Ancient Greeks highlight gay marriage flaws

Ancient Greeks highlight gay marriage flaws

Date

July 1, 2015

Bill O'Chee

I have many friends around the world, some of whom are gay, and some of whom are lesbian.  At the heart of those friendships is a desire to see people for who they are, and not for the people with whom they have sex.

Yet for all that, I do not support the state legislating to create a class of marriage between two men or two women. Moreover, I believe the arguments advanced in favour of gay marriage reflect poorly upon those who advocate for it.

Gay marriage is not about colouring your Facebook page avatar with a rainbow, nor is it about whether a man may have genuine feelings of love for another man, or a woman another woman. The discussion is, instead, about complex and fundamental issues not always properly considered.

If we go back over 2000 years, we find that both the Greeks and Romans were familiar with love and sex between people of the same gender. Indeed, for the Greeks, same sex relationships were neither uncommon, nor frowned upon; in fact they were probably much more common than they are today.

As was their way, the Greeks felt the need to use different words to describe what they saw as different types of love.

There could be agápe, brotherly love, or love of God; or storge, the love of parents and their children. The Greeks also spoke of philia, which was an idealised form of friendship based on equality and virtue; and of éros, which was sexual passion. Interestingly, éros was not restricted by gender.

Even in such a permissive society, gamos was reserved solely for a relationship between a man and a woman for the purposes of creating a family, even if that relationship might not originally be based on love.

There is much we can learn from the Greeks. The modern reality is that the vast majority of people who love each other live together without getting married, even if they may choose to do so later.

The law has moved to accommodate this, and common law couples are able to pass property to each other, to benefit from their partner's superannuation policy, and make decisions as next-of-kin, just the same as those who are married.

If that is so, why do heterosexual couples, who may have been living together for some time, choose to get married?

It is not about love, as that can be had perfectly well in a normal de facto relationship. In fact love - true and deep love - should not need outside validation, and should be independent of what others have to say.

Heterosexual couples don't need to marry to have children, as many children are born to de facto couples, even if some or many of those couples marry later.

However, the vast majority of heterosexual couples who chose to marry, either have children at the time, or intend to have them, and this is the impetus for marriage. Marriage gives those a stability and a clear identity that is the basis of their lifelong emotional development.

Certainly there may be people who marry who don't intend to have children, but they are a tiny minority, and certainly should not be used to characterise marriage.

So the truth is that marriage is not so much about love for our partner, as much as love for the children we hope to bring into the world.

It is at this point that the case for gay marriage starts to fall apart, because having children cannot ever be a natural consequence of two men or two women forming a union, no matter how genuine their emotions may be.

And if the motive for gay marriage is to make it easier for gay and lesbian couples to adopt children, or to access the powers of the state to bring children into the world through surrogacy or artificial insemination, then it is no longer about the love two people feel for each other, and more about wanting babies as lifestyle accessories.

This brings us to a broader, but important, philosophical issue.

I strongly believe the right to determine one's identity - sexual and otherwise - is one of the very few truly inalienable rights which society should accord every individual.

Determining our identity - and deciding on how we live our lives - necessarily involves many choices.
Choices, however, come with consequences.  Those consequences are the very reason we make choices: we sum up the advantages and disadvantages each choice brings, and make our decisions on that basis.

To believe that we can make choices about the way we want to live our lives, and then have the state come in and relieve us of the consequences we don't like is deeply flawed.  The whole basis of the law is built on people being responsible for the consequences of their actions, and marriage and families should be no different.

It is easy and glib to talk about "marriage equality" but what is more important is seeing through our choices to make sure they are meaningful.  This doesn't diminish the love that gay and lesbian couples may feel for each other.  However marriage has a real purpose which is larger than our love for ourselves or our partners, and it is selfish to see it otherwise.

The Best Reason I'm Wrong On Gay Marriage

The Best Reason I'm Wrong On Gay Marriage

My personal view on marriage is that it is the union of one man and one woman, joined together permanently, exclusively and monogamously. But as for the marriage wars, I’ve long argued that government should not be involved. People should be free to join together in whatever groupings they want and the government should not favor one such group over another.

To be clear, I do not mean by this that I support the government redefining marriage to include same-sex unions or other groupings. You can read more on my views in “The Rise of the Same Sex Marriage Dissidents.” I’ve never been persuaded that such a redefinition is an appropriate or coherent act for government or leads to greater liberty. We’ve definitely seen the loss of liberty that comes with it.

Marriage existed prior to government. It is public, not private, but it does not intrinsically require legal recognition. Our tax laws shouldn’t play favorites based on marital status. I wish the government were much smaller and less involved in marriage, whether that plays out in forcing florists to provide bouquets for marriage ceremonies they believe to be sinful or firing teachers who don’t wish to violate their beliefs in how they teach about marriage. In fact, I think that the stronger the family, churches, and other institutions are, the less invasive the government. The stronger and more involved the government is in regulating marriage law, the weaker these other institutions are.

Still, my position gives me pause in a few different ways. And has for years since I began thinking more deeply on this topic, if I’m being honest. One is simply the recognition that it’s based on unrealistic thinking. We don’t live in a world where people seek less government involvement.

More importantly, though, what does it really mean to get the government out of marriage? What singled marriage out throughout all time and human history as a different type of recognized relationship is that sex was involved. There’s only one bodily system for which each of us only has half of the system. The unit is the mated pair. In sexual congress, in intercourse between a man and a woman, you are literally coordinated to a single bodily end. And not infrequently, that end involves the creation of another human being. What does it mean to get the government out of marriage when you’re thinking of the natural end of coital sex? That is, children.

Abolishing the many laws regulating marriage sounds like a way to decrease state involvement, but it undeniably opens up avenues for greater state involvement in lives. Would each group of people seeking to join together draw up their own contracts? Who would adjudicate the violations of such contracts? This is an already complicated process when everyone’s operating on similar understanding. Family court judges are meddlesome enough, but imagine the layers of appeals that we would see in a “privatized” situation, appeals that would go to the Supreme Court to establish precedents.

....

Supreme Court Finally Asks the Tough Questions on Same-Sex Marriage | First Things

Link: http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2013/03/supreme-court-finally-asks-the-tough-questions-on-same-sex-marriage (via shareaholic.com)

Justice Alito also brought the questioning back to Kennedy's "going blind in uncharted waters" remark as he said to Solicitor General Donald Verrilli:

But what is your response to the argument which has already been mentioned about the need to be cautious in light of the newness of the concept of same-sex marriage? . . .

[Marriage is] thought to be a fundamental building block of society and its preservation essential for the preservation of society. Traditional marriage has been around for thousands of years. Same-sex marriage is very new. . . . You want us to step in and render a decision based on an assessment of the effects of this institution which is newer than cell phones or the Internet? I mean . . . we do not have the ability to see the future."

These questions were never really answered.

Nelson Lund: A Social Experiment Without Science Behind It - WSJ.com

Link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324557804578376671175549596.html (via shareaholic.com)

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.

