1. I suppose there is constitutional argument against gay marriage, that’s more than 10 years old?
2. Why is it an issue? Either civil law is defined by the needs and rights of citizens, or civil laws will be placed under the dominion of religious laws and gay marriage will remain banned.
3. What are xians so afraid of?
4. How can gay marriage hurt you?
5. Why should the xian viewpoint be taken over the moral viewpoint? Please don’t assume they’re the same. Xians do not own the only moral viewpoint. In fact historically, and dare I say even currently, the xian viewpoint is rather like the Muslim one. Extreme.
6. I thought all men (and women?) were created equal and had the right to pursue happiness.
7. I read that all the founding fathers were not xians and never mentioned god. Do you disagree with this?

This post was about the fact that same-sex marriage has [past tense] lost the battle in the courts with the exception of Massachusettes and possibly one other case in New Jersey (although the right to same-sex marriage will likely not be found there either).  All other cases currently in the pipeline will find that no such right exist.

The analysis conducted by the courts is not one against gay marriage.  It is whether the equal protection clause and/or due process clauses of the given state’s consitution provide a means for gay and lesbian individuals to invalidate current statutes defining marriage on the grounds that the statutes violate a fundamental right.  If you want the legal analysis I will give you that.  The other material you are going on about, I have no intention of addressing, because frankly it is not relevant.

I didn’t post this to debate the pros and cons of gay marriage.  I posted it to inform some members of the current fact that the approach taken by gay activists is not going to get them to where they want to be.  You don’t have to like it.  It’s not open for debate though.

Daryl, you know better than to post crap like that . You’ve even gone on to imply that gay couples are highly promiscuous and don’t create any supportive relationships for their children. Anything I’ve read suggests that’s it in a nutshell (and it’s something Les wrote about ages ago already); it’s how you treat the kids that counts. Gender doesn’t. If that weren’t the case, Dad would have to be working and Mom would have to be cooking and doing the laundry, cause women can’t do the same things men can and have an effective marriage, or vice-versa. You aren’t just pulling the sex, but the gender and the roles into play saying same-sex marriages don’t work.

You really wanna occupy that position, you gotta speak out against feminists, and any women who do anything that “men are supposed to do”. Not to say you might not have an argument (I know you’re good with topics other than sex), but you’re making it sloppy.

You might have a more legitimate attack on the idea that gay parents might raise children with stronger anti-social tendencies. Maybe. I know a woman who was raised by two lesbian mothers.. I imagine that if they’re all on the rag things get a little unpleasant in the home… c’mon, I know you can at least get more creative. I sure can.

Gay marriage won’t hurt me or my family either, but it certainly will hurt children brought up in gay households.

Bullshit. Absolute BULLSHIT. If one thing became clear during the last decade or more it is that, left to their own devices, gays are just as much upstanding bores as we all are. They simply don’t have the ‘wrong’ pinups on their walls, okay?

Also, your rubbish ignores newer scientific research that shows homosexuality as something that is (at least in part) ‘decided’ on before birth (they found that the more brothers your mother had before you, the higher your own chances were of being gay - (Article, LA Times)).

Yeez, we have a saying: “Sweep before your own door, there’s enough dirt there.” Why are so many either so mean or easily blinded that they constantly have to single out other groups as ‘evil’? But what really makes me mad is that you try to sell your stuff as ‘for the higher good’!!!

Sorry, should obviously say ‘simply DO have the ‘wrong’ pinups...’, obviously.

Arc, without endorsing Darryl’s viewpoint, to the extent that there is an implication that a homosexual lifestyle is more promiscous than a standard heterosexual one, an earlier post is on point:

An early study, done prior to the AIDS epidemic, reflects that more than 75% of homosexual men admitted to having sex with more than 100 different males in their lifetime: approximately 15% claimed to have had 100-249 sex partners, 17% claimed 250-499, 15% claimed 500-999 and 28% claimed more than 1,000 lifetime sexual partners. (Bell AP, Weinberg MS. Homosexualities. New York 1978).  This study has come under some criticism for the methodology used.

