There are concerns today that the Supreme Court will nullify the right of gay people to get married. The Court doesn’t think you should apply the Constitution to controversial issues that were never in the minds of those who wrote it or any of the later Amendments. If people think this is a right, then Congress can make a law saying as much.
But the issue should really be called same-sex marriage and
not gay marriage. Nobody cares or asks
whether a person is gay before they get married. The issue is whether two people of the same
sex can have a relationship that can and should be called a marriage.
This is a new thing in human history, and is it a right as
well? This whole matter has raised the
question of what exactly is a marriage in the first place. Is marriage just a word that we give to a
relationship where people love each other and decide to live together, and we
give that a legal status so they can have visitation rights and other
privileges only defined for family members.?
Why is the definition of marriage even important? Who cares?
What difference does it make?
A healthy society needs to reproduce at least enough people to
maintain its population. When reproductive
levels fall too low, societies shrink.
They get older, and that places financial stress on that society,
because it has to take care of the elderly with relatively fewer people to pay
for it. With the advances of modern
medicine, we have a vastly increasing senior population, and we have a shrinking
pool of workers able to support them. Our
society has been below replacement value for a long time now.
That was the main point of marriage, the creation of
biological families. And, of course, marriage
was encouraged prior to the fact of having any children. After they had children was too late to start
asking those questions. No, not all
marriages end up that way, but we won’t know that until after the
marriage.
A society also needs to encourage the things that make for an
optimal upbringing of these new generations to become productive members of
society. Historically, marriage has been
about the relationship of a man and a woman, not only because that is how children
are created, but because this couple also united to raise them until the children
could take care of themselves. Unlike
animals, these children required an enormous amount of time and energy to make
all this happen. Marriage was to ensure that
the two adults involved would work together to do that.
Parents are like lifelong one-on-one tutors, mentors, role-models,
and caregivers but at no cost to society.
So it is in society’s interest to encourage people to get married and
have children.
But do people need to get married to have children? Technically, no. But having children as a single parent is a
very difficult undertaking. It’s one of
the leading causes of poverty, and these children are at a greater risk for all
kinds of adverse outcomes. So it is in
the interests of society that children grow up in a two parent household.
We do know that same sex couples cannot create children. Same-sex couples often want to have their own
children, but in order to do that, they have to remove one of the child’s
natural parents from its life. That is
not good, and we shouldn’t pretend that it is.
We also know that role models are important in a child’s life, but in
same sex couples, should we then try to limit them to having only same sex
children? And how would we do that?
We stretch the meaning of family today to include any number
of different arrangements, but biological ties still remain the ideal. The rest are simply adjustments to a
breakdown in that, for whatever reason, usually a death. Because a healthy society requires new generations
of contributing members, the health of families is a proper and important concern
of society.
When we legalize same-sex marriage, we are also normalizing
it, and we are telling our children that same-sex marriage is just as good as
regular marriage, and homosexual relationships are just as good as heterosexual
ones. Our public schools are even encouraging
children today, long before they have ever given any thought to whether they
want to have children of their own or if sexual relationships have any meaning
apart from personal pleasure, and even before they have reached puberty, to
decide what gender they want to be and what sexual orientation.
Some will say that this is only a matter of self-discovery, but
they are encouraging children to experiment with all the various possibilities
and decide now the entire course of the rest of their lives. They are being taught that one way is not
better than another. And they are
teaching sex apart from even loving relationships. It’s just something that gives you pleasure,
and you need to decide which way you like best, and that will define whether
you are gay, straight, and any of a number of other possibilities.
In recent times, after our country threw off its religious
associations which stigmatized homosexuality, people were more open about these
kinds of relationships, and certain problems developed. They were in undefined relationships with no
legal status. So visitation rights were
non-existent. Inheritances were
non-existent. Some areas created a legal
status for these relationships, so they could be listed as family or next of
kin.
Which is fine.
But the goal was not legal status, though they wanted that. Heck, it was never really about privacy
either. We were told that what people do
alone in their homes doesn’t affect you and needn’t concern you. People should be free to love whomever they
will. But that was not it.
It was about something more.
It was about equality, just like ‘separate but equal’ was deemed
inherently unequal. A separate category
was deemed as second-class status, and that was unacceptable.
But we have to ask what equality means.
To use a rough analogy: if we call a bicycle a vehicle, then
is a Schwinn equal to a Ford Explorer, since they are both vehicles, and should
they have equal access on a highway? To
limit Schwinns to a narrow strip on the side of some roads is discriminatory
and unequal, and that becomes wrong.
Equality can mean equal status. There were civil unions that were created to
provide legal status and rights to same-sex couples, but that was not enough.
But what was wanted was equality in value, such as one is as
good as the other. There is no preferred
choice. Like chocolate and vanilla. One is not right and the other wrong. It’s all just a matter of personal
preference. And they will insist, this
preference is built into our very natures.
Not only is it to be deemed equal, but you better damn well
like it too. Otherwise, we will put you
out of business if you don’t.
Our presumed secular society will no longer stigmatize
same-sex relationships, however they are named, but equality is a term that is
misleading and inaccurate, particularly when we talk to our children about
this.
These kinds of relationships are best left for adults to
consider, after people are fully aware of the ramifications of committing their
lives to people of the same sex.
But, no, same-sex marriage is not a Constitutional
right. You can’t decide or determine what
the Constitution or any of its Amendments means in situations totally unlike
anything that those who wrote them would have even thought about when they were
written. This is a matter left to our
legislative bodies. This is a totally
new thing in history, and we need to talk about it.