Gay Marriage Debate Obscures Real Tragedy: Marriage Decline - Investors.com

Link: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/032713-649595-gaymarriage-debate-obscures-marriage-decline.htm?p=full (via shareaholic.com)

This country and healthy societies around the world and throughout history have given marriage between a man and a woman special legal protection because of the recognition that it is the one institution that ensures the society's stable future through the orderly procreation and upbringing of children.

In this context, we find the decline in marriage and the rise in illegitimacy, prime factors in crime, poverty and societal decay, being virtually ignored as the Supreme Court looks at the penumbras and emanations from the Constitution to decide whether Adam and Steve can legally tie the knot.

The Same-Sex Marriage Ruling's "Factual" Findings

The Same-Sex Marriage Ruling's "Factual" Findings

via The Weekly Standard Blog by John McCormack on 8/6/10

When Judge Vaughn Walker struck down California's constitutional amendment banning gay marriage on the grounds that it violated the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause, some argued that what really mattered in the decision were Walkers findings of fact--which supposedly prove there is no rational basis for keeping marriage a union between a man and a woman.

At Ricochet, John Yoo explains the trouble with Walker's "factual" findings:

Judge Walker sees it as the job of the courts to test whether laws passed by a majority of the people, or a legislature, advance the public good as defined by expert testimony by social scientists. I'm more than happy if the government required that its own laws produce more benefits than costs. But do we want this job done by a single judge, or a small group of judges, relying on social science (in this case, the work of sociologists, psychologists, and political scientists produced to the court by the litigating parties) of a recent phenomenon?

Here's how it worked in the gay marriage case. Walker asked whether the goal of Prop 8 -- higher levels of marriage & less divorce, encouragement of procreation, social stability -- were achieved by a ban on gay marriage. He said no. He cited a few studies, as if they proved facts about the real world, by the plaintiffs' experts. Because of this, the law failed the rational basis test -- there was no possible logical link between the goals of Prop 8 and the means. [...]

social science -- as anyone who reads these studies -- is far from a perfect science. There are so many variables and alternative explanations involved in understanding human interaction. I am dubious whether sociologists and psychologists can tell us the real causes and effects of gay marriage -- it has only been legal in the United States for a few years, and only in a few states. That is why my preferred solution of relying on federalism makes sense -- if states can choose different policies, we can learn from the information generated and understand the costs and benefits.

At The Public Discourse Matthew Franck takes on Judge Walker's reasoning:

Perhaps the most surprising thing in the judge's opinion is his declaration that "gender no longer forms an essential part of marriage." This line, quoted everywhere within hours with evident astonishment, appears to be the sheerest ipse dixit—a judicial "because I said so"—and the phrase "no longer" conveys that palpable sense that one is being mugged by a progressive. But Judge Walker's remark here is actually the conclusion of a fairly complex argument. The problem is that the argument is not only complex but wholly fallacious. [...]

When "the genders" are no longer "seen as having distinct roles," it is revealed that at marriage's "core" there is ample space for same-sex couples too. Since "gender no longer forms an essential part of marriage," indeed since it never really did, "plaintiffs' relationships are consistent with the core of the history, tradition and practice of marriage in the United States." There, you see? There is something eminently conservative about the admission of same-sex couples to the marital bond. What could we have been thinking, denying them this right for all these centu56ries?

Judge Walker seems to have committed the fallacy of composition—taking something true of a part and concluding that it is also true of the whole of which it is a part. If it is true that "gender" no longer matters as it once did in the relation of husband and wife, he reasons, therefore it no longer matters whether the relation is one of husband and wife; it may as well be a relation of husband and husband or of wife and wife, since we now know that marriage is not, at its "core," a "gendered institution." But restated in this way, it is quite plain that the judge's conclusion doesn't follow from his premises. To say that the status of men and women in marriage is one of equal partners is not to say that men and women are the same, such that it does not matter what sex their partners are. The equalization of status is not the obliteration of difference, as much as Judge Walker would like to pretend it is.

Should a Gay Judge Have Appointed Himself to Hear the Case Against Propositi...

Should a Gay Judge Have Appointed Himself to Hear the Case Against Proposition 8?

via Big Lizards by Dafydd on 8/6/10

Patterico asks a cogent question in a recent post: "Should the Prop. 8 Decision Have Been Made by a Gay Judge?" Or should Judge Vaughn Walker have recused himself from hearing Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the lawsuit filed to overturn California's Proposition 8, an initiative constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage (SSM)?

Patterico concludes thus:

Still, if you see laws against gay marriage as discriminatory in the same sense that Jim Crow laws were, it's tough to accept the premise that a gay judge could not ethically decide this case.... Would a black judge be required to recuse himself from hearing a challenge to Jim Crow laws? Somehow, the intuitive answer to that question is no, of course not. Why is this different?

This one is actually fairly easy to answer: By the time Jim Crow laws were being overturned in courts, America had already enacted numerous federal laws and constitutional amendments, an infrastructure of paradigmatic change, going all the way back to our Organic Documents, that collectively formed the basis for a national consensus that "all men are created equal."

Obviously not everybody agreed, or we wouldn't have needed to overturn such laws in court -- nor would we have needed to enact the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But a consensus does not require unanimity; and clearly, Americans were willing to accept in the abstract what they could not always practice in their own lives: That there is no significant difference in personhood between black and white.

Today, we absolutely accept the fact that gay men and lesbians are just as much "persons" as heterosexual men and women, and they have the same rights. Even those of us who oppose SSM accept that point without hesitation; you have to go to a repulsive, lunatic, little vants like the Irreverend Phred Phelps and his henchmen to find anyone disputing the basic humanity of gays.

But that's not the question, is it? We all agree that gays have the same rights as heterosexuals; the question is, what exactly are those rights anent marriage?

I believe that gays and straights both have the same marital rights -- to religiously marry anybody or any group of people they and their religion allow... but to legally marry only those people who meet certain qualifications, one of which is to be of the opposite gender. I have no objection to a gay man marrying a woman, gay or straight; just as I have no objection to a lesbian marrying a man, no matter his sexual preference.

It wouldn't even bother me if a gay man married a lesbian, then they had children... or even adopted. So long as the family has a male father and a female mother, I will grant it's as socially valid and as good for raising children as a marriage of two heterosexuals.

But I do not support a putative "right" to legally marry anybody one "loves", without exception or qualification. Marriage comes with a host of restrictions that bind everyone:

• You cannot marry a person without his or her consent.
• You cannot marry your sibling, your parent, or your close cousin.
• You cannot marry a child.
• You cannot marry multiple people at once (group marriage).
• You cannot marry someone who currently is already married (bigamy).
• And... you cannot marry a person of the same gender as you.

That last restriction applies equally to heterosexuals; consider two old biddies, best girlfriends, both widowed, and both completely straight, but who want to marry for the financial benefits. Sorry, ladies, you cannot. We forbid you to abuse the legal status of being married.

By contrast, I absolutely support the Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas, striking down laws against "sodomy," however defined. Why the difference? Because the right to associate (and yes, including sexually) is an issue of individual liberty. It also falls within the veil of privacy that, yes, I do believe restrains federal, state, and local government from intruding too deeply into the lives of free citizens. Simply put, a government that can control who you are allowed to sleep with or who you can live with is totalitarian.

