence of hypocrisy doesn’t destroy that any more than the a few leadfoot drivers proves we shouldn’t have speed limits.

And I never said homosexuals should be barred from anything – just that the traditional family pattern should be encouraged. I will here go on record with how I see gay marriage weakening that – by dilution. It’s like the statement by Syndrome in ‘The Incredibles’ where he said “… And then everyone will be a super. Then no one will be.” Recognizing gay marriages, while not directly attacking the traditional family, does so in a more indirect way, that is, by removing its uniqueness. Sorta like simply printing more currency devalues what is already in circulation. So there is no longer any significant recognition of the sacrifices that many ordinary people make in order to produce the next generation, it becomes only about what makes the marriage partners feel good.

So, I take it you would be in favor of passing the law that would require married couples to procreate within a certain amount of time after marriage, and requiring those who do not procreate to have the marriage annulled.

“And just because many of the traditional marriages so often suck or fail, this does not prove that the traditional marriage is wrong – it just proves we don’t practice it well.” Comment by richg — October 10, 2007 @ 1:07 pm

So, because we don’t “practice” traditional marriages “well”, we should outlaw any other types of marriages, because we have to keep practicing “unwell” marriages before we can allow any other marriages?

I’m not sure where you’re going with your argument, except to say that because heterosexuals have done so badly at the whole marriage thing in recent years that homosexuals should be barred from having them because. . . . . .

I think you know of what I speak, when right-whiners “claim” that allowing same-sex marriages will (somehow, mysteriously, magically) underminde the importance of heterosexual marriage.

Why don’t you blame the rising deficit on gay-marriage?

Why don’t you blame terrorism on gay-marriage?

They all have the same staw-man type argument.

Comment by richg — October 10, 2007 @ 8:27 pm

I’ll give one example of selective editing of history to make it conform to our modern sensitivities:

About 4 years ago, when my daughter was still in H.S., I picked up her American History textbook, and happened to stumble of the “Mayflower Compact”, which was listed as one of the important founding documents of the Colonies. I had heard several from the Christian Right read excerpts from their ‘version’ which seemed to make the case for the Evangelical Right’s interpretation of American History. Funny thing, the school textbook version had no reference to “the Gospel”, “Jesus Christ” or anything even remotely ‘evangelical’. I then went to my copy of the World Book Encyclopedia (1995 Edition) to look it up to see who was right – and you know, it was Falwell, Dobson and D.James Kennedy who had it right. The schoolbook’s version had been edited. With NO disclaimer or notation.

Now you may think it was right to edit this historical document under the “separation of church and state” doctrine, but to do so with NO comment presents a very different history than what actually happened. And if there is such a simple historical sanitizing that can be so easily discovered, what else is being changed? And taught to those who do not have the ability to do their own checking?

There’s no Platonic form of “the traditional marriage,” some beautiful ideal that has been corrupted. Crack open a history book for heaven’s sake.

I have. The view that women had “marriages in which wives had no legal rights whatsoever” seems to be a fiction created by moderns – it does not bear up under even a slight reading of pre-Christian literature from non-Christian societies. The Greeks and Romans recognized specific rights and responsibilities for both husbands and wives, as did the Egyptians and Hebrews (who may have gotten their laws from the even more ancient Chaldeans or Sumerians). Nowhere in human history have I seen women treated legally as having the status of lands or livestock. This does not say that things were identical to today, but that many modern ‘experts’ and ’scholars’ look at the past through the filters of their own current morality.

I like the little scholars here. But richg/bitbit you really might want to take a refresher course in modern social history. You talk of “the traditional marriage” as if it has existed since the dawn of time, or since the the Old Testament, or since Jesus, or even since 1776. And that is bull.

By “traditional marriage” I assume you mean one life-long sexual/emotional/legal relationship between consenting adults of the opposite sex in which the partners procreate, share property, have legal responsibilities to one another, etc.

That’s a type of marriage that did not come into being until the 20th century. It’s absurd to talk about marriage today and pretend it’s the same as marriages between, for example, two children, or an adult man and a girl child. Or marriages in which wives had no legal rights whatsoever, in which women became subsumed under the legal identities of their husbands and lost all legal identity of their own. Those marriages were typical throughout the 19th century.

There’s no Platonic form of “the traditional marriage,” some beautiful ideal that has been corrupted. Crack open a history book for heaven’s sake.

Comment by Lefty Patriot — October 10, 2007 @ 8:22 am

Ok. Let’s step back for a minute. Most of the legal aspects of “marriage” have little to nothing to do with how much two [or more] people feel about each other. It was to recognize something unique in the procreative relationship, where one person had the biological obligation to give up external pursuits in order to give herself to the pregnancy, nurturing and raising of children, while the other was obligated to the external tasks of providing for and protecting the more defenseless. This is an ancient recognition, far pre-dating our modern opinions and practices.

I was not writing anything directly attacking gay marriages, but it seems plain that to me that the traditional arrangement was there for a reason, no matter how badly it is practiced today. I don’t have as much problem with people setting up whatever living and contractual relationship they wish, as I do with disregard for the relationships that produced us. And just because many of the traditional marriages so often suck or fail, this does not prove that the traditional marriage is wrong – it just proves we don’t practice it well.

One must, as it has been said before, address the real “threat” to heterosexual marriage, and not the fabricated straw-man argument blaming all hetero ills on homos.

Comment by Democrat Soldier — October 10, 2007 @ 12:49 pm

What?

So, when do you start your crusade to enshrine “covenant marriage” in the constitution?

One must, as it has been said before, address the real “threat” to heterosexual marriage, and not the fabricated straw-man argument blaming all hetero ills on homos.