A more recent study of the homosexual population in Chicago reflects:

...a high level of promiscuity and unhealthy behavior among that city’s homosexual male population.

According to the researchers, 42.9 percent of homosexual men in Chicago’s Shoreland area have had more than 60 sexual partners, while an additional 18.4 percent have had between 31 and 60 partners. All total, 61.3 percent of the area’s homosexual men have had more than 30 partners, and 87.8 percent have had more than 15, the research found.

As a result, 55.1 percent of homosexual males in Shoreland—known as Chicago’s “gay center�—have at least one sexually transmitted disease, researchers said.

The three-year study on the sexual habits of Chicago’s citizens will appear in the upcoming book, “The Sexual Organization of The City� (University of Chicago Press), due out this spring.[2005]

It does appear that the appearance of higher promiscuity rates that would be suggested anecdotally from a quick view of the culture does in fact exist. 

Consi: This post was ... not open for debate though.

Oh? 

Daryl: Abortion won’t hurt me, but it has certainly hurt the 40 million or so children ...

Children? A bit of a stretch dontcha think? I was under the impression it was a foetus till it was born.

Gay marriage won’t hurt me or my family either, but it certainly will hurt children brought up in gay households.

And you know this to be a fact how?
Could I hazard a guess and suggest that most hurt children are from heterosexual households and always will be, whether the law changes or not?

No-fault divorce meant that parents could abandon their children for no particular reason other than “I felt like itâ€?. 

Oh please. Abandon? Of course there’s a small percentage of ‘them’ but to make a generalisation like that is ... is ... stupid.
Many divorces happen coz mummy and daddy fight and they’re better off apart, and so are the kids.
All 3 of my brothers and my sister are divorced and remarried. All the kids are fine - none smoke cigarettes let alone do any other type of drug. None are suicidal. None was abandoned.
Maybe people are different in the US.
PS: I never got married nor did I have kids, that I know of, but if one came outa the woodwork that’d be cool. I am far too selfish and never planned on being round this long.

Daryl, misery is part of the human condition.  It happens in any family where children have to live with animosity, and very much less than where children are protected and loved.  The exact plumbing involved, not so important.

Consi, Daryl, to the extent (unproven in my mind) that gays are more promiscuous, that could be a result of the fact that they’re not allowed to live comfortably in stable relationships.  Imagine if your only sexual outlet were considered a sin or even a crime?

And what Ingolfson said.

While I do agree with the idea that it would be better to change minds on the issue of gay marriage as opposed to trying to force it through court action, I think Consi’s declaration that the court battles are all but over may be a bit premature. California still has a pending lawsuit over the issue coming up that could go either way depending on the arguments used.

Lastly I have to comment on this bit from Daryl:

Gay marriage won’t hurt me or my family either, but it certainly will hurt children brought up in gay households.

Daryl, your concern for other people’s children is very touching so I’m sure you won’t be upset when others take an interest in how you are raising yours and any potential harm you may be exposing them to through things such as, say, your insistence on raising them as Christians? We all know that children raised as Christians have a greater incidence of growing up to become extremest in the ideology. Some brought up in a Christian family with strong anti-abortion messages have gone on to murder abortion doctors in cold blood. Why in the United Kingdom two Christian sects have been beating and killing each other for decades over the simple fact that one group is Catholic and the other is Protestant. Surely children raised as either faction are at greater risk of being emotionally disturbed to the point of violence against others. Not to mention that whole “spare the rod” message means you could be abusing your kids on a regular basis.

Surely if it’s OK for you to meddle in the affairs of how others raise their kids then the same should be fair in reverse, yes? Tell you what, we won’t let the gays raise kids so long as you agree that Christians aren’t allowed either. Don’t want any potential harm from those environments damaging the little tykes, yes?

Daryl, your concern for other people’s children is very touching so I’m sure you won’t be upset when others take an interest in how you are raising yours and any potential harm you may be exposing them to

  I went to a good private Christian college in East Tennessee.  Wanna know who we had to help up the stairs, clean up, and put to bed?  The preachers’ kids. 

