I warn you, I love taking the easy way out. If I find that someone else has already typed exactly what I want to say, then I will copy and paste, rather then "shooting a dead horse". Its been said, so why do I have to restate it in a different way?
While religion plays an obvious role in the debate, the effectiveness of faith-based arguments is limited because most Westerners care little what the Bible or theologians say. To argue from religion will only convince those who are already convinced and will simply alienate the rest.
Life Site News
On the order of 1,400 legal rights are conferred upon married couples in the U.S. Typically these are composed of about 400 state benefits and over 1,000 federal benefits.
Lets break a large list down into just a handfull of categories. We have the child related category; we have the tax related category, and we have insurance, and legal related categories and of course, the impact on society category. There are others, but for the purposes of this blog it is not unnecessary to tire everyone out with all details when my arguments for these few easily apply to all.
SOCIETY
If the central purpose of government is to promote the general welfare, then the state must promote always what is best for society’s health, security, and long-term viability. This requires the state to make prudential judgments about various segments of our population: Those under 16 may not drive. Those under 21 may not drink. You must possess a high-school diploma to join the military. Information about paroled child molesters must be made available so parents can protect their children.
Some label these prudential decisions “discrimination,” but discriminating in such matters promotes the general welfare. The unique affirmation of heterosexual marriage operates under the same principle. Traditional matrimony is the foundation of society, and society should neither encourage nor recognize anything pretending to approximate it. Again, the reason for this relates to marriage’s primary purpose: The spousal union produces families, and such families are the building blocks of society.
Granted, many marriages don’t produce children. Most soldiers don’t face combat and yet are still eligible for veterans’ benefits. But the state rewards each institution based on its ability to provide society with a valuable function. Governments favor historical marriage and seek to strengthen it in its policies because virtually everything that happens in society, for good or ill, can be traced back to families and family life.
Life Site News
Same-sex "marriage" would undercut the norm of sexual fidelity within marriage. “Monogamy is not a word the gay community uses,” Troy Perry told The Dallas Morning News. “We talk about fidelity. That means you live in a loving, caring, honest relationship with your partner. Because we can’t marry, we have people with widely varying opinions as to what that means. Some would say that committed couples could have multiple sexual partners as long as there’s no deception.” A recent study from the Netherlands, where gay marriage is legal, suggests that even among stable homosexual partnerships, men have an average of eight partners per year outside their “monogamous” relationship.
http://www.christocentric.com/
Heterosexual marriage and complete families are the foundation for a healthier society. With the legal onset of gay marriage, governments will be in the position of forcing onto citizens a belief system that equates homosexuality with heterosexuality — through public schools, taxpayer-funded programs like charities and non-profits, workplaces and even faith-based organizations that receive public dollars. Our society is already experiencing the effects of unhealthy heterosexual marriages and breakups. Introducing gay marriages just adds to the instability that already exists in marriages.
Fox News
It is a superficial kind of individualism that does not recognize the power of emerging social trends that often start with only a few individuals bucking conventional patterns of behavior. Negative social trends start with only a few aberrations. Gradually, however, social sanctions weaken and individual aberrations became a torrent.
Think back to the 1960s, when illegitimacy and cohabitation were relatively rare. At that time many asked how one young woman having a baby out of wedlock or living with an unmarried man could hurt their neighbors. Now we know the negative social effects these two living arrangements have spawned: lower marriage rates, more instability in the marriages that are enacted, more fatherless children, increased rates of domestic violence and poverty, and a vast expansion of welfare state expenses.
christocentric.com
If we scramble our definition of marriage, it will soon embrace relationships that will involve more than two persons, or even marriages between human and non human entities.
CHILDREN
Now, to look at the child topic. Gay marriage would be bad for children. According to an article in Child Trends, “Research clearly demonstrates that family structure matters for children, and the family structure that helps the most is a family headed by two biological parents in a low-conflict marriage.” Most of the child related stuff is from the Family Research Council.
This statement from Sara McLanahan, a sociologist at Princeton University, is representative:
A number of leading professional associations have asserted that there are "no differences" between children raised by homosexuals and those raised by heterosexuals. But the research in this area is quite preliminary; most of the studies are done by advocates and most suffer from serious methodological problems. Sociologist Steven Nock of the University of Virginia, who is agnostic on the issue of same-sex civil marriage, offered this review of the literature on gay parenting as an expert witness for a Canadian court considering legalization of same-sex civil marriage:
Steven Nock, affidavit to the Ontario Superior Court of Justice regarding Hedy Halpern et al. University of Virginia Sociology Department (2001).
Fathers devote their primary efforts to character traits.. Among other things, we know that fathers excel in reducing antisocial behavior and delinquency in boys and sexual activity in girls. What is fascinating is that fathers exercise a unique social and biological influence on their children. For instance, a recent study of father absence on girls found that girls who grew up apart from their biological father were much more likely to experience early puberty and a teen pregnancy than girls who spent their entire childhood in an intact family. This study, along with David Popenoe's work, suggests that a father's pheromones influence the biological development of his daughter, and that a strong marriage provides a model for girls of what to look for in a man, and gives them the confidence to resist the sexual entreaties of their boyfriends.
* Ellis, Bruce J., et al., "Does Father Absence Place Daughters at Special Risk for Early Sexual Activity and Teenage Pregnancy?" Child Development, 74:801-821.
