While much of our attention (well, mine anyway) is focused on the question whether same-sex marriage will be foisted on the American people by judicial ideologues, the T in LGBT (lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgendered) continues to pop up in the news in odd and disturbing ways. This morning Anthony Esolen’s On the Square essay “A Rose by Any Other Name” takes us by the shoulders for a good hard shake about this subject (and those who take offense at Esolen’s sharp wit should note whom he was really targeting; it wasn’t the poor young basketball player). I’m glad Esolen cited Douglas Farrow’s article in the March FT, which I somehow hadn’t read until now, and Stephen J. Heaney’s Public Discourse essay from last fall. Both are good, but Farrow also does us the favor of recalling Paul McHugh’s November 2004 FT article “Surgical Sex,” which discussed the studies that led Johns Hopkins Hospital (where McHugh was chief of psychiatry) to stop performing sex-reassignment surgery. His own conclusion was that such surgery “was fundamentally cooperating with a mental illness. We psychiatrists . . . would do better to concentrate on fixing [our patients'] minds and not their genitalia.”
But in New York City, it seems that the law not only “cooperates” with the “gender” confusion of those who embrace the T, it actually demands that they “fix” their genitalia. As the New York Times reported a couple of months ago, the city’s health code–for 40 years!–has allowed for a change of sex from male to female or vice versa on one’s birth certificate, but only if one has “convertive surgery.” So the price of the state’s official agreement with one’s self-identification as being one sex when one was born the other, is to undergo surgical mutilation with serious risks and no known benefits. Several individuals claiming a right to change their birth certificates’ sex indicator are now suing the city. It seems that “80 percent of transgender women and 95 percent of transgender men in New York have not had the surgery” the city requires, many of them because of the risks involved. That’s an awful lot of T’s that exist only in their heads–but better that they should avoid the knife, it seems to me.
This is one of those rare stories where everyone is in the wrong. Those asking for the change to their birth certificates are wrong to demand it, for they remain (surgery or not) the creatures they were at birth. But the city is wrong even to offer a change of the birth certificate, thus catering to a disturbance in the psyche. And it is doubly wrong, monumentally wrong, to offer the change, and then withhold it unless one undergoes an injury to the body that matches the injury to the soul.
May 26th, 2011 | 11:00 am
This an alarming story. But in regards to gay marriage, it cannot be “foisted” on the American people when two separate polls (Washington Post and Gallup) show that 53% favor it, and other polls show movement in the same direction.
May 26th, 2011 | 11:10 am
Excellent post. I want to draw your attention to what I think was an even stronger article by Douglas Farrow on this topic that appeared in Touchstone Magazine: “The Audacity of the State.”
May 26th, 2011 | 11:39 am
“While much of our attention (well, mine anyway) is focused on the question whether same-sex marriage will be foisted on the American people by judicial ideologues …”
Wait. Do you mean that these ideologues are going to force us to marry people of our own sex?!? This is intolerable. A violation of freedom and self-determination! This must stop. We cannot allow people to force others to do something against their will. We can’t impede people from marrying the person they want to marry. It just isn’t right.
PS: T = trans. Not necessarily transsexual or surgically altered people.
May 26th, 2011 | 11:59 am
it cannot be “foisted” on the American people when two separate polls (Washington Post and Gallup) show that 53% favor it, and other polls show movement in the same direction.
Yes, but it is not informed consent: the people who favor it think it will not change much.
When they learn the truth, their opinions will change.
Gay marriage advocates have avoided all the tough questions in favor of simply presenting argumentum ad misericordium arguments – so that of course people are going to respond favorably.
When it is phrased as, “Are you for or against the bad people who want to hurt innocent men and women just because they happen to have been born gay?”, then yes – people are going to be “for” whatever it wants to make gays not be hurting.
The real question is what is going to happen when people figure out that what gays are really demanding is nothing less than a fundamental change to the basis upon which we categorize relationships.
Try asking people a more honest version of the question – “do you support the idea that recognizing biological kinship as a unique form of relationship is discriminatory and ought to be outlawed?”
See how many people support that.
What gays really want is not the freedom to live and let live – they have that. What they want is for the entire society to embrace their ideal of total control:
- Over gender (“I will choose whether I am male or female!”)
- And over kinship (“I will choose which people are or are not related to me!”)
Most people who are only “in favor of” gay marriage are only supportive because they think it’s a simple choice between hating gays vs. accepting gays. They don’t yet realize it’s really something far more destabilizing and destructive than that.
May 26th, 2011 | 12:00 pm
@Ken: When it is done by popular vote, the only polls that count here, it is not foisted. Otherwise it is exactly that. Let the people vote on this issue. The methods used to date do not bear you out. The voting booth polls have overwhelming gone in the opposite direction.
May 26th, 2011 | 12:45 pm
“When they learn the truth, their opinions will change.”
Yeah. Like they’re going to be forced to do it.
“Let the people vote on this issue.”
Fair enough, but let’s only let people vote who are eligible for it.
May 26th, 2011 | 12:47 pm
The situation of transgendered and transexual individuals merits serious reflection by theologians, ethicists and others, not the kind of dismissive response that Matthew Franck offers, as though it were self-evident that such individuals are simply deluded. There’s been a lot of scholarship about gender in the past 40 years, and while some of it may be misguided or based on faulty assumptions, I don’t think it can be so easily dismissed.
These are real people whose concerns matter. Perhaps the least we could do to engage those concerns is to become familiar with the real issues at stake. Anything else is unworthy of the high intellectual standards that First Things embodies.
May 26th, 2011 | 1:08 pm
Blake, many if not most people who vote in elections are poorly informed on the issues. Are the election results illegitimate? And what gays really want is to be treated as equals, full stop. I don’t support that exact goal, but I can’t blame them for having it.
Mike, you have a point of course, but do you oppose all judicial rulings that might override the will of the people? Why even hear those cases then? It is the job of judges to oppose what they believe is unconstitutional.
May 26th, 2011 | 1:44 pm
@Mike Melendez: You and I are on the same side, and you are correct that we win in the voting booth. As a practical matter, I guess the ballot box in each state makes sense. But…
People seem to be forgetting that marriage only came into existence because men and women procreate children. We’re having this debate because a handful of years ago a few folks started playing with the idea of redefining what marriage means.
In a few years maybe the transhumanists will come up with an idea of redefining what human means. I suppose we’ll subject that to a vote to.
We haven’t lost these votes, but what if we do? “Oh hey, whaddya know? Turns out I’m not human! Turns out marriage has nothing to do with procreation!”
There’s something about using the ballot box on this that doesn’t sit well with me. I don’t know that I have a better idea, but do you see my point?
May 26th, 2011 | 2:06 pm
“People seem to be forgetting that marriage only came into existence because men and women procreate children.”
Is this actually true? Men and women were procreating children long before there was either a religious or civil ceremony to confirm it in law.
Marriage existed and continues to exist for any number of reasons: to cement alliances in business or politics, to produce one male child, to get rid of older children cluttering up one’s household, for love, for companionship in old age.
And why shouldn’t the reasons for marriage expand, as long as they are moral and honorable? Are we human beings capable of making moral decisions, or animals rutting to satisfy our genetic urges?
May 26th, 2011 | 2:17 pm
“PS: T = trans. Not necessarily transsexual or surgically altered people.”
I was thinking the other day about the term “LGBT”. I’ve also seen “GLBT”. I’ve also seen “LGBTA (for “allies”). I’ve also seen LGBTQI (for “queer” and “inquiring”). I’ve also seen LGBTQIA (for all of the above).
For a truly spectacular array of neologisms created to keep up with our desperate attempts to play God with respect to sexuality, please check out this link:
http://lgbtcenter.ucdavis.edu/lgbt-education/lgbtqia-glossary
I can’t help but feel that this entire project is a modern Tower of Babel, with the corresponding language and communication confusion. We all know where that ended up…
May 26th, 2011 | 3:19 pm
“I can’t help but feel that this entire project is a modern Tower of Babel, with the corresponding language and communication confusion.”
Aw, shucks, Steve. You’re just bummed because you’re on the outs of a conversation others are having. Talk with some teens–or better yet, text with them. You’ll feel very Q about being out of the loop there.
May 26th, 2011 | 3:31 pm
@Todd Yes, of course it’s true. My longer answer is contained in this attempt I made to address the argument to libertarians.
Here’s a relevant excerpt:
Imagine for a moment that human beings grew magically out of the ground like carrots, but without the need for sexual procreation. No mothers, no fathers, no children, no biological families–just people, completely free to do whatever they want. For what reason would two people (man-to-man or man-to-woman) create an institution declaring their mutually exclusive fondness for one another? For that matter, why would the relationship revolve around two people instead of three, or six, or why would the number matter at all? And why would we define that fondness based on some random physical activity, such as rubbing elbows together? And even if for some reason a few people in this imaginary world did do such a thing, why would anyone notice? Why would word even spread of such an inconsequential thing? Furthermore, why on earth would the government have any interest in such an entirely inconsequential, weird exercise?
My point here is that marriage only came into existence because sexual procreation is the inescapable biological necessity for the existence of mothers, fathers, children, families, and civilization. The government did not create marriage and the natural family, but rather these pre-governmental institutions are the building blocks of the civilization that our government was created to protect.
May 26th, 2011 | 3:39 pm
Todd: “Fair enough, but let’s only let people vote who are eligible for it.”
That came out of left field. Are you making an accusation or just an insinuation?
Ken: “Mike, you have a point of course, but do you oppose all judicial rulings that might override the will of the people? Why even hear those cases then? It is the job of judges to oppose what they believe is unconstitutional.”
It is the job of the judge to judge. I give you my own state, MA. Somehow, the Supreme Judicial Court discovered that the constitution of long standing outlawed marriage limited to a man and a women. Even though it had never been so interpreted before. Where did that judgement come from?
So, no, I do not agree with you. It is not the job of judges to oppose what they believe is unconstitutional. They must make a case from neutrality, from the document itself, without bringing their beliefs into the picture. They are the parallel of baseball umpires who must set aside the fact they are Red Sox fans when the Sox are playing the Yankees.
Here, they decided that not limiting marriage to a man and a woman made those desiring a marriage with the same sex less equal, a novel idea and certainly the belief of the court’s majority. They decided the Red Sox won because they were fans, not because of the Constitution, which is silent on the issue unless you assume that belief.
The people desired to vote on the issue. An initiative gained twice as many signatures as any other initiative ever in this state. Yet the people were not allowed to vote. It was all “nice and legal”, of course. And we don’t know what the only poll that really counts, the will of the people, would have said.
May 26th, 2011 | 3:40 pm
There’s a valid reason why to do so, mostly to prevent able-bodied men from changing gender to take advantage of things meant for the other gender. Scholarships come to mind.