But marriage is not a private affair; it's a public, communal celebration and societal endorsement of a relationship; it says, "This is a special relationship that we, in this state, believe is better than other types of relationships. Thus, to encourage this type of relationship, we will reward it above and beyond other relationships." Given that description, state citizens have the right to decide what particular types of relationships we will so celebrate and endorse.

We can decide how close a relationship must be in order to put that person off limits. We can decide how old a person must be to get married. If we so choose, we can decide to allow polyamorous marriage. And if we so choose, we can decide to allow SSM; but by the same token, if we choose -- which we have done -- we can likewise decide to disallow it. And until and unless we have the same legal infrastructure anent marital rights for gays as we had the 1940s-1960s anent civil rights for blacks, no damned court has the power to overturn the people's law and make its own law.

If it did have that power, then America would no longer be a constitutional republic... we would instead be a kritarchy, ruled by unelected, robèd lords with lifetime tenure.

So yes, it may well make a difference if the judge who decided the case is a gay activist. But that would be true whether or not he himself was homosexual; there are doubtless more heterosexual gay activists than homosexual gay activists. The only point in bringing up Judge Walker's sexual preference is that it's another brick in the wall, another piece of evidence that he might well be a gay activist... taken together with other pieces of evidence, including the thirty-eight years he has lived and practiced in ultra-liberal, ultra-gay-activist San Fransisco; his judicial record in toto (not just a couple of cherry-picked cases where he actually deigned to follow the law, instead of trying to rewrite it); and the fact that, as Chief Judge, he probably decided to appoint himself to hear this case.

And of course the vapid and tendentious opinion he wrote, which also smells strongly of judicial activism.

For that purpose, exploring whether Judge Walker is a gay activist, it's not unreasonable to bring up his own sexual preference; by itself, it's not dispositive -- but it's not irrelevant, either.

Three Takeaways From the State of Social Science and Gay Families - By David French - The Corner - National Review Online

Link: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/303618/three-takeaways-state-social-science-and-gay-families-david-french (via shareaholic.com)

As the 18 social scientists said in their letter, "The vast majority of studies published before 2012 on this subject have relied upon small, nonrepresentative samples that do not represent children in typical gay and lesbian families in the United States." Thus, when political (and judicial) figures declare that gay and lesbian families are equivalent to heterosexual families in child-rearing outcomes and that the science is "settled," they're simply wrong.

Articles: Gay Marriage: The Hidden Agenda

Articles: Gay Marriage: The Hidden Agenda

But why is gay marriage inimical to the traditional matrimony?  How does society suffer if it gives legal sanction to the cohabitation of gay couples and bestows upon them the rights traditionally granted to spouses?  In short, an approach based on individual rights is a bum steer.  Legalization of same-sex marriage compromises the institution of marriage and thus undermines the family built on the foundation of marriage.  

A Marriage Tail

A Marriage Tail « Public Discourse

Abraham Lincoln once asked how many legs a dog has if we call a tail a leg. The answer, he said, is four: calling a tail a leg does not make it so. We chuckle and move on.
But what if people began to argue that a tail really is a leg? They might say that what defines the leg is that it is an appendage of the dog’s body, that it contains bone and muscle covered with skin and fur—just like a tail. Tails just happen to come out of the body at a different angle than other legs. When a tail hangs down low, who can tell the difference?

....

The call for same-sex marriage involves a similar misdefinition. Marriage is often characterized today as follows: 1) two people 2) who love each other 3) want to perform sexual acts together, so 4) they consent to combine their lives sexually, materially, economically 5) with the endorsement of the community. Since same-sex couples can meet the first four criteria, how can society refuse the fifth?
It is easy to see why this would be a cause of aggravation, not only for same-sex couples who wish community endorsement of their relationships, but for millions of others. If the criteria stated above actually define marriage—and in contemporary Western society, many have come to view marriage as no more than this—then refusal to acknowledge and endorse same-sex relationships is a rank injustice, nothing but an exercise in bigotry or stupidity.
Typically, marriage does in fact have these characteristics. But why does marriage have these characteristics? Remembering why will help us to remember how they show themselves in a relationship that has the essence of marriage—and how that is often different in other relationships.

 And if he's wrong, and this is not a misdefinition, then we get to the question of why society should support an institution such as marriage.  Why should it?  Why do "really-close-friends-who-like-each-other-a-lot" enjoy special recognition of that fact from society and the government?

If sexuality did not naturally bring us offspring, it is hard to explain why it exists, whether you believe in a purely material evolution or a loving designer of the universe, for it would serve no purpose. If sexual acts did not naturally lead to offspring, it is just as hard to explain how marriage would have appeared in human history, for it would serve no purpose.
Religions may bless marriage, but they did not invent it. Because it involves such profoundly important human realities, it is no surprise that sex and marriage have religious significance. But sex and marriage have existed as long as there have been human communities.

Stephen J. Heaney believes that reproduction is the key point of marriage. A tail is not a leg because it never serves to support or propel a dog.  Same-sex relationships are not marriages because sex within one can never result in offspring.

In previous articles, I have asserted that if sex did not naturally lead to children, no one would ever have conceived the idea of marriage.
....
But this is where it must be pointed out that the act in which opposite-sex couples wish to engage has a very public outcome: children. Let me put my initial assertion another way: if sexual intercourse between a man and a woman always and naturally led to the same outcome as genital contact between two people of the same sex—that is, pleasure, increased feelings of closeness, even affirmation and love, and nothing else—no one would ever have come up with the idea of marriage.
The best that can be said about the contemporary face of “marriage”—the deliberately childless union, or union built around the desires of adults, with children a secondary and dispensable characteristic—is that it is entirely parasitic on the proper idea of marriage. Impossible to imagine on its own, it takes real marriage and strips it of the thing that gives it meaning, yet continues to refer to it by the same name. That means that the notion of “same-sex marriage,” which relies entirely for its conceivability on the notion that marriage exists for the desires of adults, is by that fact two levels removed from reasonableness.

MercatorNet: Parenthood is not just a private project

MercatorNet: Parenthood is not just a private project

It was only when I had children of my own that I came to see that something was deeply wrong with the way I had been avoiding the “tough questions” about children. In my personal experience of parenthood, I have had responsibility for profoundly neglected children. These children were permanently damaged by lack of relationship. I came to see that we libertarians have been starting our theorizing from the perspective of adults who are equipped to take care of themselves, make contracts, keep promises, defend their own property, and respect other people’s property.
But no one enters the world that way: we enter the world as helpless infants. In fact, if you think about it, infancy is the only truly universal human experience. We all have to pass through infancy to get anywhere else. Yet, we libertarians essentially explain the transition from infancy to adulthood by saying, “Then a miracle happens.”

