It does not have to be SO THREATENING. It merely needs to not be the preferred form of household. The current law concededly favors raising children in heterosexual families. Gay marriage "threatens" that by reducing the specificity of what it is that is favored. Beyond that social benefits of marriage include subsidies of one form or another. Peeling off some portion of those subsidies for disfavored behavior eiher means overall costs go up or the average available to those engaging in the desired behavior goes down.
But it absolutely was democratic. Lincoln freed the slaves by proclamation, but the Constitution still had to be amended through the ordinary amendment process. (*see below) The Amendments may not have been fully embraced in the southern states, but they were all part of the process. Imagine if one judge, much less nine justices, had simply ordered the change. At least with a democratic process, everyone has a voice in the result. Even if theirs is the minority voice. *ETA: I'll qualify that. The southern states were certainly strong-armed into adopting the post-War Amendments, as well as the Civil Rights Act. I don't mean to make it sound like the Civil War end and everyone shook hands and made nice-nice. That wasn't my point.
Well, this leads us into a discussion of whether homosexuality is a behavior or an inborn trait. I doubt we'll find agreement there, so I'll leave it be. The behavior, the act of homosexuality, has been deemed legal, at least as far as this state is concerned. We'll have to disagree on whether voting on the underlying preference is a matter of determining acceptable behavior. Given that, we'll apparently also have to disagree as to the propriety of such a vote. So be it. Nothing said so far has seemed to logically challenge my assertion that this never should have been put to a legal vote. I do, however, recognize the obvious wisdom of the 2nd paragraph, as well as Jack's arguments from a legal, federal standpoint. Personally, I don't think the reasoning given by Walker was appropriate or sufficient, and I can admit that I acted irrationally when I was happy that the earlier mistake was corrected. It will be interesting to see what comes of the SC case.
I'm not disputing that, nor did I suggest 13 - 15 were adopted by a dead president. I was simply stating that those laws were enacted by the power of the legislature, not by popular vote. All attempts to do the same in California have been overturned by popular vote. Remember as well, the popular opinion that blacks were undeserving of citizenship in the 1860s was by no means limited to the rebel states. Given that we're primarily discussing the 14th, there's an important distinction to be made.
No, it's that we need to save them from the idiocy of others. Completely false. Gay couples are allowed to adopt or have children with surrogates now. Marriage and children are COMPLETELY independent from each other.
I thought this was a thoughtful article, by Ross Douthat, on this issue. August 9, 2010, 9:20 pm We’re All Marriage Ideologues A few weeks ago, Noah Millman had an interesting post explaining why he had temporarily opposed gay marriage in the early 2000s, and why he ultimately changed his mind and now supports it again. His brief opposition, he wrote, was rooted in an attempt to embrace what he called “the ideology of marriage,” in the hopes that it would provide grounding and support during some of his own private marital difficulties. Here’s his sketch of this ideology, which he sees as an attempt to provide some kind of rationale for modern marriage that doesn’t just depend on the fickleness of eros: In the marriage ideology, marrying isn’t primarily about love, or any other aspect of the relationship between two people; it’s about the creation of a third thing, different from either spouse, greater than either spouse, into which they pour themselves and are dissolved. This union finds its material expression in children, the product of a fertile marriage that cannot be torn asunder even in divorce, and who thereby give sign to the world that you and you are now parts of a larger whole, and if you break that whole it will not restore you to yourself, but merely leave the world broken. Eventually, though, Millman concluded that this was “all false, all an attempt to set up an artificial ideal to replace the only thing that is real, which is people, how they treat each other, care for each other, feel about each other.” The marriage ideology, he decided, “is not really that different from other romantic ideologies that have sought to assuage a sense of loss of self by subsuming the self in a larger, purportedly organic whole, and substituting this whole for the actual self. Nationalism does this with the nation, various religious ideologies do this with a religious group, etc. Not marriage itself, but the marriage ideology, is pernicious for the same reasons these other ideologies are.” Now I think the understanding of marriage that I offered in today’s column is somewhat different from the Romantic ideology of self-subsumation that Millman describes, and I don’t really buy his history of how the ideas surrounding what we in the West call “traditional” marriage evolved. But obviously I believe in a kind of ideology of marriage, and one that leads to the sort of conclusions about the distinctiveness of heterosexual wedlock that Millman now rejects as self-evidently false. What I would strongly dispute, though, is his suggestion that it’s possible to escape entirely from ideological conceptions of marriage, into a world where it’s all just people loving people, and the way we treat one another is the only thing that matters. This seems like an extremely naive view of how ideas intersect with human action, and how cultures shape behavior. Of course all ideals and ideologies are imperfect descriptions of reality, and semi-quixotic attempts to graft order onto the inherent messiness of human affairs. But you can’t escape them just by declaring that they’re “artificial,” because such artifice is itself natural to man, and inherent to culture-making and social order. Every society has its ideals and ideologies, about marriage as much as about any other institution. And the fact that wedlock was once somewhat more about property and somewhat less about love than it is today doesn’t mean that our ancestors