I agree with anon that it needs more serious discussion. I personally think it’s no coincidence that it rose as the power of women also rose in modern life. But that’s a lot, tangental discussion.
May 26th, 2011 | 3:45 pm
Todd: “And why shouldn’t the reasons for marriage expand, as long as they are moral and honorable? Are we human beings capable of making moral decisions, or animals rutting to satisfy our genetic urges?”
Good questions, Todd. Now all the advocates have to do is persuade a majority that laws on marriage should be changed. So far, that doesn’t seem to be working. So instead, the advocates have made an end run around the voting public and persuaded some judges in the right position. So much for democracy.
May 26th, 2011 | 4:00 pm
@Douglas Johnson: I do see your point and agree with you, but I also believe in a rule of law. We need to persuade the majority of the voting populace of our beliefs, which so far we are succeeding in. What is proposed is a fundamental change in how the nation treats marriage. This needs to be worked out in the democracy, not foisted on the people by the few.
May 26th, 2011 | 4:07 pm
I don’t buy it, Mike M. “Judges. . . must make a case from neutrality, from the document itself, without bringing their beliefs into the picture” comes down to saying that judges must rule on constitutionality. You have presented no evidence that in this case they merely ruled according to political preference. Put another way: you believe the judges ought to have ruled in accordance with yours. This does not prove that your have no real concern for constitutionality either.
As you must know, liberals accuse conservatives of legislating from the bench as well. I don’t buy the charge from either side, and I especially don’t buy the Tea Party’s vaunted love affair with the Constitution. How many of these people have read liberal scholars?
May 26th, 2011 | 5:22 pm
Blake, many if not most people who vote in elections are poorly informed on the issues. Are the election results illegitimate?
Ultimately, gay marriage is about redefining marriage.
It’s not possible. We can reject marriage, but marriage is what it is. If gays get custody of the word “marriage”, we will have to find some other way to support real families, and call it something else – or else we will have to reorganize our social units so that we are arranged into governmentally approved units based on some criteria other than kinship.
People don’t realize how much categories define things. Something that is a “sin” but not a “crime”, and categorized as “victimless” when less than 5% of the population does it, can destroy a culture altogether when it is redefined as “perfectly acceptable, even desirable behavior”.
May 26th, 2011 | 5:33 pm
“Let the people vote on this issue.”
Fair enough, but let’s only let people vote who are eligible for it.
All right, but then by the same logic, only those who voted in favor of “gay marriage” have to recognize “gay marriages” as legally binding, or “real”, or entitled to the benefits we grant to real marriages.
May 26th, 2011 | 5:40 pm
Blake, you’re changing the subject, but that’s alright. I respect your view of marriage, and promiscuous gay “marriages” are not fully marriages in my mind. But the state has an interest in supporting any stable relationship, and I define real families as ones held together by love. On that score, there are many gay marriages.
May 26th, 2011 | 5:41 pm
The situation of transgendered and transexual individuals merits serious reflection by theologians, ethicists and others, not the kind of dismissive response that Matthew Franck offers, as though it were self-evident that such individuals are simply deluded. There’s been a lot of scholarship about gender in the past 40 years, and while some of it may be misguided or based on faulty assumptions, I don’t think it can be so easily dismissed.
These are real people whose concerns matter. Perhaps the least we could do to engage those concerns is to become familiar with the real issues at stake.
The real issue is that “The Enlightenment” promised us control over everything
But “The Enlightenment” lied, and some people just don’t want to face it. It turns out that some things really are beyond our control, and gender is not a social construct – it’s a biological fact.
What you are – male or female – is not a question of how you feel. It is a question of how your body is wired – including but not limited to your bones, your muscles, your brain, your chemistry, etc.
It’s sort of funny how the materialists – the ones who believe that your body is all you are and all you have – are the ones insisting that there is some “essence” beyond the body that can be male or female, in defiance of what the body actually is. Gender is not a quality of the soul. One’s sex is a quality of one’s body.
To attempt to present yourself as other than what you are is fraud. To be so full of self-loathing that you cannot accept your body unless it is reshaped (at great cost) into a different body altogether is pathological. We see this readily enough when it’s a perfectly normal brunette woman reshaping herself into a life-size imitation of a plastic fashion doll (right down to the permanently bent feet and the grotesque measurements). We refuse to see it when we are talking about gender because we are hooked on this dream of control, but it is a false sense of control: you cannot escape who and what you are by pretending to be someone else. The entire LGBT movement has committed itself to an agenda that is based entirely on lies.
May 26th, 2011 | 5:43 pm
“Now all the advocates have to do is persuade a majority that laws on marriage should be changed.”
People in same sex relationships want what any other person wants: the shared commitment of a life together backed up by any number of shared responsibilities.
The only thing I see morally problematic in same-sex marriage is the sexual activity. But nobody seems to be advocating for criminalizing sex outside of marriage.
Raising children, sharing a household, tax breaks, legal representation, visiting a loved one in the hospital, death benefits, etc.–all of these are morally good or neutral.
My biggest problem with this anti-meme is that conservatives seem smugly satisfied to impose their will on a small minority who wants nothing more than to have a normal citizens’ existence. It would be one thing if you were also advocating prison or fines for people having sex outside of man-woman marriage. At least then you would be consistent. But y’all just look petty to me.
May 26th, 2011 | 5:55 pm
@Ken: The MA judgement depended on the interpretation that not allowing same-sex marriages was unequal making the assumption the conclusion. The Constitution itself has nothing to say on the issue. It still doesn’t as no one has chosen to change the Constitution. It does say that all people should be treated equally but doesn’t relate that to marriage at all. The problem now is whether any proposed marriage can be made illegal by the state. With this judgement, there is no basis for disallowing any marriage, unless apriori you assume it should be disallowed. Law by assumption makes for bad law in my mind. Indeed, that is one of the reasons we established a representative democracy after breaking with the U.K. The rest is smoke. If you advocate same-sex marriage, I say make your case to the people and accept their judgement. Don’t just assume it.
By the way, I consider myself a liberal, but a liberal of a type that is now rare. Early-60′s is the term I use, back when civil rights meant human rights and not “victim” rights. I don’t fit into the current sides and haven’t yet figured out what to do about it.
May 26th, 2011 | 6:20 pm
What is proposed is a fundamental change in how the nation treats marriage.
Not just marriage, but the definition of family.
They want “family” defined as “any group of people who love each other and/or are recognized by the law as being family”.
Imagine in chemistry, if we replaced a strong bond with a weak one, what that would do to the structure of a thing? But that is exactly what they are aiming for: they want to make it a thought crime to recognize “family” as a unit that (a) is defined by biological ties and (b) carries obligations that are assigned according to family role (i.e. “this is what a man owes his mother, and this is what a man owes the woman who bears his children, and this is what a man owes his child”).
In other words, they want to take out the very things that make a family strong and stable.
May 26th, 2011 | 6:24 pm
“It would be one thing if you were also advocating prison or fines for people having sex outside of man-woman marriage. At least then you would be consistent. But y’all just look petty to me.”
Anti-gay legislation allows social conservatives to feel that they are better than gays. It puts gays in a second class. These social conservatives may have a dead end job and a disappointing family life, but hey, at least they are better than that homo over there.
May 26th, 2011 | 8:03 pm
@Jeremy: Such a bundle of bigotry, I don’t know where to begin. If you want an end to “bigotry”, then it would help if you set the example. It might even help make your case.
May 26th, 2011 | 8:24 pm
@Jeremy: Such a bundle of bigotry, I don’t know where to begin. If you want an end to “bigotry”, then it would help if you set the example. It might even help make your case.
Amen to that. There are bigots who hide behind Scriptural injunctions against homosexuality. But there are also licentious people who pooh-pooh to excuse their own fault. It’s unfair to the majority on both sides of this issue to presume those are their motives.
May 26th, 2011 | 8:53 pm
I hope all the commenting on gay marriage has clued Mr. Franck in on how this post lacked any insight into the transgender issues many humans face. It’s fine (though arrogant) to assume that people with normal genitals are deciding their gender because of some mental illness. (Or homosexual conspiracy.) But to just disregard those folks who are born with ambiguous genitalia as though they don’t exist or don’t face profound questions through no fault of their own is as ignorant as the “genderless child” family making the rounds currently.
May 26th, 2011 | 10:43 pm
It’s a conversation stopper, isn’t it, to shout the word “bigot” at someone, as if the person in question had not considered the issues thoroughly. In this case, I would like to ask two questions:
First, what are we going to have for sexual ethics? If homosexual pseudogamy is recognized, on what grounds, and please be precise, do we fail to recognize as licit other forms of sexual behavior? And, corollary to this question, have you or have you not noticed that the burgeoning of our prisons has gone along with the destruction of the family?
Second — and this is a question I address only to heterosexual fathers of sons: Suppose I could show you a very simple and natural thing that you could do, that would lead your son to assume a natural masculine identity; he would be comfortable in his skin, attracted to women and attractive to them in turn; and he would make friends easily with members of his own sex. Would you do this thing? Or, would you not do this thing, in a heartbeat? It would have nothing to do with any bigotry or hatred; it would simply be evidence of your quite natural and justified desire that your son should grow up without a conflicted sense of his masculinity. Well …. there is such a simple thing to do … but that is matter for another blog.
What the answer to question 2 suggests is that by pretending to be compassionate towards homosexual men, we visit all kinds of confusion and unnecessary difficulty upon boys who do NOT have reliable or loving fathers. But those boys and their feelings are invisible.
There’s a thousand times more to this question than anyone wants to admit.
May 26th, 2011 | 11:35 pm
Imagine for a moment that human beings grew magically out of the ground like carrots, but without the need for sexual procreation. No mothers, no fathers, no children, no biological families–just people, completely free to do whatever they want. For what reason would two people (man-to-man or man-to-woman) create an institution declaring their mutually exclusive fondness for one another? For that matter, why would the relationship revolve around two people instead of three, or six, or why would the number matter at all?
Why are marriages for life then? Why not 20 years or until the oldest child reachest, say 20 years old?
And as for what reason? Well note that traditional marriage vows actually say nothing about children or procreation but instead discuss two people pledging their lives to each other. If it was just about procreation then sterility would nullify that promise and making it lifelong is just overkill.
But let’s talk about the actual article at hand. I think the doctor is right that those seeking sex change operations should be discouraged. That seems quite conservative to me, if you can be discouraged you probably shouldn’t be getting one. If tomorrow I woke up as a woman, I don’t think I could be discouraged from seeking the best possible way to get back to being a man. The doctor also makes pretty valid observations, the surgery is imperfect and a body alone does not fill in for decades of cultural learning and conditioning. But at the same time the doctor more or less reveals that there is a disconnect between biology and gender. Boys with childhood deformaties raised as girls both with hormones and basically the body of a woman still know there is something not right. So it would seem viable to suppose that gender is deep rooted in the brain’s hardwiring. But if that is the case then there is no a prior reason to assert its impossible to be “a man/woman in a woman/man’s body”. If that’s the case then we are basically at a point where medical science is pretty poorly advanced and at best can offer half-good options. In that case New York’s policy is basically pretty conservative. If you’re serious about changing gender then do it seriously and its basically up to you and your doctor to decide if its the right thing to do. Barring some real breakthrough, that’s the best we have right now.