I came to the conclusion that a free society needs adults who can control themselves, and who have consciences. A free society needs people who can use their freedom, without bothering other people too much. We need to respect the rights of others, keep our promises, and restrain ourselves from taking advantage of others.
We learn to do these things inside the family, by being in a relationship with our parents. We can see this by looking at attachment- disordered children and failure-to-thrive children from orphanages and foster care. These children have their material needs met, for food, clothing, and medical care. But they are not held, or loved, or looked at. They simply do not develop properly, without mothers and fathers taking personal care of them. Some of them never develop consciences. But a child without a conscience becomes a real problem: this is exactly the type of child who does whatever he can get away with. A free society can’t handle very many people like that, and still function.

Children are entitled to a relationship with both of their parents. They are entitled to know who they are and where they came from. Therefore children have a legitimate interest in the stability of their parents’ union, since that is ordinarily how kids have relationships with both parents. If Mom and Dad are quarrelling, or if they live on opposite sides of the country, the child’s connection with one or both of them is seriously impaired.
But children cannot defend their rights themselves. Nor is it adequate to intervene after the fact, after harm already has been done. Children’s relational and identity rights must be protected proactively.
Marriage is society’s institutional structure for protecting these legitimate rights and interests of children.

 What about marriage as a contract?  Can parenthood by contract be adequate?

Rather than just recoil from the weirdness of it all, let me spell out these conceptual flaws. First, contracts are limited, but parenthood is a status. Contracts are of limited duration, but parenthood is forever. Second, and more importantly, the child has been objectified. Instead of being a gift, the child is treated as a product or an object. And this has implications for how we view ourselves, and the foundations of our liberty.
This first point about the permanence of parenthood came home to me when I read a peculiar Ohio case last summer. The Mullen case was a pretty standard lesbian custody dispute, with one wrinkle. The birth mother had written up a few documents before the child’s birth, giving her lover things such as medical power of attorney for the baby. The former lover claimed that these documents established her as the child’s second parent.
The judge in the case was not impressed. He said, in effect, look, a medical power of attorney is a revocable document. Anyone can revoke it any time. As a matter of fact, this nice lady before me in court has just revoked the power of attorney she gave you. But parenthood is forever. A collection of contracts or revocable documents stops well short of an adoption. The nice lady did not let you adopt her child. She could have, but she chose not to. I’m not about to second-guess what this mother intended. You are not the child’s parent. Case closed.

 The second and even more fundamental flaw of the contract parenting model: it treats the child as an object, something to be negotiated over. Even a cursory look at these cases shows that this is true. The adults don’t mean for it to be true. I have no doubt that these adults brought children into being in all good faith, and out of love. But they simply can’t help themselves. Good intentions do not suffice to overcome the structural tendency for “contract parenthood” to objectify children far more often and deeply than natural parenthood.

 There are enough cases where children are treated as property without creating new classes of relationship rife with this possibility.

Lizards' Rationale

Lizards' Rationale

via Big Lizards by Dafydd on 5/10/12

Huge Hewitt is spending the three hours of his show today to discuss same-sex marriage (he's agin' it). He would have done so yesterday, because of President Barack "Big Stick" Obama coming out on national TV; but Hewitt was too busy spending the three hours of his show promoting Dennis Prager, who has a new book out.
Not being a religious person or even a believer -- I'm a true agnostic, not an atheist tarted up as an agno -- I get frustrated when the religous argue against same-sex marriage (SSM). I'm frustrated that the argument always begins and ends with "God said so," with only a small forray in the middle towards a non-religious reason, that children are best raised with one male father and one female mother.
Which is certainly true; alas, however, that one secular argument still has a gaping hole: What about same-sex couples who have no intention of having children, which probably encompasses most of them? The government can't mandate traditional marriage on the basis that "God said so;" so if the lone non-religious argument is the welfare of children, then what is the "rational basis" for saying that two guys or two gals who don't want kids cannot marry?
(For that matter, what is the rational basis for denying marital status to a triplet comprising two women and one guy who's had a vasectomy? Or to a gaggle of swingers, male and female, whose only religious impulse is that they all religiously use condoms and the Pill?)
We need a solid and secular rational basis to restrict marriage to the traditional definition. A truly activist court can still ignore the basis and overturn it; but with such a rational basis, the odds are much greater that a supervisory court will overturn the lower court.
With this much buildup, you won't be surprised that I have just such a solid and secular rational basis to propose. Here we go:
Premise 1: The United States (and most of Western civilization) is based upon several premises, one of which is that males and females are of equal value in our societies.
Premise 2: Another traditional American premise is that, unlike, e.g., Afghanistan, we do not live in gender-segregated societies.
Men and women interact with each other all the time, and per above, should be able to do so on a basis of equality. American men are not supposed to treat women as property or prisoners, nor vice versa (though that's rare to the vanishing point, except among feminists).
These conditions may not prevail in every family, but they are organizing principles of American society. They set the standard we should all strive to meet.
Ergo, the rational basis of recognizing only the traditional definition of marriage is that it is the best marital system ever created for promoting gender integration and the full valuation of women in society.
Every other form of marriage either devalues and degrades women, leads to gender segregation, or both -- without exception. So if we want to promote equal value of both genders and a gender-integrated society, we have only one realistic choice: traditional marriage, regardless of the individual's personal sexual preference.
(Do I mean that gay men should nevertheless marry women, and lesbians should marry men? Yes, you betcha! That is exactly what I mean: It's better for society, better for kids (if they have any), and even better for the two individuals in the marriage.)
Why is this so?

• SSM, by its very nature, promotes gender segregation: A man married to another man is not forced into constant contact with a woman he is expected to treat as his equal; the same is true for a marriage of two lesbians, vis-à-vis men.

Most gays and lesbian naturally organize themselves into all-male or all-female groups: A gay man dates other men, hangs out with other men, goes to gay bars full of men, and may only come into even casual contact with women at work... and even that is iffy, since it's easier to avoid someone at work than avoid someone who lives with you.
Men who have no significant contact with female equals (wives, committed girlfriends) tend to be far more violent than men who do; women generally civilize men. Similarly, women who have no significant contact with male equals tend to be unambitious, unsuccessful, poor, and dependent upon welfare; men generally encourage women to become stronger, more confident, and more independent. (If the men in your life don't do that, replace them with men who do!)
Either of these conditions is horrifically destructive of American society. It's entirely rational that states wish to avoid them both.

• Then what about polygamy, polyandry, and group marriage? Don't they force men and women to live together?

Yes they do; but by its nature, polygamy devalues women, because you always have another woman waiting in the wings; you can "freeze out" the uppity wench who dares to think she's an equal. (Observe Moslem and African polygamous societies and how the women are treated.)
And by its nature, polyandry simply hasn't worked in any society in history I've ever heard about: Men are aggressive and jealous, and they will invariably start fighting each other for "bed rights" with the girl.
Finally, group marriage has the problems of both polygamy and polyandry, plus an increasingly attenuated and fragmented sense of being married; when everybody's "married" to everybody else, then nobody's really married to anyone.
So if you believe women and men should have equal value in our society and that they should not segregate themselves by gender, then rationally, you must support only traditional marriage. It is equally true for religious and irreligious, and for families with and without children.
And that forms the rational basis for the laws: to bring the female and male principles, the yin and the yang, together as equals in American society.
If that's not what you want to see in America, then go be a tribal chief in the Congo or a slaver in Sudan. Or join Occupy Wall Street, where rapists and woman abusers are celebrated!