I figured out it was because of the unrelenting external control with which they’d grown up.  They never had any chance to develop self-discipline or self-control; those muscles were atrophied from non-use.  It’s as if their parents did all their homework for them K-12.

Never mind killing abortion doctors, Daryl; just make sure your kids get to make their own mistakes now and then.  You won’t always be there to exert your parental control.

Bullshit. Absolute BULLSHIT. If one thing became clear during the last decade or more it is that, left to their own devices, gays are just as much upstanding bores as we all are. They simply don’t have the ‘wrong’ pinups on their walls, okay?

We already know what happens when you introduce non-biological guardians into the family: increased rates of poverty, domestic violence, child abuse (physical and sexual), bad grades, dropping out of school, suicide, and low self-esteem. (Some reading available here). Even if we grant the theory that there is no difference between gays and straights other than the same sex attraction, we still have ample reason to oppose gay marriage. It will screw up the kids. Not all kids, there will be plenty of exceptions. But the statistical pattern of poor outcomes will nevertheless remain.

But the hypothesis that gays are just as dull and boring as straights cannot be sustained. Daryl and I both used to be liberals. We have gone to gay bars with our gay friends and been awed at the litany of sexual partners our gay friends have had just from those in the bar at that time. I’m sure many of you have had the same experience. Of course, the plural of anecdote is not data so Daryl has pointed out in this previous discussion that gays are far more likely to have short term relationships, infidelities, and open relationships. That is fine for adults enjoying their right to privacy, but it is less than fine for the child that has no long-term father/mother figure or role model for long term relationship success. Gays also have higher rates of substance abuse and domestic violence.

The best you can do is to maintain that once we legalize gay marriage, gays will then become just as dull and boring as straights. In other words, conduct yet another completely untested population-wide study on our nation’s children. And again, the very best that you can hope for is that gay marriage is only as bad as single motherhood, no-fault divorce and cohabitating single parents.

I find it funny that the best argument anyone can come up with against gay marriage is that it might hurt children potentially raised in that marriage. We already have de facto gay marriage. Two people of the same sex are perfectly free to form a long-lasting, stable relationship- a fact that conservatives often point out when explaining that the are only opposing “a change in the definition of marriage”. They’re also free to raise children; only in the case of actually adopting children unrelated to both partners do gays tend to run up against insurmountable problems.

So, conservatives, how exactly do you justify prohibiting gay marriage on the basis of helping children? Logic would dictate that the only outcomes of gay marriage directly pertaining to children would be that both partners could legally adopt a child who was either biologically related to only one partner, or to neither (this is, of course, assuming that full marriage equality presumes full adoption rights). I cannot fathom how anyone who claims to care about the welfare of children can think that it’s better for a child to either be raised by only one parent with legal rights to it, or to never be adopted at all. Do you know how many gay couples are raising children that no one wanted right now, who kicked around the foster care system far past the point at which children are usually adopted? Children born with HIV, or addicted to crack?

Do conservatives seriously want to make the argument that these kids would have been better off if it had been even harder for their gay parents to adopt them? Whether or not they would have been better off with heterosexual parents is irrelevant to the point of absurdity. This is the thing I never get about the retarded anti-gay adoption argument (which has somehow become synonymous with the anti-gay marriage argument)- the notion that any kid raised by parents who want her, but happen to be gay, is likely to be worse off than parents who just happened to be biologically capable of producing her. Gay couples have to want to have kids, and frequently have to sustain that desire over a period of years- which would still be the case even if adoption were made easier. They never accidentally have unwanted kids, they typically don’t have more children than they can afford, and they never have abortions. Parenting-wise, they should be a conservative’s dream.

Good post Ulfrekr, you have brought up some points that I have also been considering. The gist is that there are two different points under consideration. One is marriage/procreation. The other is adoption. To put it more explicitly:

(A) - adopt: The circumstances under which it is ethical to allow non-biological guardians to take parental rights over a child

and

(P) - procreate: The circumstances under which it is ethical to procreate

As a Christian and as someone who has looked at the scientific evidence regarding the breakdown of the married, two-parent biological family, I maintain that the (P) can only be met by traditional marriages in which both parents have recognized their obligation to unconditionally love their children. However, (A) is another matter. In these cases someone has already failed to meet (P), or there have been deaths to the parents. Necessarily, (A) has lower standards than (P).