May 27th, 2011 | 12:30 am
“It’s a conversation stopper, isn’t it, to shout the word “bigot” at someone …”
Not really. You just keep talking or writing.
“Suppose I could show you a very simple and natural thing that you could do, that would lead your son to assume a natural masculine identity ….”
That assumes that SSA is nurture, not nature. Getting back to the trans issue, not every human being is born xx or xy. And sometimes a person is born with partial male and female genitalia. If my child were, then I would be a good father, in whatever way that took. I probably would avoid the “easy” surgery of past decades” the removal of penis and testicles.
I don’t think there’s anything necessarily wrong with being ignorant about human sexuality. The problem is when people pass themselves off as knowledgeable when they lack significant understanding.
May 27th, 2011 | 1:15 am
Todd writes:
“The problem is when people pass themselves off as knowledgeable when they lack significant understanding.”
And yet, Todd, it is you who lacks understanding, that is what is so appallingly funny! The certitude of ignorance! You haven’t answered a single point made by Esolen.
May 27th, 2011 | 1:19 am
“It’s sort of funny how the materialists – the ones who believe that your body is all you are and all you have – are the ones insisting that there is some “essence” beyond the body that can be male or female, in defiance of what the body actually is. Gender is not a quality of the soul. One’s sex is a quality of one’s body.”
Yes. I agree it is funny…and annoying.
May 27th, 2011 | 2:03 am
“You haven’t answered a single point made by Esolen.”
Of course I haven’t. I don’t agree with him, and I’ve said as much. Clearly I must be ignorant. All of these sexuality matters under discussion are all about having the special knowledge of the Right, and parroting all the things conservatives say.
May 27th, 2011 | 5:17 am
Second — and this is a question I address only to heterosexual fathers of sons: Suppose I could show you a very simple and natural thing that you could do, that would lead your son to assume a natural masculine identity;
The biggest thing a father could do to help his son be masculine is to teach that son the importance of recognizing and honoring obligations, as opposed to the narcissistic desire to receive – take – the blessings and benefits of membership in one’s family and culture, without giving back what is necessary for the sustenance and well-being of that family or that culture.
Masculinity is not the same thing as whether one experiences sexual desire in heterosexual or homosexual ways. Masculinity is the biological fact that our race is differentiated by gender, and that this differentiation is directly linked to the fact that this is how we reproduce ourselves and how nature, God, evolution – whatever force you credit or blame, this force has determined that it shall be such that reproductive capacity shall be sexual in nature, and split inefficiently, with one partner bearing the bulk of the commitment and risk and burden physiologically and economically.
If men and women could simply write up a contract by which childrearing could be split 50-50, sexual identities would not be necessary; each partner could simply negotiate a straight split. But it is not possible: we are a species that is divided into strong and vulnerable, with the vulnerable suffering disadvantages but also being entitled to rights.
The dream of androgyny is the dream of those born male to be entitled to those rights we grant to the vulnerable, and the dream of those born female to be entitled to the privileges we accord to those who are strong. In both cases, men and women wish to have the blessings and benefits granted to the other sex, but without sharing the obligations, the burdens and the vulnerabilities associated with those blessings and benefits.
May 27th, 2011 | 5:41 am
Well note that traditional marriage vows actually say nothing about children or procreation but instead discuss two people pledging their lives to each other. If it was just about procreation then sterility would nullify that promise and making it lifelong is just overkill.
Benefits of marriage include what is known as “the presumption of paternity” – that is, the recognition that if one partner has a baby, the other partner is legally presumed the spouse.
When you are through explaining why gays feel they’re entitled to that benefit (that is, the “right” to make fraudulent claims about paternity and to misrepresent family tree data), you can explain how come the benefits associated with the “non procreative” institution of marriage are delivered in a form that requires identification of which partner is the “head of household” and which is the “dependent”….with further benefits being dependent on one partner being identified as the “breadwinner” and the other as the “caregiver”….it’s clear why a procreative couple requires such identifications, but is there some reason why do two equally able-bodied adults might need such identifications?
May 27th, 2011 | 6:39 am
split inefficiently
Excuse me, I meant to say either “split efficiently” or “split unequally” – and somehow I managed to split the difference :(
That should probably read, “reproductive capacity shall be sexual in nature, and split efficiently rather than fairly“.
This – not bigotry – is the real cause of the androgyny idealists’ grief.
May 27th, 2011 | 8:05 am
“Aw, shucks, Steve. You’re just bummed because you’re on the outs of a conversation others are having. Talk with some teens–or better yet, text with them. You’ll feel very Q about being out of the loop there.”
I see…I’m the out-of-touch weirdo here. By the way, I am a high school teacher in my early 30s who has and continues to have conversations with teens every day. Let me tell you when I felt very “queer” in the original sense of the word. I was at an event where there was no male or female restrooms. There actually were gendered restrooms, but the signs were deliberately covered so as to “be sensitive to trans” people, who are uncomfortable with gendered restrooms, I suppose. So I pick a restroom, which turns out to be the women’s room. No big deal, that is, until I find myself using the restroom right next to a couple of elderly women. When we were washing our hands next to each other, the discomfort and tension was palpable, among the women included. But of course, there’s nothing unnatural about women wanting privacy from men in a restroom. So I guess for the sake of a tiny minority of people who are sadly confused and uncomfortable within their own skin, all of society has to disregard the most natural and expected of public decency and privacy. Queer, indeed.
I guess I got “genderf*cked” (see my aforementioned link).
May 27th, 2011 | 8:52 am
@Tony Esolen
“Suppose I could show you a very simple and natural thing that you could do, that would lead your son to assume a natural masculine identity; he would be comfortable in his skin, attracted to women and attractive to them in turn; and he would make friends easily with members of his own sex. Would you do this thing? ”
I’m a heterosexual father, so I’ll answer your question. My answer is a very easy “yes”. But note the 2 key words in your post are “simple” and “natural”. If it turned out one of my sons wasn’t heterosexual, I don’t consider it “simple” or “natural” to try to make him heterosexual by telling him that he is perverse and unnatural. It’s not simple or natural to threaten him with eternal torture in hell because God hates homosexuals.
May 27th, 2011 | 9:03 am
“The biggest thing a father could do to help his son be masculine is to teach that son the importance of recognizing and honoring obligations …”
I can get totally on board with this. However, the quality of recognizing obligations is not foreign to non-heterosexual men. In fact, one could say that the push for same-sex unions and committed gay relationships is absolutely about this.
So in one corner you have a well-regarded celebrity or athlete or GOP politician who fathers children outside of marriage, and in the other a gay man who adopts a child with a partner. Clearly somebody got your father’s message, I’d say.
“I see…I’m the out-of-touch weirdo here.”
No, Steve, you’re not. The letters are just lingo, and the lingo is pretty fluid going from one group to the other. If I wanted to discount a group, I’d look deeper than letter combinations.
I do get your problem with non-specific bathrooms–which we do have in many places– but not the shared variety so much. Personally, if I identified a woman’s bathroom, I’d probably change to another. I have no problem defending my choice in that regard, and it’s not likely I would be confronted about it.
May 27th, 2011 | 9:28 am
I know a young adult who has embraced the transgender movement and partially “transitioned” via surgical mutilation and hormones, into a pretension of the opposite sex. I observed this youth’s parents, who are very liberal, as they sacrificed their child on the altar of cutting-edge political correctness by indoctrinating their child into the boundary-less, fantasy world of the “gender” movement. They wouldn’t listen to warnings that this was a dangerous thing to do.
The child was dressed as the opposite sex from the age of a toddler and persuaded to play almost exclusively with toys associated with the opposite sex. Playmates of the same sex were rejected by the parents. “Gender” was seen as only a social construct by the parents, with biology not a consideration.
The poor kid never had a chance. When children are indoctrinated into their parents’ warped agenda for them, as Storm’s parents are doing for the attention they receive, you get thoroughly confused children. The parents then claim their child was “born this way”.
I hope this destructive fad of gender-bending dies a very quick death as it only brings tragedy. In reality, there is only a male or female sex, not an assortment (aside from very rare physical sexual defects which is not part of the gender-bending movement even though the movement tries to pretend it is).
This is all based on lies with parents receiving attention (admiration, media coverage, book royalties, etc.), unethical health professionals receiving money for mutilating confused people, and judges/legislators receiving votes from their liberal bases to ensure they keep their well paid jobs.
May 27th, 2011 | 10:12 am
Todd, the point of my non-gendered bathroom anecdote is to show that I couldn’t simply excuse myself and change to another. Had I left the bathroom I was in and gone into the other one, there was an equal chance that women would be using the facilities there also. The organizers of the event deliberately covered the signs for all restrooms, which effectively erased the genders of everyone at the event who needed to use the bathrooms. By the way, I suspect that if I had sought out a male restroom because I do not recognize the “fluidity” of gender, then I better be prepared to be labeled a bigot.
With regards to the fluid lingo, it is “fluid” because it is trying to express a reality that some people want to insist is “fluid” but is not, in fact, fluid at all. Reality is not whatever we want to make it (or subsequently call it). I am a human, not a horse. I am a caucasian male, not a black female. I am 33 years old, not 12 years old. etc…At what point does society draw the line? Really, I swear, depsite what you see, I really am a black female “on the inside”.
May 27th, 2011 | 10:14 am
I can get totally on board with this. However, the quality of recognizing obligations is not foreign to non-heterosexual men. In fact, one could say that the push for same-sex unions and committed gay relationships is absolutely about this.
Sure, the “gay community” is absolutely about honoring obligations.
Except the ones they don’t happen to like. Which is most of them.
May 27th, 2011 | 10:19 am
So in one corner you have a well-regarded celebrity or athlete or GOP politician who fathers children outside of marriage, and in the other a gay man who adopts a child with a partner.
Every child has the right to both a mother and a father – and that should be his or her own mother and father unless a genuine and unintended circumstance makes it best for the child to sever that relationship.
That’s in conflict with “gay marriage”.
Other people doing bad or selfish things does not change the basic fact that gays are asking for a right that is neither fair nor legitimate. There is no right to commit fraud. There is no right to found a family in ways that rely on children being exploited in the name of “loving” them.
Parents who love their children should do what is best for children. Pressuring a child to pretend that he doesn’t really mind not having a mother or a father is abusive, not “loving”.