The essential public purpose of marriage

Link: http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/the_essential_public_purpose_of_marriage/

The essential public purpose of marriage is to attach mothers and fathers to their children and to one another.  To see the importance of this purpose, we must take the perspective of the child: What is owed to the child? Unlike adults, the child does not need autonomy or independence. The child is entitled to a relationship with and care from both of the people who brought him into being. Therefore, the child has a legitimate interest in the stability of his parents' union.  But no child can defend these entitlements himself. Nor is it adequate to make restitution after these rights have been violated. The child's rights to care and relationship must be supported pro-actively, before harm is done, for those rights to be protected at all.
Marriage is adult society's institutional structure for protecting the legitimate interests of children. Without this public purpose, we would not need marriage as a distinct social institution.
We often hear the objection that some marriages don't have children. This is perfectly true. However, every child has parents. Depriving a child of relationships with his or her parents is an injustice to the child, and should not be done without some compelling or unavoidable reason. The objection that some marriages don't have children stands the rationale for marriage on its head. It views marriage strictly from the adult's perspective, instead of from the child's perspective.
Same sex couples and opposite sex couples are obviously different with respect to this essential public purpose of marriage.  And treating different things differently is not discrimination. That is why, in the few cases where courts have found opposite sex marriage to be unlawful discrimination, they have had to come up with purposes for  marriage that have nothing to do with procreation or attaching children to parents.

Let us be clear: the alternative to the biological principle for determining parentage is the principle that the government decides who is a parent. Instead of simply recording parentage, the state will determine parentage, not in exceptional cases, but routinely. This is what "getting the state out of the marriage business" will eventually come to mean.
In short, redefining marriage from the union of a man and a woman to the union of any two persons jettisons three foundational principles: first, the principle that children are entitled to a relationship with both parents, second, the biological principle for determining parentage, and third, the principle that the state recognizes parentage, but does not assign it.

Fwd: Family Deformation

Family Deformation

via The American Spectator and AmSpecBlog by Janice Shaw Crouse on 4/8/11

A recent eye-opening study put numbers to an issue that I have written about repeatedly: One in five of all American mothers have children from different men. When mothers of more than two children are isolated, the number jumps to 28 percent. When race is isolated, it gets extreme: 59 percent of African-American mothers and 35 percent of Hispanic mothers have children with more than one father. The mothers were overwhelmingly low income with little education; while they were "poorer than others to begin with," their single-parent status virtually assured that "their whole lifetimes [would] continue to be disadvantaged."
This is no small problem, as indicated by the fact that press coverage of the report ranged from Medical News Today to Forbes, from "Imperfect Parent" to "WebMD," and from MSNBC to the Los Angeles Times. The negative consequences for both the mother and the child are so well documented they have almost ceased to register on the public's radar. Yet, warnings about the outcomes -- bleak as they are -- are not getting through to the culture, and we continue to see the myth perpetuated that single motherhood is glamorous and the "baby daddy" culture as a substitute for husband/father continues to thrive, especially among the poor and uneducated in America. The number of young women who are cohabitating instead of getting married is increasing; the number who have children before getting married is increasing; and the number of children who live in blended households as a result of divorce or prior cohabitation is increasing, as my research and writing reveals.
Single moms of children from multiple fathers are far more likely to be "under-employed, to have lower incomes, and to be less educated." The children in these households live with enormous stress: "Everyday decisions are more complex and family rules are more ambiguous." Just figuring out logistics, such as "whose turn it is to spend time with the kids and who gets more attention," and dividing up time, responsibilities, and finances -- who lives with whom when, who is responsible for what when, and who pays for food, clothing, and incidentals, as well as who pays child support for what child -- is daunting and sometimes impossible. Sadly, and most damaging to the children, is that the conflicts that lead the parents to separate in the first place tend to go on and on, with the kids often getting caught in the middle.
The study's author, Cassandra Dorius, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research, presented her findings at the Population Association of America. She studied data from up to 20 interviews with each of 4,000 women over a 27-year-period. The data for the study came from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Dorius called the trend an "intergeneratic transmission of disadvantage." She said, "Juggling all the different needs and demands of fathers in at least two households, four or more pairs of grandparents, and two or more children creates a huge set of chronic stressors that families have to deal with for decades."
Opposition to Dorius's findings was immediate.
Black critics accused the author of focusing an "unfair spotlight" on black women's "love lives," "over-sensationalizing" and holding up "stereotypes" of black women for "ridicule." One critic was concerned that "this will be another way that this country will put a negative label on black women."
Other critics were afraid "people will point to this fact as an example of the decline in American morality and the cause of a good number of societal ills." In fact, the critic accused society of wanting to "police the sexuality of women -- especially women of color -- and these troubles will be laid at our feet."
There are those, too, who believe the situation is not "inherently bad or good" and, in a flight from reality, they argue that any group of people can successfully parent. They contend that the larger problem is whether the dad plays a role in his child's life, whether married or not. Yet research is clear and unsurprising: When a mother finds a new man or has a child by another man, fathers typically become less involved financially and emotionally, and they are far less likely to be a physical presence in their children's lives.
Some reports sought to debunk the "myth of the perfect family." Such thinking, however, merely sets up a straw man and is erroneous. There is a voluminous body of research that is clear and unambiguous: The very best family for a child's positive development and good outcome is a married mom and dad.
The critics can sidestep the issue with their victimhood opposition, but the facts are accumulating from highly respected universities and think tanks across the ideological spectrum, and the conclusion is unanimous: Those who are care about women and children must do something to change the pernicious "baby daddy" culture that is destroying the future of so many promising young women and precious children. As Time magazine put it: "Growing up in a home in which different men cycle in and out is not good for a child's health or well being. Think of these families as having 'domino dads,' with each one's departure putting pressure on the next."
All the comments about victimhood do nothing but perpetuate the problem in minority communities. Only by facing facts and addressing problems realistically can we hope to see a brighter future and the inherent potential of the next generation realized.

MercatorNet: Is it worth it? the economics of same-sex marriage

Link: http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/is_it_worth_it_the_economics_of_same_sex_marriage

MercatorNet: You argue that marriage is an institution with its own norms which exists in many different legal systems. So what are the basic characteristics of marriage? 

Douglas Allen: I think is important to think of marriage as an "institution" rather than some other metaphor. Perhaps the worst way to think about marriage is "as a contract". A contract is a legally enforced agreement between two people, and although marriage contains this element, there is much more to marriage than this. An institution, is a collection of expectations, norms, and humanly devised constraints that work together towards some social objective. Across cultures and time there are a number of basic institutional characteristics of marriage that are relatively constant.

These characteristics would include the following. First, there is a strong contractual element to marriage. Marriage almost always requires some degree of consent between the husband and wife. Even in arranged marriages the individuals are almost always involved in some extent and often have veto powers. In modern marriages, the couple determine a number of the details of marriage. For example, how things are to be shared, produced, and monitored are matters left up to the couple.  