I think it is open question as to whether gays can meet (A). Perhaps they can, or perhaps children would be better off in foster care or orphanages. However, there is no contradiction in taking the conservative position that people in gay unions should not do (P) while still being allowed to do (A) - adopt.

Daryl: Gay marriage won’t hurt me or my family either, but it certainly will hurt children brought up in gay households.

“Certainly” is a strong word, Daryl. Where is your evidence for such certainty? Surely it doesn’t come from the American Psychological Association’s research.

Gay marriage . . will hurt children brought up in gay households.

Show me the evidence for this. You’ve made an assertion here that is absolutely not backed up by available empirical evidence.

Arc, without endorsing Darryl’s viewpoint, to the extent that there is an implication that a homosexual lifestyle is more promiscous than a standard heterosexual one, an earlier post is on point:

Well, there are at least two factors involved here that I can think of off the top of my head:

1. The historical, traditional, and on-going bias against gay relationships that has made it extraordinarily difficult for gays to have and sustain monogamous relationships.

There has never been the kind of broad acceptance of gay relationships that would foster and support monogamy. Cognitively, this leads to a situation in which sex becomes separated from intimacy for gay people—hence, lower rates of monogamy.

Now that the gay community is asking to combine intimacy and sexuality through marriage, conservative elements are doing all they can to prevent it while simultaneously decrying promiscuity in the gay community. Odd, isn’t it?

2. Men have the benefit of all the goodies that lots of testosterone brings with it—including an increased sex drive. With no legitimate outlet for it, is it really a big surprise that they’re more sexually and secretly active than those who have a legitimate sexual outlet? 

No-fault divorce meant that parents could abandon their children for no particular reason other than “I felt like it�.

Well, that’s a load of shit. Caring parents don’t abandon their children regardless of whether they are divorced and those who do not care about their children easily abuse and abandon their children within marriage.

As a Christian and as someone who has looked at the scientific evidence regarding the breakdown of the married, two-parent biological family, I maintain that the (P) can only be met by traditional marriages in which both parents have recognized their obligation to unconditionally love their children. However, (A) is another matter. In these cases someone has already failed to meet (P), or there have been deaths to the parents. Necessarily, (A) has lower standards than (P).

I think it is open question as to whether gays can meet (A). Perhaps they can, or perhaps children would be better off in foster care or orphanages. However, there is no contradiction in taking the conservative position that people in gay unions should not do (P) while still being allowed to do (A) - adopt.

To suggest that a child might better off in an institutionalized setting or in a series of foster homes rather than being adopted by a gay couple demonstrates a considerable lack of understanding of the literature. See: A comparison of family functioning in gay/lesbian, heterosexual and special needs adoptions by Leung, Erich, & Kanenburg (2005) in Children in Youth Services Review, 27(9), 1031-1044.

In addition, as much as you may dislike it, the empirical evidence continues to demonstrate that the children of gay and lesbian parents fare as well as those of straight parents. See: Lesbian mothers, gay fathers, and their children by Fiona Tasker (2005) in The Journal of Developmental & Behavioural Pediatrics, 26(3), 224-240.

If you’re going to claim to have looked at the scientific evidence, Justin, you’re going to have to stop surfing the net and go to the primary literature.

Justin: I maintain that the (P) [ethical procreation] can only be met by traditional marriages in which both parents have recognized their obligation to unconditionally love their children.

This is definitely a topic worthy of discussion, Justin, but I don’t see how it can have any bearing when we’re talking about legal rights. There’s no legal injunction regarding who can procreate, and there’s unlikely to ever be one in this country. Are you advocating that we implement one?

However, there is no contradiction in taking the conservative position that people in gay unions should not do (P) while still being allowed to do (A) - adopt.