May 27th, 2011 | 10:22 am
Todd writes:
I do get your problem with non-specific bathrooms–which we do have in many places– but not the shared variety so much. Personally, if I identified a woman’s bathroom, I’d probably change to another. I have no problem defending my choice in that regard, and it’s not likely I would be confronted about it.
There are three styles of arguments commonly used by those who advocate the redefinition of marriage. Todd has used all three here. One style is to try and intimidate your opponents by drawing parallels to racism and bigotry in hopes of intimidating them with public shaming. A second tactic is to steer clear of the issues discussed by framing the discussion is purely sentimental terms. You are against the redefinition of marriage? That means you want gay men to die alone in the hospital while their life partner screams in tears as police handcuff him outside the hospital to prevent him from sitting by his partner’s bedside.
The third tactic employed by Todd is seen in his response to Steve, who related a real story about how the politics of trans-_____ freakishly manifests itself in the real world. Let me correct that–I may say it’s freakish but it’s merely the obvious and unavoidable outcome of where all this points.
Facing any negative real world outcomes, Todd throws up his hands and says ‘oh no, that’s not what I’m about!’ How many times have any of us been in an argument with someone on marriage, we make a point that resonates, and then the other fellow opens his hands and says “All I’m saying is…” Sorry. That’s never all he’s saying. We are talking about redefining the foundation of civilization itself. You can’t take a sledgehammer to the foundation and then helplessly claim innocence when the building starts to crumble because, well, you never actually wanted the whole building to fall down.
The barbarism Steve described is the barbarism of Alfred Kinsey. It’s the barbarism of the Therapeutic State, it’s the barbarism of the kulturkampf. It’s the barbarism of the movement to redefine marriage, and yes Todd, you own it. You own it all.
May 27th, 2011 | 10:35 am
[...] comments The Disturbing (and Disturbed) “T” in LGBT – Matthew Franck offers some . . . well . . . disturbing reports on New York’s law [...]
May 27th, 2011 | 10:39 am
“It’s a conversation stopper, isn’t it, to shout the word “bigot” at someone …”
Not really, but it can easily degenerate into circular reasoning. “You’re a bigot”, “Why am I a bigot?”, “Because you’re a bigot.”……sort of like just asserting people you don’t understand or don’t like are all mentally ill.
And yet, Todd, it is you who lacks understanding, that is what is so appallingly funny! The certitude of ignorance! You haven’t answered a single point made by Esolen.
No evil was ever done because someone was certain of his ignorance.
Blake
Benefits of marriage include what is known as “the presumption of paternity” – that is, the recognition that if one partner has a baby, the other partner is legally presumed the spouse.
A relatively minor benefit of marriage. So what? I’m not interesting in reopening the thesis that “We need marriage only for French Aristocrats who need to be able to pass down their titles of Nobility” that was exhausted on the previous thread but if you insist….
When you are through explaining why gays feel they’re entitled to that benefit (that is, the “right” to make fraudulent claims about paternity and to misrepresent family tree data),
I don’t need gay marriage to misrepresent my family tree as I’m a direct descendant of the Kaiser.
More seriously, get over yourself here. The paternity issue is a relatively minor feature of law that’s been mostly made moot by DNA testing. It’s not some vital right of marriage but was pragmatic common law in a pre-DNA world where a husband might try to challenge his parental obligations by asserting his wife’s child was really fathered by another man. If you think about it for a moment it’s not technically a ‘benefit of marriage’. You are legally already obligated to any child you father. The ‘benefit’ here is actually to the child. To you it’s actually a risk of marriage since you may end up on the hook for a child that some other man fathered!
you can explain how come the benefits associated with the “non procreative” institution of marriage are delivered in a form that requires identification of which partner is the “head of household” and which is the “dependent”…
Married couples are not required to identify who is the ‘head of household’ and who is the ‘dependent’.
May 27th, 2011 | 11:22 am
Esolen,
“It’s a conversation stopper, isn’t it, to shout the word “bigot” at someone, as if the person in question had not considered the issues thoroughly.”
Yes, it is, and I avoid it, but I have to say that, after having many conversations with the regular posters here, yes, most of the people posting here are bigots. Given your supposedly uproarious satire “Rose by Any Other Name,” I’m inclined to say that you’re probably a bigot, too, but I don’t have enough evidence yet to say. You can consider an issue carefully and still be a bigot, which is what I’ve concluded about many of the posters here. We’ll see how you fare.
—
Blake,
No one makes me laugh harder than you. Here are a couple of choice ones: “The biggest thing a father could do to help his son be masculine is to teach that son the importance of recognizing and honoring obligations.”
How obligations are tied any more strongly to being a man than to being a woman beats me, but I’m sure that you’ve got a complex and idiosyncratic answer.
But here’s the one that produced a loud guffaw: “we are a species that is divided into strong and vulnerable.”
Really? This is how you describe the difference between men and women? So silly.
Since masculinity and femininity are so very biological, children don’t need help to be masculine or feminine. They already are. I just teach them to be good Christians. And that includes recognizing that there are all kinds of ways of being masculine and feminine. To divide humanity’s great variety into two broad categories is useful only for the crudest type of thinking.
May 27th, 2011 | 11:24 am
The author of this article obviously has very little knowledge of the psychological diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder (GID) or Gender Dysphoria but appears to be articulating his own transphobic bias. To quote Paul McHugh as an authority on the subject reveals the bias of the author. Paul McHugh does not represent mainstream psychological thinking by any stretch of the imagination.The American Psychiatric Assoc, AMA, American Psychological Assoc. amd most credible medical/ psychological global organizations all accept that gender reassignment surgery and hormonal therapy is appropriate for people with severe gender conflict who meet the appropriate criteria. Post- surgical outcome studies strongly suggest that this procedure is beneficial and well over 90% of patients who follow the Harry Benjamin Standards of Care are satisfied or very satsfied with their decision. While Anatomical Gender is typically a binary concept, Gender Identity is a spectrum from very fem to very macho and 99% of the population falls near the polar ends of the sectrum that coincides with their anatomical sex. A small % of the population does not fit in this pattern and may fall anywhere in between the polar extremes. Only those with severe gender dysphoria require surgery. Since health insurance rarely covers this surgery, most Trans people can not afford to get it. Many transition without surgery because of finances but can not change the gender marker on legal documents due to archaic laws, which is embarrasing and humiliating for the Trans person because they are “outed” every time they need to show I.D. It can also be a safety issue when you are “outed” to some violent redneck. It can open the door for all sorts of discrimination including loss of employment in the 39 states that do not protect gender identity from discrimination. GID is a biological condition most likely occuring within the first trimester in utero. It requires psychological and often medical treatment. This is not a lifestyle choice and hence has no moral implications. Most people with GID function fine if they are left alone to live their lives without hate and discrimination.
May 27th, 2011 | 11:35 am
Blake wrote:
When you are through explaining why gays feel they’re entitled to that benefit (that is, the “right” to make fraudulent claims about paternity and to misrepresent family tree data), you can explain how come the benefits associated with the “non procreative” institution of marriage are delivered in a form that requires identification of which partner is the “head of household” and which is the “dependent”….with further benefits being dependent on one partner being identified as the “breadwinner” and the other as the “caregiver”….it’s clear why a procreative couple requires such identifications, but is there some reason why do two equally able-bodied adults might need such identifications?
This sounds like the kind of excuse-making bureaucratese that might have come out of the Soviet Union or the pre-civil rights American South. How many gays do you know that go around claiming actual paternity or maternity when they don’t it have it? How many lie about their kid’s family tree? Etc. Your post is absurd, and you’re dodging the question posed: if marriage rights are granted for the sake of the children, why are they granted to couples who can’t have kids?
May 27th, 2011 | 12:11 pm
For those on the conservative side opposing the redefinition of marriage, I have some thoughts about how to debate this issue and I’d be curious to hear what you think.
1) We have to stop talking about this issue as “gay marriage” and start referring to the “redefinition of marriage.” Gay marriage is not only an oxymoron, but it is an idea that didn’t even exist among homosexuals until a handful of years ago. Conservatives make a concession every time they use the term “gay marriage,” viz. that homosexuals can somehow be included in what we know as marriage. They can’t. Not unless we redefine the word–that’s what this debate is about.
2) In talking with friends and colleagues, we must cease starting sentences with “I believe…” This is yet another concession. When the transhumanists eventually demand civil rights for robots are we going to start our sentences with “I believe humans are biological.” Well who cares if you believe that? They ARE biological. Marriage actually means something and it never meant same sex until a handful of years ago. Don’t make concessions right out of the gate by stating your opinion as if it were less than the history of all mankind.
3) I have read, written, and studied the marriage debate rather closely. It’s easy to get lost in the morass of sentiment, charges of bigotry, etc. Here is what I think is a useful landmark to keep in your sights and return to whenever you find yourself deep in the swamp. I’ve said it here a few times: marriage only came into existence because sexual procreation is the inescapable biological necessity for the existence of mothers, fathers, children, families, and civilization. The government did not create marriage and the natural family, but rather these pre-governmental institutions are the building blocks of the civilization that our government was created to protect.
I don’t care if Todd or others who want to redefine marriage disagree with what I have written here. But I would like to hear some comments and disagreement from others who do not want to redefine marriage.
May 27th, 2011 | 1:42 pm
Douglas,
Your advice to conservatives on the SSM issue can be summed up as:
Assume your own conclusion first. Then ignore all arguments to the contrary and just bash people over the head with it until they get sick of discussing it with you.
I think someone has already beat you too that advice.
May 27th, 2011 | 1:45 pm
Douglas, fine, marriage only came into existence because sexual procreation is the inescapable biological necessity for the existence of mothers, fathers, children, families, and civilization. No argument here. But why give it to some couples who can’t procreate, but deny it to others?
May 27th, 2011 | 1:52 pm
Nikki H
One thing I do notice is that critics of transgenderedness almost always make a huge point of arguing that gender is unchangeable….yet they seem to miss that the fact that the people they think they are arguing with actually agree with them.
The argument that people who have sex changes make is that they feel their gender is simply not what their body appears to be, that their body is wrong just as a man who grows women’s breasts due to some hormonal imbalance knows that something is simply wrong…even though there’s nothing wrong with female breasts inthemselves.
For example, the doctor cited spends nearly half his article disputing the discredited idea that gender is ‘all a social construct’. Namely that a boy will act like a boy because he grows up around other boys who act like boys and everyone else gives him both explicit and subtle cues to act like a boy. This idea was discredited by the fact that babies assigned to the ‘wrong sex’ due to birth defects did not grow up adopting their medically assigned gender despite being amply socialized into that gender.