Second, marriage always has involved third parties. Families are involved in marriages, but so are extended family members, non-blood relations, and third parties like the church, state, or tribe. These third parties often regulate the terms of entry into and exit from marriage. Here is where marriage starts to move beyond mere contract. Whereas contracts can be customized between two people, marriage regulations are common across couples. The meaning of marriage for one couple in British Columbia, is the same for another couple. Every couple within a jurisdiction faces the same entry and exit conditions.

Among these third party regulations we see many similarities across time and space. Marriage has always been a life-long arrangement (although recently in Mexico City some politician suggested making marriage a matter of a renewable two-year contract). Marriage has, until very recently, been heterosexual. For the most part marriage has centered on monogamous relations, although there are many instances of polygamous ones. Marriage is always a sharing arrangement. Rather than one spouse "hiring" the other, couples form unions and share in the good and bad times.

Finally, marriage is the institution that all societies have used as their first choice in raising children.

These similarities do not mean that one cannot find exceptions. In the history of mankind all sorts of institutions have been used to regulate sex. What we know is that these isolated cases were unable to grow in numbers and wealth. As a result they either died out, or quickly converted when contact was made with other civilizations. In addition, often events in life (such as death), have meant that second-best arrangements have had to be made to accommodate children. Hence, most societies have had to develop welfare systems around marriage that include multiple marriages, adoption, and the like.

....

MercatorNet: Many people say that adverse consequences of legalising same-sex marriage are just social science scaremongering. But you argue that we should learn from the legalisation of no-fault divorce.  

Douglas Allen: Yes. This gets back to my fundamental point: marriage is an institution designed with a purpose. If you mess with it, there will be consequences.

During the no fault divorce debate the same arguments were made that are heard today: "marriage is a formalization of love". Hence, if a couple no longer loves each other, why shouldn't they be allowed to divorce? The view was that there exists an exogenous number of dead and living marriages, and so the law was only setting free those trapped in a dead marriage.

Well, guess what? Marriage is designed to mitigate bad behavior, and by allowing individuals to unilaterally abandon their marital responsibilities there was a lot of bad behavior.

In the 1960s debate, no one thought the divorce rate would change, but it changed enormously and led to a divorce culture. No one thought there would be changes to labor force participation, hours worked, violence against spouses, suicide rates for children, and on and on. And yet, changes to these thing are linked to no-fault divorce.

The no-fault divorce experiment proves that marriage is an institution designed with a purpose, and therefore, further changes to accommodate same sex couples will also have consequences. As in the 1960s we're probably unable to predict what they all will be, but they will come nonetheless.

One of the overriding purposes of marriage has been to encourage fertility. Every couple wants to have one baby, but not enough want to have enough to replace or grow a population. This has been a social problem for 3,000 years (ask the Spartans). Over the past 100 years we've been able to dodge this bullet through high levels of wealth and immigration, but as we continue to erode the value of marriage, reduced fertility is likely a long-term consequence.

No such thing as “good polygamy”

No such thing as “good polygamy”

British Columbia Supreme Court Chief Justice, Robert Bauman, has ruled that the government of Canada may continue to prohibit polygamy because, although the law does impinge on the right to freedom of religion, that harm is outweighed by the harms that polygamy inflicts on women and children, and to the institution of monogamous marriage. “There is no such thing as so-called ‘good polygamy’,” said Bauman.
The Alliance Defence Fund, an association of Christian lawyers represented by Gerald Chipeur in the court case, said that the court “recognized that marriage is about children and parents, and that Parliament has a very important role to play in protecting the family. The court also recognized that Parliament, not the courts, has the authority to define marriage.” The court had accepted their argument “that, under the Constitution of Canada, Parliament may define marriage as no more than two people,” said Chipeur.

A dad does matter to a child, whether gay couples like it or not | The Australian

A dad does matter to a child, whether gay couples like it or not | The Australian

“Marriage is fundamentally about the needs of children”, writes David Blankenhorn, a supporter of gay rights in the US who nevertheless draws the line at same-sex marriage. “Redefining marriage to include gay and lesbian couples would eliminate entirely in law, and weaken still further in culture, the basic idea of a mother and a father for every child”.

Here is the heart of opposition to same-sex marriage: that it means same-sex parenting, and same-sex parenting means that a child must miss out on either a mother or a father.

Same-sex parenting is saying neither sex has anything special to offer to a child. Male and female are completely interchangeable.

As ethicist Professor Margaret Somerville wrote in these pages, such assertions “force us to choose between giving priority to children's rights or to homosexual adults' claims.” Yet trivial arguments frame the gay marriage debate solely in terms of the emotional needs of adults, ignoring the child’s point of view.

Such adult-centred narcissism begs the wider question: if gender no longer matters in marriage, why should number? If marriage is all about adults who love each other, by what rational principle should three adults who love each other not be allowed to marry? Academic defenders of polyamory are asking that question, and no doubt van Onselen will shortly be slurring opponents of polyamory as binary bigots.

While warm fuzzy writers like Valentine can imagine no possible harm to society from gay marriage, the serious minds behind the movement occasionally let us glimpse their wider purpose. US activist Michelangelo Signorile urges gays “to fight for same-sex marriage and its benefits and then, once granted, redefine the institution of marriage completely”. He sees same-sex marriage as “the final tool with which to get education about homosexuality and AIDS into public schools”.

Marriage is not a fad to be cut to shape according to social whim. The father of modern anthropology, Claude Levi-Strauss, called marriage “a social institution with a biological foundation”. Marriage throughout history is society’s effort to reinforce this biological reality: male, female, offspring. All our ceremonies and laws exist to buttress nature – helping bind a man to his mate for the sake of social stability and for the sake of the child they might create.

Not all marriages do create children – but typically they do, and the institution exists for the typical case of marriage. Homosexual relations cannot create children and cannot provide a child with natural role models; such relations are important to the individuals involved, and demand neighbourly civility, but they do not meet nature’s job description for marriage.

MercatorNet: Anything else on the menu?

MercatorNet: Anything else on the menu?

Supporters of same-sex marriage say that the New York law is good for marriage. In a way they’re right. Just as World War II was good for Germany because out of the ashes, corpses and rubble arose a heightened sense of human dignity and a democratic and peaceful government, same-sex marriage will heighten our esteem for real marriage.