* David Popenoe, Life Without Father (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1999).
Studies show mothers devote special attention to their children’s physical and emotional needs. Although homosexual men are less likely to have children living in their homes than lesbians, homosexual men are and will be raising children. There will be even more if homosexual civil marriage is legalized. These households deny children a mother. Among other things, mothers excel in providing children with emotional security and in reading the physical and emotional cues of infants. Obviously, they also give their daughters unique counsel as they confront the physical, emotional, and social challenges associated with puberty and adolescence.
Stanford psychologist Eleanor MacCoby, The Two Sexes.
See also Steven Rhoads' book, Taking Sex Differences Seriously.
Eleanor MacCoby, The Two Sexes: Growing Up Apart, Coming Together (Boston: Harvard, 1998).
Steven Rhoads, Taking Sex Differences Seriously (Encounter Books, 2004).
Traditional marriages provide the natural complementary between the sexes, which benefits children. David Popenoe of Rutgers University’s National Marriage Project writes, “Both dimensions are critical for an efficient, balanced, and human child-rearing regime.” Left unsaid is the fact that same-sex couples can never provide this complementary and thus cannot provide an optimally “efficient, balanced, and human child-rearing regime.”
Acceptance of gay marriage will strengthen the notion that marriage is primarily about adult yearnings for intimacy and is not essentially connected to raising children. Children will be hurt by those who will too easily bail out of a marriage because it is not “fulfilling” to them. Awfully selfish in my opinion.
A 2002 U.S. Census Bureau study reported similar results, with 70.7 percent of women married between 1970 and 1974 reaching their tenth anniversary and 57.7 percent staying married for twenty years or longer.
The 2003-2004 Gay/Lesbian Consumer Online Census surveyed the lifestyles of 7,862 homosexuals. Of those involved in a "current relationship," only 15 percent describe their current relationship as having lasted twelve years or longer, with five percent lasting more than twenty years. While this "snapshot in time" is not an absolute predictor of the length of homosexual relationships, it does indicate that few homosexual relationships achieve the longevity common in traditional marriages.
Brad Hayton provides insight into the attitudes of many homosexuals towards commitment and marriage:
I haven't even gone into the taxes, insurance, and legal ramifications.
Let us now propose the proper response and set some goals to fix problems in our society. We must look for the real facts here. What makes a healthy society? What makes for healthy kids?
The ideal family unit consists of a marriage between a natural man and a natural woman, in which the relationship is healthy and stable. Don't focus on the fact that a staggering number of hetero marriages are unhealthy as a means to promote homo marriages. "Heteros can't do it right, so why should it matter that homos supposedly can't do it right." isn't a mature response. Instead lets aim our attention, education, and media toward making healthy hetero marriages. Hetero is healthy for society, and children, as long as its stable and correctly run, so lets teach everyone how to have a healthy marriage.
Society needs, among other things, children. And in order to just simply maintain the population numbers every person needs to procreate with another person and those couples must then have 2 healthy offspring that survive into child bearing age, and then that generation must also pair up and have 2 children that survive. Because there is no such thing as a 100% survival rate among infants and children, and because of the difference in the men-women ratio of not 50/50, and because there is no such thing as 100% fertility in all persons, a certain percentage of the children that must be born will need to fall to the people that are able to have children. It is said that the average number of kids that every 2 people needs to have in order to just simple maintain population is just under 3. But a society will not grow at this rate. It will just maintain A prosperous society needs to grow and expand. The next generation needs to care for the previous generation. Protection with military is easier with more personnel not less. The burden to support any society is individually diminished when more people are involved in contributing to said society. I could go on, but you get the idea.
Because healthy families are necessary to a healthy society, and because health in a society is greatly beneficial to the families, you get a "circle of life" scenario. This circle can only be supported by a hetero-sexual agenda. A government should want to promote this circle, because it will be successful and long lasting, and everyone as a whole will be happier for it. "Promotion" include things like tax breaks and rewards, joint custody/adoption policies, and all those other things that were listed at the beginning of this blog for heterosexual married couples.
In conclusion, the proper mindset, from a political stance, in my opinion is thus:
I will promote the giving of incentives to any activity that promote a healthy positive change/benefit to the society in which I live. Gays' and Lesbians' lifestyle can not offer benefits to my society. I will not discriminate against these persons on an individual basis in regards to personal and professional interactions, because its not my business what they do. But when the government that I live under passes out money and rewards to persons, it comes directly out of my paycheck. It is not good business practice to hand out goods and money if nothing is received in return, so why should i allow my government to do the same with my tax money? People are not deserving of endorsement for their choices unless it returns a benefit to the endorser.
This leads one to ask a few more questions:
Is it within the best interest of the people to intice their fellow citizens to make choices that benifit society? I think yes. It is not be the job of the government to tell its people what to do (its the people's job to instruct the government), and its within the people's best interest to promote, through its government, healthy choices that positively impact all.
Is there anything a gay couple can offer its society that a straight couple can't, thereby providing a benifit to said society and realizing a deserved eligibility to recieve an incintive? Straight couples can offer benifits (increase the population, provide an allover healthier environmet for children, etc) that gays can not hold claim to.
Is there anything that the straight community can do to overall damage its society that only the gay comminuty can avoid? No
Insert any other question here for descussion.
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