But the idea that gender is a ‘social construct’ is not an argument for sex changes, it’s an argument against it. If gender is indeed a ‘social construct’ then the male who thinks he should be female has no biological problem but a social one. Surgery is as unlikely a cure in that case than thinking that a fear of public speaking could be cured by some operation! But if gender is hard wired into our biology then we know that biology is sometimes broken and wrong. There are men who sometimes get a female sex characteristic (like breasts) or women who get a male characteristic (like facial beards). Why then would sex change operations be ruled out in any and all cases?
May 27th, 2011 | 1:55 pm
And, corollary to this question, have you or have you not noticed that the burgeoning of our prisons has gone along with the destruction of the family?
Tony Esolen,
This is an extraordinarily poor argument.
Presumably your implication is that as the “destruction of the family” has progressed, the crime rate has increased, and therefore the prison population has increased. However, the crime rate for both violent crimes and property crimes has been decreasing since around 1990, and as of 2009 was very roughly at the same level as around 1970. The reasons for the tremendous growth in the prison population has nothing to do with an increase in crime. It has a great deal to do with things like the federal “war on drugs” and incarceration policies like mandatory sentencing.
If by the “destruction of marriage” is meant high divorce rates, the increase in out-of-wedlock births, and the increasing trend for women with two or more children to have had them by two or more men, those trends were firmly established before 2004, when Massachusetts became the first state to permit same-sex marriage. Exactly how allowing same-sex couples to marry could accelerate the “destruction of marriage” in heterosexual couples is a mystery to me.
Imagine that all the gay people who have legally married or want to legally marry abandoned the cause of same-sex marriage and moved to Spain, the Netherlands, or other countries where gays may already legally marry. Or imagine all gay people including those who don’t care about same-sex marriage decided to abandon the United States. Can anybody seriously argue that the divorce rate, the out-of-wedlock birth rate, and the rate of women bearing children by multiple fathers would somehow begin to decline? I think heterosexuals must face the fact that the problems besetting heterosexual marriage have not been caused by gay people, will not be solved by opposing same-sex marriage, and will not be exacerbated should same-sex marriage be legalized.
The divorce rate in the United States is the highest in the world, and the out-of-wedlock birth rate 40% over all and 70% among Africans. And the response of religious conservatives is, “We must stop same-sex marriage!” I don’t get it.
May 27th, 2011 | 1:55 pm
“Yes, it is, and I avoid it, but I have to say that, after having many conversations with the regular posters here, yes, most of the people posting here are bigots. ”
Michael, what do you mean by the word bigot? This? ‘Any person who disagrees with me.’
“…most of the people posting here are bigots.” What a line.
PeterG
May 27th, 2011 | 2:42 pm
Douglas,
I really don’t see how permitting legal same-sex marriage can “redefine” marriage for those who believe that marriage can only be between a man and a woman any more than legally permitting divorce and remarriage “redefined” marriage for those (e.g., Catholics) who believe that marriage is indissoluble. Catholics have no problem maintaining that the standards set for civil heterosexual marriage do not affect the definition of Catholic (sacramental) marriage.
If marriage is what you say it is, how can it be “redefined”?
May 27th, 2011 | 3:20 pm
Michael offers the following:
May 27th, 2011 | 11:22 am
Esolen,
….I have to say that, after having many conversations with the regular posters here, yes, most of the people posting here are bigots. Given your supposedly uproarious satire “Rose by Any Other Name,” I’m inclined to say that you’re probably a bigot, too, but I don’t have enough evidence yet to say. You can consider an issue carefully and still be a bigot, which is what I’ve concluded about many of the posters here. We’ll see how you fare.
—
Michael,
You’re funny…but not in a “Ha! Ha!” way. Who are you to call anyone names? “Judge not” and all that, rememeber? Your sactimonousness is worthy of it’s own parable. Have you considered that you may be wrong? You offer no arguments, no reasons, you just emote. In your all too common hubris you casually call billions and billions of people, Christians, Muslims, Jews, and atheists alike childish names in the most clueless way. Ad Hominem is the oldest logical fallacy there is. It’s a child’s trick.
I avoid bigots myself. Do you also frequent Aryan Nation sites? It’s odd.
Anyway, in the spirit of your sort of “reasoning” I offer this rejoinder: You are a clueless idiot. Perhaps you can be educated on this site, if you persist in reading it, but I am not sure. We’ll see how you fare.
May 27th, 2011 | 7:44 pm
Douglas: I’ll chime in.
Marriage predates all governments and all civilizations. It has ALWAYS, in all cultures and times and nations, been understood as the union of a man and a woman. Even in countries where men have been allowed to have more than one wife, they are and have been understood to have more than one marriage — a different marriage to each wife, not one marriage with numerous wives. Places allowing multiple marriages have always allowed as exceptions, for certain ranks of men or certain incomes. Even in cultures that allow divorce, divorce is and has been considered the exception — something for when the marriage doesn’t work, not something done normally.
In places where other types of relationships were recognized, they were not considered marriages.
People arguing that marriage should be redefined really need to make their case, not against whatever they happen to think “marriage is today,” but against all of human history.
It makes no sense to say, for instance, that anyone who loves should be allowed to marry because, in fact, love is not and never has been a requirement for marriage. It is highly desired these days, in some cultures, but plenty of couples in the world even today get married without loving each other, and in many cases without even knowing each other. So spare me that one.
May 27th, 2011 | 8:49 pm
If someone were, through plastic surgery, change his racial appearance–let’s say, from Swedish to sub-Saharan African–should that person now qualify as part of a protected class, and receive all the benefits of preferential treatment programs?
If I were to take a Kai-Ken puppy and have him surgically altered so that he looks like a feline. Is he now a feline? If I were to then surgically alter his genitalia to make it appear female, with faux vagina, and then make sure he received hormone treatments to maintain his “femininity,” have I turned a male dog into a female cat? If you think so, you are truly mad.
What I don’t understand is the bigot charge. If categories like male, female, marriage, children, parents, can be linguistically and surgically altered by one’s mere will, in what sense is being a bigot wrong? Perhaps I choose to say it isn’t wrong, to define it in a way that I enjoy and like. If willfulness, and not the nature of things, is the way by which we “measure” the world, why does your willfulness trump mine? If I can cut off my penis and expect no judgment on the part of others, why can’t I cut off my terms and expect no judgment as well?
If nothing is static–if there are literally no men, no women, no children, no families, except if we say so–then the “bigot” say so is of a piece. It is your hang-up, since according to your view of reality, there is nothing outside your will. And I, as fellow willer, choose to will the falsity of your judgment of me.
Welcome to hell.
May 27th, 2011 | 9:45 pm
A relatively minor benefit of marriage.
It’s the difference between a marriage vs. a “civil union”.
If you think that’s minor, then what is the problem?
A lot of people are willing to grant gays the right to have their union recognized. It’s the explicitly procreative benefits of marriage that are the big problem for most people – gays just aren’t entitled to them.
May 27th, 2011 | 9:50 pm
I want to recommend several important references on the SRS/GID issue. A 2011 long term follow-up of transsexual persons undergoing sex reassignment surgery found that
persons with transsexualism, after sex reassignment, have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behaviour, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population. Dhejne C, et al. PLoS One. 2011 Feb 22;6(2):e16885.
In regard to the treatment of GID the leading authorities, Zucker and Bradely, state in their book, “In these cases, the gender identity disorder resolves fully, and nothing in the children’s behavior or fantasy suggest that gender identity issues remain problematic…. All things considered, however, we take the position that in such cases clinicians should be optimistic, not nihilistic, about the possibility of helping the children to become more secure in their gender identity.” Zucker, K. & Bradley, S. (1995) Gender Identity Disorder and Psychosexual Problems in Children and Adolescents (New York: Guilford Publications, p.282.
Finally, our article, The Psychopathology of Sexual Reassignment Surgery, Fitzgibbons, R., et al., Spring 2009, National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, assesses the medical, psychological and ethical appropriateness of sexual reassignment surgery, http://www.ncbcenter.metapress.com.
May 27th, 2011 | 9:53 pm
If by the “destruction of marriage” is meant high divorce rates, the increase in out-of-wedlock births, and the increasing trend for women with two or more children to have had them by two or more men, those trends were firmly established before 2004, when Massachusetts became the first state to permit same-sex marriage.
The destruction of marriage = redefining it away from the well-being of the family, and toward the new definition that it is nothing more than the celebration of warm fuzzy feelings between two people.
The old definition protected women from exploitation; the new definition encourages the exploitation of women (culminating in the fantasy of “gay marriage” – where a woman is reduced to ‘gestational carrier’, a thing, whose function is to provide goods which will be given to someone else).
The old definition protected men from being severed from their family units; the new definition causes men to be severed from their family units – which is bad not only for the men who form no attachments to (or are forcibly detached from) their families and the children of those families, but also for the boys who are raised in the dysfunctional, broken families. (Culminating in the gay marriage fantasy, where a man can be reduced to merely a parts donor, and neither boy nor girl “needs” a father – because a jealous, emotionally needy mother or stepmother needs the child to “not need” his father.)
The old definition protected the integrity of the family. The new definition directly attacks the integrity of the family (culminating in the perversion of defining the right to mutilate and falsify family trees as a “civil right”).
The old definition protected the stability of the family – which was recognized as the core social unit and the backbone of society. The new definition redistributes that function away from families (which are inherently unstable, having been detached both from integrity and from obligation) and toward government – which increasingly takes over the roles once served by families (culminating in “gay marriage” – a state whereby the very definition of who is and is not a family is no longer related to biological kinship at all, but because a function of the state, which has the power to decree that any given relationship is or is not familial – or to take that decree away).
Of course, the old definition of family also protected children from exploitation and abandonment. The new definition defines the exploitation and abandonment (and selling, and trading) of children as a “civil right” – for the parents; the children are now merely “things”.
May 27th, 2011 | 9:59 pm
having many conversations with the regular posters here, yes, most of the people posting here are bigots. Given your supposedly uproarious satire “Rose by Any Other Name,” I’m inclined to say that you’re probably a bigot, too,
It’s comments like this that have neutered the word “bigot”.
It used to refer to the sort of person who committed serious human rights violations.
Now it just means anyone who doesn’t agree with the increasingly outrageous demands of left wingers trying to push “identity politics” as far as they can get away with.
May 27th, 2011 | 10:47 pm
Blake,
you are never short of words, so I will once again ask you (and all the conservatives here) this simple question you have so far dodged: If marriage is a status granted for the sake of procreation, why should marriage rights be granted to straight couples who can’t have kids?
Answer the question if you dare, or dodge it again and demonstrate your lack of integrity. One does get sick of this sort of cowardice, and wish for self-professed Christians to hold themselves to higher standards then the people they’re always putting down.
May 27th, 2011 | 11:05 pm
Blake wrote:
The destruction of marriage = redefining it away from the well-being of the family, and toward the new definition that it is nothing more than the celebration of warm fuzzy feelings between two people.