Atlas Revived

Atlas Revived

via Big Lizards by Dafydd on 6/26/11

Perversity's blowback as the savior of marriage

Now that New York State has approved same-sex marriage -- rather, now that the New York State legislature has done so, probably over the objections of a strong majority of its own citizen constituents -- we need a battleplan to hold the line against this becoming the norm.
Why? So what if the federal circus courts begin striking down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in this and that circuit, forcing states that oppose SSM nevertheless to have it de facto anyway. What's the big deal?
The "big deal" is that once same-sex marriage (SSM) has become nearly universal around the country, then we're going to see the same terrible effects on our society that we already see in Europe: diminished interest in marriage (it's no longer special), more domestic violence, even quicker divorces, a marked drop in the fertility rate, massive importation of fecund immigrants who have no loyalty whatsoever to the United States... and of course ever greater pressure to also allow polygamy and polyandry, group marriage, and so forth.
Pro-SSM people (like Patterico) are fond of making the argument that somebody else's SSM doesn't affect his own marriage; his marriage is still just as strong! Just as strong, perhaps; but not just as special as it used to be, not when any random association between two or more people of any gender can also be called a "marriage."
It's like counterfeiting money: If I print my own twenty-dollar bills, that doesn't physically change the real bills you have in your wallet at this moment; they don't magically change into newspaper, the ink doesn't turn a different color, Andy Jackson doesn't morph into George Soros. In that sense, my counterfeits don't directly affect your sawbucks... but my counterfeits indirectly devalue your real bills, creating uncertainty about which currency is real and which is fake, how much is out there, which is truly legal tender and which an ersatz copy that, if discovered, is worthless.
My counterfeit currency spreads fear, uncertainty, doubt. Private counterfeiting is as bad as rampant money-creation via the Federal Reserve; worse in the sense that at least the Fed must report on its activities from time to time.
By this analogy, traditional marriage is the currency backed by some form of specie, that which gives the institution of marriage itself the very cachet and social benefit that same-sex couples want to claim for their own. Contrariwise, any other form of union that is legally called marriage is the fiat or counterfeit currency; it piggy-backs on the real institution of marriage, hoping some of the moral, emotional, and sacred virtue rubs off.
Marriage is quite a special social institution; that's why it's the one to which we entrust child rearing. But to paraphrase Dash in the Incredibles, when everything is "special," then nothing is special.
So what to do, what to do? With the third largest state in the U.S. falling, I fear that train has left the station. Even if there is a later referendum in New York and the people reverse that decision, already hundreds of thousands of people across the nation will have flown to the Bug Apple and gotten legally married. And as we're finding out in California, you can't put the genie back in the bottle again, even if it was let out in despite of the voters.
You can't fight something with nothing; we need something positive to fight for, not just something negative to fight against; we can't allow ourselves to be put on the defensive by the Left and by libertarians who oppose legal marriage altogether. I believe there is only one answer: The Covenant marriage movement must become a popular front, just as the Tea Party movement already has.
Covenant marriage (CM) as a distinct legal institution arose comparatively recently, in response to the jump in the divorce rate in the 1980s. It differs significantly from normal legal marriage in ways that make it vastly more exclusive an institution:

• In a CM, couples must first undergo pre-nuptial counseling before they can marry.
• They agree to limit the grounds for divorce from the standard normal around the country -- if either party wants a divorce, that's grounds for divorce -- to a much narrower set of grounds, usually spousal or child abuse, felony conviction, or adultery. (If a state allows a CM couple to negotiate its own covenant, there can of course be more or fewer grounds for divorce.)
• Any CM passed by citizen demand would, by its enabling legislation, be restricted to the traditional definition of marriage -- one man, one woman. Creating a new form of marriage to exclude non-traditional groups of people being married is the only reason that CM legislation is likely to be passed in most states.
• CM is non-denominational and can be performed by civil authorities as well as religious; there's no religiosity requirement.

But how could CM become "the savior of marriage?" It's clear that the law cannot confer any greater legal status upon a couple married under CM than normal marriage confers upon the two, three, n-number of males and/or females who "marry" under that regime.
Yet that very point should make it harder for the courts to subvert CM: Same-sex couples (and later, groups of people larger than two) cannot argue that they're excluded from legal marriage, up to and including the name "marriage." They have the same legal rights and status, insofar as the secular law is concerned. Therefore, they have no legal ground to demand that Covenant marriage be forced to allow same-sex, polyamorous, group, incestuous, or under-aged marriages. The only difference between normal and Covenant marriage is that the latter has a number of restrictions not found in the former.
True, CM confers no more legal rights than normal marriage; but extra legal rights were never really the source of the specialness of marriage -- except perhaps the legal right for spouses not to testity against each other. (That last will certainly have to be revisioned when polyamorous marriages are allowed, unless we want entire Mafia families and street gangs to "marry" each other, so that nobody can squeal.)
No, the specialness of marriage has always flowed from its exclusivity and its permanence... which is why the Left has persistently attacked both those qualities by (a) twisting the definition of marriage towards making any association of any number of people a "marriage," and (b) making it easier and easier to walk away from a marriage upon the slightest pretext, provocation, or whim.
By restoring exclusivity and strengthening permanence, CM becomes the "real" marriage, and ordinary legal marriage just a trendy domestic partnership. And if that is how people begin to see it, we'll see more and more traditional couples getting married under Covenant, so they can demonstrate to the world their commitment to, and determination to work at, the union.
Ordinary legal marriage will persist, and will still confer the same legal status and rights; but it will probably fall into greater and greater disrepute among the majority: "Oh, you won't marry me with a Covenenant marriage? What, you want a back door out whenever you get bored with me? Drop dead, you creep!"
Women especially will have good reason to demand a CM or nothing: They know better than most men how vital is an intact family, with a male father and a female mother, when raising children.
A few caveats, none of which changes the basic equation:

• It's very unlikely that Congress will pass a federal version of CM. Nor should it. We have an enviable system of federalism; let it work! Each state can decide what exact kind of Covenant marriage to allow, if any, in its enabling legislation.
• Even if your state enacts a strong version of CM, it cannot make it illegal for one of the partners to move to another state, establish residency, and then get divorced under that state's no-fault divorce law that doesn't recognize the covenant. That's the price of liberty.
• There will never come a time when normal marriage is abolished altogether; because if it did vanish from a state, then the Left could once again raise the spector of "unequal treatment." Specious though it is -- gays and straights alike are constrained in who they can marry; neither can marry a sibling, for example -- the judiciary has signalled that it is ready to cram SSM down our throats, and to hell with voters.
But that's a feature, not a bug; when state citizens must actually make a choice which type of marriage to enter into, they necessarily will have to think longer and harder about it that with a normal legal marriage. (As of course we all should, and do, if we believe it to be a solemn vow.)