didn’t have their own theories of marriage, and their own arguments about what the institution meant and ought to mean. Read the Greeks and Romans; read the New Testament; read Shakespeare and The Book of Common Prayer. There was never a time when human beings weren’t building ideologies of marriage, and there was never a culture where those ideologies didn’t have an impact on how people wed and parented and loved. This means that if the ideology that justifies defining marriage as lifelong heterosexual monogamy gets swept into history’s dustbin, we won’t suddenly be flung into a landscape where the only real things are people and the people they love. We’ll just get a different ideology of marriage in its place, one that makes a different set of assumptions and generalizations and invests the institution with a different kind of purpose. And we don’t need a judge’s ruling (though Judge Vaughn Walker’s analysis was certainly clarifying!) to know what that ideology will look like: It’s the increasingly commonplace theory that marriage exists to celebrate romantic love and provide public recognition for mutually-supportive couples, with no inherent connection of any kind to gender difference and/or procreation, and with only a rhetorical connection to the ideal of permanence. Since this is basically the theory that much of our society already holds, redefining marriage to include gay relationships is unlikely to have anything like the kind of impact on American life that, say, the divorce revolution of the 1960s and 1970s did. But again, I think it’s a little naive to assume that it will have no impact at all — that legal changes don’t beget further cultural changes, and that public definitions don’t influence private conduct. Maybe the potential consequences are so vanishingly minimal that they’re easily outweighed by the benefits to gay couples; that’s certainly a reasonable position. But looking out across America’ landscape of heterosexual dysfunction, it’s still a little hard for me to accept that what this moment demands of us is the legal formalization — indeed, the constitutionalization, if Judge Walker has his way — of the ideological conceit that marriage has no necessary connection to gender difference, procreation or childrearing.
You misread. And are wrong. You are correct that single people can adopt. But that does not mean that couples are not more likely to adopt, because they are, and the subsidies and support given married couples are in part designed to encourage that form of social arrangement as the preferred, and therefore more common than otherwise, social arrangement within which to raise children. Seeing marriage and raising children as unrelated is just your ideology talking, and shows precisely how the gay agenda and those, like you, who support it are shifting society away from the important social purpose and interest in raising children better.
Speaking of misreading and being wrong... I never said ANYTHING about single people adopting. Glad to know I was right about it though. You keep hammering away at this retarded argument though, so I guess there's something to be said for consistency. The bottom line is you can have a marriage without children and you can have children without marriage. The state of being married or not is in no way dependent or influenced by the state of being pregnant and the state of being pregnant is in no way dependent or influenced by the state of being married. In short, the two things are the literal definition of independent from each other. It's not even a matter of opinion, it is objective fact. Disputing it is either stupid or willfully ignorant of the basic meaning of the word independent.
Off topic, but my older brother worked in Albany during the early 80s and the Coumo gombahs had a whisper campaign going against Ed Koch: "Vote for Cuomo, Not the Homo."
Take a look around, do you really think gay couples could/would do a worse job than straight couples are currently doing?
You try to use a hyper and overwrought literalism to avoid the obvious. That something can exist apart from something else does not mean that when they occur together, are joined in some manner, that there is no effect. I never said, obviously, that one has to be married to have children, or that married people always have children. That is a straw man that exists in your mind. I said that society has long felt that children are better off being raised by their biological parents in a long term, state recognized relationship, called marriage. I also think society has a right to reserve that title as an honorific for people who can meet that definition, ready to raise what children come along within that social construct.
I think children are better off being raised by their biological parents. That we honor and recognize adoptions, and that adoptions can be if you will a good thing for all involved does not take away that there is something special and therefore BETTER about being raised by your father and your mother. There is an identification that is undeniable, a connection that does not otherwise exist. That does not mean that love and caring can only exist in such relationships, but they do add something. By definition gay parents fall outside that type of relationship.
So falling short of attaining an ideal means society should be constitutionally prohibited from continuing to pursue that ideal?
I must have missed that part. I could have sworn that lettings queers get married had absolutly no impact on straights getting married. Apperently BB has uncovered some shifty legislation tho, blocking straights from getting married. Kudos to you sir! You're a true patriot!
The three previous posters either have purposely misread my post or are not very good at reading. The ideal is marriage as a construct within which children can and should be raised by their biological parents in a lifelong relationship. The fact that that ideal is not always met, even is met infrequently, does not mean that society must be constitutionally prohibited from identifying that as the ideal and seeking to encourage people to follow it. Gay marriage does not meet the definition of the ideal. By its nature it cannot. Sorry, can't change Nature.
Who is trying to eliminate your "ideal family"? Nobody. You're jumping to rediculous conclusions to try and make a poor point.