Gay people are capable of nothing more than ” warm fuzzy feelings” for each other? That’s an expression of bigotry, pure and simple – an unwillingness to recognize another person’s full humanity.
Gail F,
yes, many people have and many people today still do marry without love. Did you? What’s your point then? Marriage benefits society by giving support to people who commit to supporting each other, and very often wish to nurture and support children. We need to study and learn from history, not slavishly follow it.
May 27th, 2011 | 11:35 pm
“We have to stop talking about this issue as “gay marriage” and start referring to the “redefinition of marriage.””
Right.
Well, wrong, really. I have no problem with expanding benefits in society to people who need them and express some values of benefit to society.
I see no moral problem with same-sex unions. I also have no problem with elderly parents being reabsorbed into a home by adult children and the two or three of them gaining some tax benefit comparable to spouses filing jointly or dependents. Permanent, committed, loving relationships, even among best friends, are of benefit to society. And benefit can and should be returned in kind. People can be in a family by birth (via children) or by choice (spouses). Personally, I think homosexuals and the culture at large would be more sound if the practice of promiscuity was less common.
I found some of today’s arguments fascinating. I particularly like how that section of comments started being about me. It’s also a common tactic when a conservative is confounded to start talking about his or her opponent in debate.
“Had I left the bathroom I was in and gone into the other one, there was an equal chance that women would be using the facilities there also.”
I’d wonder if the joke among hets was that they looked under the taped signs and just went to the bathroom assigned to the appropriate sex.
I don’t think same-sex unions have anything whatsoever to do with “traditional” marriage. Speaking as a heterosexual man happily married for over fifteen years, I know I have my own issues that are or have been obstacles to the best relationship I can offer my wife. Not one of them has anything to do with someone else’s homosexuality. The same is pretty much true for any married couple I know.
Getting back to the trans issue, it is a falsehood that a human being is either an XX female or an XY male. Human biology is a lot more complicated than that. It’s just the way God made us. Period.
May 28th, 2011 | 12:01 am
David,
Another excellent analysis of Esolen’s weak logic. Well done.
—
PeterG,
Please read a little more carefully and don’t allow your assumptions about people dictate what you think you are reading or hearing.
I’ll say to you what I said to Esolen: I haven’t conversed with you long enough to find out whether you are a bigot or not. I have conversed with a couple of people on this site with whom I strongly disagree, but I don’t consider them bigoted. Keep talking, and I’ll let you know what I think of you.
—
Jan,
You ask, who am I to make such judgments, and I have to say that I’m just like everyone, offering his opinion. You can take it or leave it, but I have to say that I’ve reached my conclusions only after spending the last eight months talking to dozens of people on this site.
If memory serves, I’ve only had one, brief series of exchanges with you, and I was not impressed. You’re probably a bigot as well, though our conversation wasn’t long enough or detailed enough to tell.
As for Christ’s injunction not to judge, you’re taking the quotation out of context, of course, but I agree with you that we should treat our Christian brothers gently and well. And that is in fact the way I used to treat people on this site, but not anymore. Not after the ugly turn this site took two weeks ago.
Surely, it has struck you that the most Christian and non-judgmental approach taken by commenters on this thread–the commenters who have been most patient in explaining their position and respecting the views of others–have been two of the more liberal commenters, namely Ken and David Nickol. I have disagreed with David concerning his position on abortion, and he has politely disagreed. I see things pretty much the way Ken does, so we haven’t argued.
I’ve only met one conservative Christian on this site who is as kind and gentle as either Ken or David. I’ve met two others whose opinion I respect but who get testy and are prone to unfair accusations. In short, there’s little real Christianity here. It’s mostly angry men in their late middle age.
Contrary to your assumptions, I’ve said nothing hasty. I’ve been talking and listening to you all for some time, and it has disheartened me. My sister told me I could find intelligent commentary here, and she has been far, far wrong. I’ve found a lot of self-righteousness and much, much anger.
And of course, I’ve considered that I could be wrong. That’s why I’ve had so many conversations and tried so many different angles and tried to engage in so many real exchanges, just as David and Ken are doing. But look at how you all treat them. I’ve had enough, but I admire their commitment to continuing to try to find someone who will answer them with as much Christian respect as they give.
—
Blake,
As you know, you lost my respect a long, long time ago. I’ve never encountered someone so trapped inside his own idiosyncratic imaginings. Your logic has an odd consistency to it, but it lies awfully close to raving. You’re convinced that you are only unveiling the lies of gay activists, but your routine slanders and your inability to hear outside of them suggests that bigotry has found a comfortable home.
I come from an old Texas family. We know what bigotry smells like, how its logic works, and what people have to do to convince themselves that they’re just looking out for the common good.
May 28th, 2011 | 2:19 am
Ken writes:
May 27th, 2011 | 10:47 pm
Blake,
you are never short of words, so I will once again ask you (and all the conservatives here) this simple question you have so far dodged: If marriage is a status granted for the sake of procreation, why should marriage rights be granted to straight couples who can’t have kids?
First, there’s no such thing as “marriage rights”. You’ve been duped by SSM propaganda.
But anyway, one reason marriage is recognized for infertile couples is because the State has every reason to expect heterosexuals to reproduce. On what basis should the State assume otherwise? Unless we want to live in some Stalinist, Orwellian, police state, where every one is subjected to fertility tests, as if that were even possible, well… It’s a pretty reasonable assumption that two heterosexuals will at some point have a child.
There is no similar expectation for a homosexual couple. For obvious reasons.
A more profound reason than the obvious practical considerations is that a union of complementary opposites is an obviously different kind of social arrangement than a union of two men or two women. The State distinguishes between all sorts of different social arrangements. Why should this case be any different?
May 28th, 2011 | 2:45 am
Michael,
You’re a stereotype. I can’t take you seriously. You offer no reasons, no logic, no facts, no arguments. Your a sentimental emotivist. What’s hilarious is that if you’re not busy stereotyping others( you keep referring to me as if I were a man!) you’re busy calling people names like some knuckle dragging clansman!! Look at yourself for God’s sake. Does the word hypocrite mean anything to you?
And really, if you hate this site so much, why do you keep reading it?
Like I said earlier, you are a clueless idiot.
May 28th, 2011 | 7:55 am
Jan,
thank you for answering the question. I don’t think either of your answers is adequate, however.
Yes the state expects that most married couples will reproduce. But fertility tests do exist. You could argue against mandating them on the grounds that they’re not entirely accurate. But to your actual point, couples are already tested for social diseases before they marry. If the state’s interest in marriage is reproduction, then why would it be so Orwellian for it to test to see if reproduction is possible? Anyhow, the real reason you’re answer fails here is that elderly straight couples with no hope of conceiving have the right to marry – but gays do not.
Yes, unions of biologically complementary opposites are different in kind in biologically than unions between gays. Yes, the State does make some legal legal distinctions among different social arrangements, based on age, family, and mental competence. But that hardly demonstrates why it should make one here. Why do you believe it should?
Oh, and to claim that I’ve been duped into believing propaganda without even knowing why I believe what I do, or how much thought I’ve given it, is rude and presumptuous.
May 28th, 2011 | 8:03 am
Blake,
you are never short of words, so I will once again ask you (and all the conservatives here) this simple question you have so far dodged: If marriage is a status granted for the sake of procreation, why should marriage rights be granted to straight couples who can’t have kids?
There is a selection of appropriate court cases here:
There’s no Constitutional right involved. Gay Marriage will only become a right when judges “re-interpret” the law to “make” there be such a right. Baker v. Nelson, 191 N.W.2d 185, 185‐86 (Minn. 1972) was a decision at the Supreme Court level, and the only reason it’s not being treated as binding is because openly partisan judges just don’t want it to be.
May 28th, 2011 | 8:06 am
Whoops that should have read:
There is a selection of appropriate court cases
here:\
(Of course, only bigots would choose those particular courts to quote, so maybe these court judgements “just don’t count”, eh?)
May 28th, 2011 | 8:08 am
The State distinguishes between all sorts of different social arrangements. Why should this case be any different?
The problem in this case is that what gays want is not to have their different social arrangement distinguished.
What they want is to have the State force people to pretend their different social arrangement is the same as an existing social arrangement.
The problem is, it isn’t.
The deeper problem is, the act of forcing people to pretend that there is no difference between a married couple vs. any two people who “love each other” (according to whatever definition of “love” people choose to embrace at any given moment in time) is that this is a precedent with ramifications.
Just because you don’t want to believe there are consequences to something….does not mean there really aren’t.
May 28th, 2011 | 8:33 am
But the state has an interest in supporting any stable relationship
No, it doesn’t.
The state has an interest in upholding family obligations as a special type of contract law because we recognize kinship relationships as having a special importance that has nothing to do with whether or not the relations in question happen to feel “loving” toward each other.
]
What government interest is there in any relationship that is not related to kinship and the special relationships, functions, and obligations that are viewed as unique and special to kinship?
Both “marriage” and “family” as we understand these terms are institutions that serve important social, emotional, financial, and other support functions. Changing the ground rules so that one special group is exempt from obligations they don’t like (specifically, the obligations toward their child’s well being, their child’s other parent, their child’s other parent’s family, and the entire – paternal and maternal – family’s stability and integrity) is going to affect these institutions in ways very similar to how “protectionism” affects economies and trade relationships.
To cite just one example: rights and responsibilities in any stable system (culture or family or whatever) are balanced. If they’re not, you’re going to have drama and dysfunction until the issue is resolved. There is no way to grant rights and/or take away responsibilities from one group without creating a disequilibrium that creates tension – and will ultimately create unintended consequences.
May 28th, 2011 | 8:42 am
Gay people are capable of nothing more than ” warm fuzzy feelings” for each other? That’s an expression of bigotry, pure and simple – an unwillingness to recognize another person’s full humanity.
No, there are lots of gay people who are capable of committed love.
But people who are capable of committed love are going to deal with the conflict between their own desires vs. what is right and fair in a more honest fashion than simply saying “oh, my child is not going to mind having two moms/dads!”.
People who say such things about their own children are people who think they know love, but really just know warm fuzzy feelings.
May 28th, 2011 | 8:57 am
Blake, why should elderly, obviously infertile, straights be allowed to marry, but not gays? And in the Bowen v. Gilliard case, everything in that opinion you cite is obvious, except for the word “biological.” In other words, take it out and the opinion is just as strong – kids need loving, stable homes.
A recent study out of the University of Virginia found that kids adopted by gays do just as well as those adopted by straights. I’m skeptical of that claim, and it’s probably worth noting that the study’s author is a lesbian. But there is no question that two loving parents rather than one or the orphanage is the ideal.
You wrote:
There’s no Constitutional right involved. Gay Marriage will only become a right when judges “re-interpret” the law to “make” there be such a right.