Maybe not, but again, it’s irrelevant to the question of gay marriage. Not having legal recognition of their relationship isn’t going to stop any gay couple from raising a child who is biologically related to one of the parents. All it’s going to do is make the welfare of that family a little less protected.

Here’s what I don’t understand: Let’s say, for purposes of the conversation, that the absolute best environment for a child to be raised in really is a “traditional”, two-heterosexual-parent marriage, where both parents are legally committed to each other and have recognized their obligation to unconditionally love their children. Now, let’s assume that there’s no rational way to actually prevent children from being raised in other circumstances (if I’m wrong here, please call me on it). In this scenario, in which the traditional family is the ideal, let’s assume that the quality of other household environments can be determined based on how far they deviate from the ideal. So, under these assumptions, which is better: A) a family of two parents and their children, where both parents are legally committed to each other and have recognized their obligation to unconditionally love their children, yet the parents are of the same sex and one or both of them is not biologically related to the children; or B) virtually any other permutation of family? Doesn’t the gay family come closer to the conservative ideal than a single parent family, or a foster family, or whatever?

So how does preventing gay couples from marrying and raising children help kids, if far more kids will still be raised in families that are in a sense even further from the ideal than gay-parent families are? Blocking gay marriage does nothing to stem single-parenthood, or revolving door parenthood, or any of the myriad other family structures that are much more prevalent and which one would think conservatives would be much more concerned about.

And this is why you conservatives so frequently get accused of just hating gay people. To most of us who really think about your arguments, even basing the logic on the same assumptions as you guys seem to, the arguments don’t ultimately seem to hold water unless there is another agenda at play.

Here’s what I don’t understand: Let’s say, for purposes of the conversation, that the absolute best environment for a child to be raised in really is a “traditional�, two-heterosexual-parent marriage, where both parents are legally committed to each other and have recognized their obligation to unconditionally love their children. Now, let’s assume that there’s no rational way to actually prevent children from being raised in other circumstances (if I’m wrong here, please call me on it).

Consider yourself called. That is precisely what marriage has historically done, both in our society and in others: it has been the gatekeeper for proper family structure. In the early 20th century, only 1% of whites were born outside of traditional marriages. That is what conservatives want to get back to.

As to which is worse, no-fault divorce, gay marriage, single motherhood, or cohabitating singles, that question does not need to be answered. They are all worse than the ideal.

Justin, you have a rather rosy view of ‘traditional’ families.  Think of them as tight containers for misery in many cases; at least all ‘dat bid’ness stays out of the news, usually.

There are far greater variations among individuals than there are between the averages of groups.  As I said to Daryl, what children need is a supportive, loving, functioning family.  When that is the case, the children will do fine even if the parents are married and of opposite genders! 

Justin writes…

In the early 20th century, only 1% of whites were born outside of traditional marriages. That is what conservatives want to get back to.

Is it just me? Or does the above strike anyone else as an incredibly bigoted statement even for Justin?

As to which is worse, no-fault divorce, gay marriage, single motherhood, or cohabitating singles, that question does not need to be answered. They are all worse than the ideal.

Everfresh Translation: If it ain’t the best situation then it shouldn’t be allowed at ALL. No shades of gray in MY world!

[Edited to include full quote. I missed part of it on the first attempt.]

Men have the benefit of all the goodies that lots of testosterone brings with it—including an increased sex drive. With no legitimate outlet for it, is it really a big surprise that they’re more sexually and secretly active than those who have a legitimate sexual outlet?

Maybe it’s not you, but I thought you all were saying it was a hormone deficiency that resulted in homosexuality because the older brothers got all the goodies?  That aside, females, from humans to chimps, are just as driven by the desire to get laid. They are more discrete about it though. 
ab
The other thought amounts to nothing more than blaming me for someone else’s behavior.  Isn’t that like blaming video games for youth crime?  It is.  It doesn’t work there.  It doesn’t work here.