Just as tea parties have swept the nation in a "popular front" -- and I believe I was the first person to so desribe them, back in February, 2010 -- I see Covenant marriage doing the same (with a vast overlap, most likely). And that means those of us who support traditional marriage no longer need wage a defensive war, trying to protect every state, city, village, and farm from the contagion of the "love bug," the untenable and cockamamie meme that "love is all you need" for marriage.
That bit of wrongthinking leads directly to our present discontent, the conclusion that any two or more people who "love" each other should be allowed to marry... men, women, siblings, fathers with their daughters, forty year olds with fourteen year olds, one man with eight women.
Instead, we can revert to the traditional American strategy of opening our own offensive. Rather than try to defend the status quo ante, we fight to implement a new form of marriage that is more exclusive and more permanent, bucking the leftist trend towards inclusion and impermanence. We slap both kinds of marriage on the table, then let the people choose. I predict that after an astonishingly brief time, "normal" marriage, with its unspecial universality and unserious provisional nature, will sink into desuetude, the last step before moribundity.
Americans may be many things, but not generally a mob: When the Left forces mob-rule upon us -- or more accurately, when they gin-up mobs to force tyranny upon the rest of us, with themselves as smug, self-satisfied tyrants -- we the people have a glorious history of rising up against them. This is true whether it's the tyranny of socialism, the tyranny of "diversity," or the tyranny of perversity.
As SSM spreads and infects more and more states, CM will grow alongside and surpass it in every venue. Soon the Obamunists will be fighting the defensive war, clinging to their "inclusive" definition of marriage. We achieve victory within the culture, despite -- even because of -- the Left's victory in the courts and legislatures. As an institution that is far more societal than legal, a solid victory within the culture is of much greater moment and future value than merely winning legal and legislative battles on the ground.
As the pushback becomes a wave, then a tsunami, and more and more states enact some version of Covenant marriage, then we'll once again have an exclusive and durable form of union to offer in preference to the liberals' and leftists marriage-lite. I sense that people, most especially young adults, have grown tired of weak tea and tolerance of everything, including intolerance itself. They crave something permanent, solid, bigger than themselves.
Give us Americans the choice, and I believe we will once again lead the rest of the world out of its moral morass.
Cross-posted on Hot Air's rogues' gallery...

WHEN SAME-SEX MARRIAGE WAS A CHRISTIAN RITE?

This recently crossed my desk on Facebook: WHEN SAME-SEX MARRIAGE WAS A CHRISTIAN RITE

It makes the case that the Christian (Catholic, at the time) Church once supported same-sex marriages.

While the pairing of saints, particularly in the early Christian church, was not unusual, the association of these two men was regarded as particularly intimate. Severus, the Patriarch of Antioch (512 - 518 CE) explained that, "we should not separate in speech they [Sergius and Bacchus] who were joined in life". This is not a case of simple "adelphopoiia." In the definitive 10th century account of their lives, St. Sergius is openly celebrated as the "sweet companion and lover" of St. Bacchus. Sergius and Bacchus's close relationship has led many modern scholars to believe they were lovers. But the most compelling evidence for this view is that the oldest text of their martyrology, written in New Testament Greek describes them as "erastai,” or "lovers". In other words, they were a male homosexual couple. Their orientation and relationship was not only acknowledged, but it was fully accepted and celebrated by the early Christian church, which was far more tolerant than it is today.

Contrary to myth, Christianity's concept of marriage has not been set in stone since the days of Christ, but has constantly evolved as a concept and ritual.

Prof. John Boswell, the late Chairman of Yale University’s history department, discovered that in addition to heterosexual marriage ceremonies in ancient Christian church liturgical documents, there were also ceremonies called the "Office of Same-Sex Union" (10th and 11th century), and the "Order for Uniting Two Men" (11th and 12th century).

These church rites had all the symbols of a heterosexual marriage: the whole community gathered in a church, a blessing of the couple before the altar was conducted with their right hands joined, holy vows were exchanged, a priest officiatied in the taking of the Eucharist and a wedding feast for the guests was celebrated afterwards. These elements all appear in contemporary illustrations of the holy union of the Byzantine Warrior-Emperor, Basil the First (867-886 CE) and his companion John.

....

At St. John Lateran in Rome (traditionally the Pope's parish church) in 1578, as many as thirteen same-gender couples were joined during a high Mass and with the cooperation of the Vatican clergy, "taking communion together, using the same nuptial Scripture, after which they slept and ate together" according to a contemporary report. Another woman to woman union is recorded in Dalmatia in the 18th century.

Prof. Boswell's academic study is so well researched and documented that it poses fundamental questions for both modern church leaders and heterosexual Christians about their own modern attitudes towards homosexuality.

For the Church to ignore the evidence in its own archives would be cowardly and deceptive. The evidence convincingly shows that what the modern church claims has always been its unchanging attitude towards homosexuality is, in fact, nothing of the sort.

A quick run through Google turned up a couple of other pieces, one from First Things:

Ancient in origin, same-sex unions blessed in the Church occur quietly to this day. So says John Boswell, Professor of Medieval History at Yale University and the author of this new and lavishly publicized book. It may surprise readers of this journal to learn that he is probably right- depending on what the ceremony means.

This is a subject about which I have the good fortune to speak not merely as a scholar or an observer, but as a participant. Nine years ago I was joined in devout sisterhood to another woman, apparently in just such a ceremony as Boswell claims to elucidate in his book. The ceremony took place during a journey to some of the Syrian Christian communities of Turkey and the Middle East, and the other member of this same-sex union was my colleague Professor Susan Ashbrook Harvey of Brown University.

....

The blessing of the Syrian Orthodox Church was a precious instance of our participation in the life of an ancient and noble Christian tradition. Although neither of us took the trouble to investigate the subject, each privately assumed that the ritual of that summer was some Christian descendant of an adoption ceremony used by the early church to solemnify a state-that of friendship-which comes highly recommended in the Christian tradition ("Henceforth I call you not servants . . . but I have called you friends." [John15:15]).

If this were all that Professor Boswell were claiming to have "discovered," neither I nor anyone else would be likely to dispute his findings. It seems reasonable to assume that ceremonies like the one Susan Ashbrook Harvey and I went through continue to take place in those eastern churches that preserve the rite of adoption (adelphopoiesis) for friends. In fact, scholars of the liturgy have known for years of these rituals.

But any such modest claim is not what Boswell has in mind. He claims that the "brother/sister-making" rituals found in manuscripts and certain published works are ancient ceremonies whose cryptic (or, in current argot, "encoded") purpose has been to give ecclesiastical blessing to homosexual or lesbian relationships, thus making them actual nuptial ceremonies. This startling claim is certainly far from the reality of the ceremony in which we participated nine years ago. Is it perhaps just as far from the real meaning of such ceremonies in the distant past? According to his publisher, Boswell "irrefutably demonstrates that same-sex relationships have been sanctioned and even idealized in Western societies for over two thousand years." He has also "restored" a rite that could be used in contemporary homosexual marriages, should they become legal.

....

All in all, then, this book does not begin to accomplish what it set out to do. (The reviews, after the early burst of hopeful publicity, have been notably skeptical-even from sources one would expect to be favorable.) Indeed, the author's painfully strained effort to recruit Christian history in support of the homosexual cause that he favors is not only a failure, but an embarrassing one.

Thomas Peters at Catholic Vote Action begins with an unflattering comparison:

Just as Dan Brown capitalized on ignorance and prejudice to sell copies of his bestselling The Da Vinci Code novel, some historians have tried to sell gay marriage by claiming that the early Christian martyrs Sergius and Bacchus are an example of Church-sponsored same-sex marriage.

....

...gay-marriage proponents who bring up the argument about Saints Sergius and Bacchus, like Dan Brown, are either totally deluding themselves about history because they can’t handle reality, or intentionally deceiving others about history because they stand to gain from twisting it.

The claim that Saints Sergius and Bacchus represent an example of Church-sponsored same-sex marriage was first put forward in 1994 by John Boswell in his book Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe. Boswell’s claims have been completely debunked by David Woods, Robin Young, and Brent Shaw (to name the first three authors I found during a simple internet search).