That’s what you’re trying to prove, but to do so you’d need pretty strong evidence of what’s in the judges hearts. Someone might argue with just as much/little reason that it is conservative judges who refuse to recognize a legal and human right implicitly recognized in the Constitution.
And I repeat: I don’t call you a bigot because you oppose homosexual marriage and behavior. I think those views can be defended, even though I don’t hold them myself. I have great respect for those views when they’re argued respectably. No, I call you a bigot because you have repeatedly demonstrated that you have no empathy for gays, that you see them as not fully human, that you, like all bigots and ideologues, are unable to see good motives in them, only bad. It would be nice if you’d prove me wrong, but you didn’t even try to refute the particular assertion in my last post.
Moving on to a fresh example, you write that
What [gays] want is to have the State force people to pretend their different social arrangement is the same as an existing social arrangement.
First of all, every law has force, so if you don’t like forcing people to do or not so certain things, you shouldn’t be arguing laws, because you’re the pot calling the kettle black. Secondly, what evidence is there that gays want anyone to “pretend” anything? They want people to believe, or failing that, for the law to, yes, force them to allow what they don’t believe is right.
This is how a democracy functions. This is how people everywhere, Christian conservatives as well, behave. To not recognize that, to speak as if your opponent is guilty of something you and yours never do, is childish, uncharitable, and bigoted.
May 28th, 2011 | 9:41 am
Blake wrote:
What government interest is there in any relationship that is not related to kinship and the special relationships, functions, and obligations that are viewed as unique and special to kinship?
Kinship in itself is not what’s valuable. What’s valuable is the bond of love kinship often fosters. In granting marriage rights to straights the state isn’t recognizing a family, it’s fostering a new one. It can do the same for gays. The kids they parent won’t have to blood ties to one or either parent, but they can have what’s more important: parental love.
And where in the world do you get the wild, wild idea that gays reject obligations toward their child’s well being, their child’s other parent, their child’s other parent’s family, and the entire – paternal and maternal – family’s stability and integrity)? That’s the sort of assertion that demonstrates your bigotry. There are responsible and irresponsible straight and gay parents – sexuality is not the determinative factor. Nor does granting marriage rights to gays take anything away from straights.
Likewise, what makes you think gays – whom you acknowledge to be capable of commitment but then characterize as if they aren’t – don’t stop and think about whether or not they can provide kids all they need? Because they disagree with you, I guess. Again, you’re displaying bigotry.
May 28th, 2011 | 9:51 am
David Nickol writes:
It is interesting that you emphasized the word “legal” in your original comment. You think that if the law is changed to say that marriage no longer means one man and one woman then poof!–it turns out that the word marriage meant two men and two women all along for the history of mankind. Wow. Who knew?
To Gail F: All well put.
Thomas Aquinas: Fantastic comment, especially your third paragraph. What is the redefinition of marriage movement all about but the triumph of the will?
Ken writes:
I don’t think anyone dodged this question, but the answer is so elementary that I’m not sure others considered as pivotal as you do. But here’s a quick answer for you…
That some couples can’t have kids was no less true at the dawn of civilization as it is today, and therefore the argument is no more relevant today than it was then. A man and a woman might marry only to discover that they cannot procreate, but that unfortunate fact does not change the procreative nature of marriage.
What I find more interesting in your comment is the phrasing “If marriage is a status granted for the sake of procreation…” Marriage, as it has been defined for the history of mankind, was not a creation of the government but rather was the conjugal building block of civilization itself for which we create governments to protect. It’s the difference between positive law and natural right. However, under your new definition of marriage, you are certainly right–the new meaning of the word will be strictly a creation of the state. It will not longer be a natural right, but rather a permission granted to you by the state. Good times. (For a longer explanation of what I mean by all this, click here.)
May 28th, 2011 | 9:54 am
This is how a democracy functions. This is how people everywhere, Christian conservatives as well, behave. To not recognize that, to speak as if your opponent is guilty of something you and yours never do, is childish, uncharitable, and bigoted.
Speaking of childish, uncharitable, and bigoted, when are you going to get through accusing me of various bad things and get around to addressing the arguments I make?
Is it or is it not true that marriage has a procreative, family-sustaining function? And if it is true, then how can gays claim to be entitled to full access to a function which provides benefits they are not entitled to?
If not “procreative benefits”, then what is the difference between marriage vs. a civil union?
Is it or is it not true that gay marriage advocates seek, explicitly, to exempt gays from the obligations one normally is expected to honor toward the person one “uses” to make a son or daughter?
I have a lot of questions. You haven’t offered many answers. All the name-calling in the world won’t make your argument true, if it can’t even stand up to questions that ought to be easy to answer.
And speaking of bigoted: the real civil rights movement (which “gay rights” is attempting to appropriate and piggyback on) was based entirely on the moral authority and legitimacy of truth. If you have truth, it’s time to speak it out. It is only those who do not have any truth to speak who need to hide behind words like “bigot” and “homophobe”. Can you imagine how successful Martin Luther King Jr. would have been if his great speech had been entitled “I Have A Grudge”?
May 28th, 2011 | 10:01 am
No, I call you a bigot because you have repeatedly demonstrated that you have no empathy for gays, that you see them as not fully human
I have a lot of empathy for gays who are good people and who do right by their loved ones (including their family). I believe that is the majority of gays.
I have no “empathy” for people who “need” to use children in the ways that “the gay community” uses its children – to push a political agenda, to put their children on YouTube in videos where the kids testify to how happy they are. Speaking of “lacking empathy”. Here we see a community of people who has built an entire political movement on the backs of exploited children. They claim to represent “all” gays but that is a lie: most gays are good people who would never want to do such a selfish, rotten thing to their own child.
And speaking of reducing other people to less than fully human: good parents – gay or straight – don’t need to dehumanize their child’s other parent. In fact, good parents, who are capable of empathy, should know that their child is going to be concerned with (and identify with!) that parent, even if they never get to meet that parent. When you hurt your child’s baby-mama or baby-daddy, you hurt your child. That “the gay community” does it behind the false shield of “civil rights” doesn’t make it any less ugly. Some day these people are going to grow up and see themselves as they are and be very, very ashamed.
You are the one who lacks empathy. You lack empathy for these children, and for motherless children everywhere.
Your arguments are based on the idea of children as things – as endlessly resilient, as capable of becoming whatever the parent needs them to be. But that view of children, and of adoption, has been refuted by several painful decades of reality.
May 28th, 2011 | 10:10 am
Blake,
You answered Ken’s question much more thoroughly than I. I really appreciate your fair and nuanced comments. You are spot on.
May 28th, 2011 | 10:19 am
Thomas Aquinas wrote:
May 27th, 2011 | 8:49 pm
“If someone were, through plastic surgery, change his racial appearance–let’s say, from Swedish to sub-Saharan African–should that person now qualify as part of a protected class, and receive all the benefits of preferential treatment programs?
If I were to take a Kai-Ken puppy and have him surgically altered so that he looks like a feline. Is he now a feline? If I were to then surgically alter his genitalia to make it appear female, with faux vagina, and then make sure he received hormone treatments to maintain his “femininity,” have I turned a male dog into a female cat? If you think so, you are truly mad.
What I don’t understand is the bigot charge. If categories like male, female, marriage, children, parents, can be linguistically and surgically altered by one’s mere will, in what sense is being a bigot wrong? Perhaps I choose to say it isn’t wrong, to define it in a way that I enjoy and like. If willfulness, and not the nature of things, is the way by which we “measure” the world, why does your willfulness trump mine? If I can cut off my penis and expect no judgment on the part of others, why can’t I cut off my terms and expect no judgment as well?
If nothing is static–if there are literally no men, no women, no children, no families, except if we say so–then the “bigot” say so is of a piece. It is your hang-up, since according to your view of reality, there is nothing outside your will. And I, as fellow willer, choose to will the falsity of your judgment of me.
Welcome to hell.”
I handn’t noticed this post. It’ worth repeating in full. Excellent.
May 28th, 2011 | 10:39 am
Douglas,
again, if elderly straights can marry, why not gays? And of course marriage is a natural right, and the state only recognizes it. But that doesn’t show that it’s not a natural right for gays as well.
Blake, I’ve addressed every argument you’ve made to me. You have not addressed my specific examples as to why you’re bigoted, except to tell me you do believe gays are capable of committed love, and then demonstrate that you don’t believe they are.
Yes obviously marriage has a procreative, family-sustaining function. But that is clearly not its only function. If it was, we not not allow elderly, obviously infertile couples to marry, a point you again fell silent about. The difference between a marriage and a civil union is only that one has more legal rights than the other.
And if it is true, then how can gays claim to be entitled to full access to a function which provides benefits they are not entitled to?
That’s confused, but I think I addressed your point above. If you don’t think I have, please rephrase it.
Is it or is it not true that gay marriage advocates seek, explicitly, to exempt gays from the obligations one normally is expected to honor toward the person one “uses” to make a son or daughter?
No, that’s an incorrect formulation. They do not wish to “use” anyone in the pejorative sense of the word. There are instances in which a man donates sperm or a woman donates eggs, but with full consent, and for the explicit purpose of giving gay couples a child to love, which means giving the child loving parents. But of course many gay couples don’t even have kids this way, but instead adopt them from dead or unwilling to parent adults. There are also cases in which a parent carries a child into a new, gay relationship, having broken off a previous straight one. I don’t defend this practice, but denying marriage rights is not going to deter it in many if not most cases.
And speaking of bigoted: the real civil rights movement (which “gay rights” is attempting to appropriate and piggyback on) was based entirely on the moral authority and legitimacy of truth.
Yes, of course. Which proves that gays don’t exactly how?
It is only those who do not have any truth to speak who need to hide behind words like “bigot” and “homophobe”. Can you imagine how successful Martin Luther King Jr. would have been if his great speech had been entitled “I Have A Grudge”?
King often spoke about prejudice, obviously.
May 28th, 2011 | 10:47 am
I want to add a couple other voices to this discussion, specifically those who have held leadership rolls in movement to redefine marriage.
Paula Ettelbrick, Executive Director of the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission, stated the following in her article “Since when is Marriage a Path to Liberation?”:
In similar form gay activist and talk radio host Michelangelo Signorile argued that the best plan “might be to fight for same-sex marriage and its benefits and then, once granted, [to] redefine the institution of marriage completely”; that is, “to demand the right to marry not as a way of adhering to society’s moral codes, but rather to debunk a myth and radically alter an archaic institution that as it now stands keeps us down.”
May 28th, 2011 | 11:34 am
You think that if the law is changed to say that marriage no longer means one man and one woman then poof!–it turns out that the word marriage meant two men and two women all along for the history of mankind.