Furthermore, one should have seen the floodgates open as all these committed couples in Massuchusetts rushed to get married.  On May 17, 2004 couples could began marrying up there.  The floodgates in that first year? 6,000 couples.  A full twelve thousand people.  The commonwealth has roughly 6.5 million people.  Using the gaydar from the gay community that fully 10% are gay, something that is hogwash, but let’s use their stats, that’s 650,000 gay folks. What percentage married when given this right that is so precious and which the lack of induces one to have anonymous sex in bars, oh, let’s see:  12,000/650,000=.01846 Not 1%.  Not 1/10th of one percent.  18 hundreds of one percent.  Precious indeed.

Justin: In the early 20th century, only 1% of whites were born outside of traditional marriages. That is what conservatives want to get back to.

Implicit racism aside, that doesn’t sound like an incredibly momentous goal.

Shelley, I have a suspicion that in your googling you selectively visited gay and liberal websites and avoided websites that were Christian or conservative. A trip to PubMed (an online database of peer reviewed studies) shows:

In 1994, American Psychological Association amicus briefs informed two state Supreme Courts that (a) homosexual parents are not more apt to have homosexual children; (b) lesbians “score significantly higher than heterosexual parents” on a measure of parental effectiveness; and (c) no differences between the children raised by homosexuals and nonhomosexuals had been found “regardless of the geographic region within the United States where the children were raised.” In fact, the evidence from these briefs shows to the contrary that (a) homosexual parents are more apt to have homosexual children; (b) the findings on parental effectiveness consisted of 15 fathers being less verbal than 45 mothers; and (c) the finding of no differences between homosexually and heterosexually raised children consisted of investigators visiting 11 states to test 89 offspring of 83 lesbian vs. 81 children of 69 nonlesbian volunteers.

link

And

From this tentative method of counting, support was found for common sense beliefs that children of homosexuals will be more apt to become homosexual and have poorer peer relationships, while weaker support was found for some of the other predictions. As assessed in this way, the empirical evidence in the literature tended to lean against claims of “no differences” between children raised by homosexuals and heterosexuals. 

link

I would also add that some of the studies showing that children of homosexuals do not become homosexuals typically use the 10% figure for prevalence of homosexuality, even though in reality the number is closer to 2% to 3%.

The fact is that research on gay parents in 2005 is about where research on single motherhood stood in the mid 1960’s when the right was losing that battle in the ongoing culture war. It took about 20 to 30 years of being called bigots before leftist sociologists started to come around to the fact that single motherhood is bad for children. Now those same sociologists who got dragged kicking and screaming into reality on single motherhood and divorce are blithely embarking on a new experiment with our nation’s children.

The math is right, but my stated percentage is not.  The percentage of gays married in the first year. 1.8%.

Sadie, would you like to give us some background on the author of the writer who penned the document you are referring to.  Her name is Charlotte J. Patterson of the University of Virginia.

But do most same-sex couples accept the norm of sexual exclusivity? In a 1999 survey of such couples in Massachusetts, sociologist Gretchen Stiers found that only 10 percent of the men and 32 percent of the women thought that a “committed” intimate relationship entailed sexual exclusivity. An essay called “Queer Liberalism?” in the June 2000 American Political Science Review reviewed six books that discussed same-sex marriage. None of the six authors affirmed sexual exclusivity as a precondition of same-sex marriage, and most rejected the idea that sexual fidelity should be expected of “married” homosexual partners.

Some proponents of same-sex marriage believe that its legalization will help same-sex partners be sexually faithful. The evidence, however, suggests that acceptance of the norm of sexual exclusivity is a minority view among homosexuals in the United States and elsewhere. Furthermore, because intimate relations between persons of the same sex are inherently--and not merely contingently--unconnected to procreation, there is no principled reason to limit same-sex marriage to two persons. Thus, one can reasonably predict that same-sex marriage is going to be intrinsically unstable, as Sex Panic recognized in expressing its contempt for the institution. As if to confirm these points, the first same-sex couple to receive a marriage license in Provincetown, Massachusetts, told the press that they had an “open” marriage.

Link

Implicit racism aside, that doesn’t sound like an incredibly momentous goal.

Unlike the liberals on this board, I want for all children - black, white, and in-between - to be raised by their biological parents. And it is certainly a momentous goal for people who actually care about the wellbeing of children.