Douglas,
No, that is exactly the opposite of the point I am trying to make. Same-sex marriage has been legal in the Netherlands for a little over then years now. For Catholics and others who believe marriage can only be between a man and a woman, has the definition of marriage changed? No, the law has changed. Catholics believe marriage has been indissoluble since the beginning of creation. Civil divorce (or something like it going all the way back to the time of Moses) has always been an option. Does that change the definition of marriage for Catholics? No, it just means that civil governments and the Catholic Church have different understandings of marriage.
I am making a rather simple point that is not (necessarily) an argument in favor of same-sex marriage. I am saying that a civil government (or a hundred civil governments) passing a law about something like marriage can’t “change the definition” of marriage. I think almost everyone who objects to legalizing same-sex marriage objects not because the definition of marriage can be changed, but rather because the definition of marriage can’t be changed, and legalizing same-sex marriage is incompatible with what they believe marriage was, is, and will always be, no matter what civil laws say.
May 28th, 2011 | 11:51 am
If you have truth, it’s time to speak it out. It is only those who do not have any truth to speak who need to hide behind words like “bigot” and “homophobe”. Can you imagine how successful Martin Luther King Jr. would have been if his great speech had been entitled “I Have A Grudge”?
Blake, read or listen to the speech.
May 28th, 2011 | 11:54 am
Blake hasn’t really addressed the question by quoting Griswald. First of all, fertility tests wouldn’t be Constitutionally intrusive since the couple is the one that is asking the state for a marriage license. Requiring a fertility test would be no different, then, than the state requiring a person submit his fingerprints before being granted a gun license or a business providing financial statements to get a charter of incorporation from the state.
Second of all, the presumption that people like Blake make is that marriage isn’t natural, that it’s a purely state created creature hence it’s whatever the state wants it to be. In other words it’s like a public park with basketball hoops rather than baseball diamonds. Since the state is creating the park baseball fans have no right to demand diamonds, the best they can do is write their local representatives asking them to vote for diamonds. But marriage is a member of the family of contracts which exist as a right for humans to enter into before the state came into existence. The common law recognizes that the state’s role is to faciliate that only and when it tries to deny it, the burden is on the state to justify the denial. Not on the individuals to justify the contracts and marriages they seek to make.
Make no mistake about it, Blake’s argument runs straight to eugenics. If the state’s interest in producing children trumps all, then the state not only has a right to refuse infertile marriage, it has a right to order marriage based on its ‘interests’.
The deeper problem is, the act of forcing people to pretend that there is no difference between a married couple vs. any two people who “love each other” (according to whatever definition of “love” people choose to embrace at any given moment in time) is that this is a precedent with ramifications.
Fallacy here, who is being forced to pretend anything? You are not required to recognize anyone’s marriage. You are perfectly free to, say, Anna Nicole Smith’s marriage to that rich old man was a sham marriage (his children did). You are free to say that Hugh Hefner’s marriage to a 20-something girl is a shame. If, say, Mr. Hefner was visiting your house for an overnight stay you are perfectly free to say “Mr. Hefner, I do not approve of unmarried couples sleeping in the same bed in my home, I don’t believe your marriage is real therefore I’d appreciate it if you and Mrs. Hefner took two of my guest bedrooms”.
Both “marriage” and “family” as we understand these terms are institutions that serve important social, emotional, financial, and other support functions. Changing the ground rules so that one special group is exempt from obligations they don’t like (specifically, the obligations toward their child’s well being, their child’s other parent, their child’s other parent’s family, and the entire – paternal and maternal – family’s stability and integrity
Exactly what obligations would SSM couples be exempt from? Obligations to your spouse’s family? Sorry there’s no law that gives your mother-in-law a claim on you…even if there is I’m not seeing how it wouldn’t apply to SSM couples.
But people who are capable of committed love are going to deal with the conflict between their own desires vs. what is right and fair in a more honest fashion than simply saying “oh, my child is not going to mind having two moms/dads!”.
This, though, is a different issue. We can just as easily ask a heterosexual couple to honestly ask themselves is it right to create a child when they are devoted more to their drug habit than mutual ‘social, emotional, financial and other support functions’? I remember when actor Tony Randall had a two babies at age 75 (his wife was 25), quite a few people questioned the morality of having children who would never know an active father and would loose their father before they grow up.
Ken
A recent study out of the University of Virginia found that kids adopted by gays do just as well as those adopted by straights.
At this point we should note we are discussing two different things. Whether or not kids do well with gay couples on average is irrelevant. There are gay couples who aren’t married with kids. There are straight couples who aren’t married with kids. Likewise there are plenty of married couples who should not have kids….in fact there are married couples that are so bad off with various problems that if they did have kids the state would likely automatically take them (think if couples with very bad drug addictions, mental illneses etc.). The state doesn’t say they can’t get married but the state does say they can’t keep their own kids or adopt other people’s kids.
Douglas
Thomas Aquinas: Fantastic comment, especially your third paragraph. What is the redefinition of marriage movement all about but the triumph of the will?
I think your error is presuming the state owns the definition. This goes to the paradox that we often encounter with SSM. Those opposed assert that the definition of marriage is hardwired into the nature of things, like gravity. They then go on to totaly neglect this assertion and predict horrible things from the state ‘redefining marriage’.
Look if it’s hardwired into the nature of things, like gravity, then the state’s definition is totally irrelevant. If tomorrow the state declared the law of gravity null and void, you’d still break your arm if you jumped off your roof. If you’re respecful of gravity, the state declaring gravity void will do nothing to harm you. You will not suddenly fly out of your sofa and smack into the ceiling. As a result the state has no law of gravity. If tomorrow you start flyling around on a broom like Harry Potter the cops aren’t going to write you a ticket for violating the law of gravity. The Wright Brothers did not need to consult with lawyers to make sure their airplane didn’t run afoul of a state law of gravity.
Now by definition for a marriage to work it requires the will of two individuals. If they are successful, then their will has triumphed, if not then they have failed. It’s their job to discern whether or not they can and will achieve a marriage. This is the error that Blake makes. The state’s interest is only as a fan rooting for a team, the fan doesn’t have the right to come down onto the field and try to intercept the football on behalf of his team. Or to use another analogy the state may grant a business a license but it’s not the state’s job to make sure that the business plan meets the definition of a successful business. The state doesn’t say “hmmmm, you’re going to buy servers, have web pages that will store people’s pictures, videos, and messages and let them chat with each other and this will be called Facebook and you’ll give it away for free! Naaa that’s not a profitable business license denied”. If people fly in the face of nature, they will fail. If they find that the wall of nature has some knooks and crannies, then they might succeed.
That some couples can’t have kids was no less true at the dawn of civilization as it is today, and therefore the argument is no more relevant today than it was then. A man and a woman might marry only to discover that they cannot procreate, but that unfortunate fact does not change the procreative nature of marriage.
Ahhh just as you may start a business thinking it will be successful but discover it fails, that doesn’t demonstrate that businesses are not about creating profit. But then the marriage you described above is still a marriage in the eyes of the law, the church and the married couple. If the man filed for divorce, you would probably counsel him to reconsider. But if your buddy told you he was getting out of the rental property he owns because he’s been making a loss for the last five years you’d probably say ‘good for you, I hope you find something else that works better’.
Likewise if the couple knows they are infertile before marriage, no one objects to them getting married. Yet if your friend said he was going to start a business that consisted of buying gas for $3.75 a gallon and selling it for $3.50 a gallon, you’d question whether he really understood what a business was. This indicates that while children are important to marriage, they are not the essential core of marriage. What is the essential core? Well why don’t you look at what marriage vows actually say, a promise of a lifelong partnership no matter how good or bad. Or Jesus who said it was about two people becoming one flesh. Or Blake who lets the truth drop, that marriage is about making individual people secure in emotional, financial, social and other ways. Having kids is not a problem. Every year thousands of teenagers who can’t solve basic math problems or hold a decent job demonstrate that they can produce children. Humans do not have much trouble making children, the challenge for humans is to get themselves in order so they can support the children that they and others produce. The infertile marriage, therefore, is not automatically a failure in the way a loss-making business is. If it provides a stable and nurturing life for the couple so they are not a burden on others and may even help others with their own children then it’s a successful marriage despite the fact that they never have kids of their own. Likewise many marriages are failures even if they produce children.
May 28th, 2011 | 12:16 pm
If someone were, through plastic surgery, change his racial appearance–let’s say, from Swedish to sub-Saharan African–should that person now qualify as part of a protected class, and receive all the benefits of preferential treatment programs?
Absolutely the person should be protected from discrimination and be considered a member of a protected class. It is just as wrong to discriminate against a person because you think he is of African descent as it is to discriminate against him because he is of African descent. As for “all the benefits of preferential treatment programs,” how many white people are there who think they would be better off black? Anybody who analogizes gender change to race change on the grounds that it’s an advantage to be black because of “all the benefits of preferential treatment programs” had better rethink not just his attitude toward LGBT people, but toward blacks as well. It’s so unfair that blacks get all that preferential treatment isn’t it? It’s so hard being a white guy nowadays. LOL
May 28th, 2011 | 12:31 pm
Boonton,
Imagine a proposal were introduced in a state legislature that any couple applying for a marriage license sign an affidavit saying—to the best of their knowledge—they were capable of conceiving children as a couple and were intending to do so. This would effectively ban same-sex marriage. Yet I can only imagine those opposed to same-sex marriage on the grounds that marriage is about procreation would be horrified by the idea. Why?
May 28th, 2011 | 1:22 pm
Blake,
your inability or unwillngness to recognize that gays love their children just like straights do, that their only “political agenda” (why are those by definition – for that’s what your use of phrase implies – wrong when gays have them but not when you do?) is to function as families just like straights, your characterization of this wish as a selfish need rather than a natural human desire . . . these are all bigoted. As is your apparent assumption that kids are better off with single parents or no parents in the home that they are with a loving gay couple.
No, the “good” gays are the ones who agree with you that gay couples parenting kids is “exploitation.” (And it’s highly unlikely that, as you suggest, most gays would think it is. Where’s your evidence?). Again, that unwillingness to see good motives is a form of bigotry. Most gays oppose same-sex parenting? Right, and most Negroes were happy with segregation and ashamed of those outside agitators.
And still – still! – you will not give an answer as to why elderly straights who can’t procreate should be allowed to marry, but not straights.
May 28th, 2011 | 1:39 pm
Boonton writes (among thousands of other words):
Okay, let’s do this clean and simple and remove procreation from even within the realm of possibility of a marriage (as with SSM): Suppose people sprouted out of the ground asexually–no mothers, no fathers, no children, no families. Now please explain to me how, in such a world, an entirely inconsequential union called marriage would come into existence.
I’d suggest that before trying to come up with a 1,500 word answer for that you first read the post above by Thomas Aquinas.
May 28th, 2011 | 1:42 pm
Boonton writes:
Okay, let’s do this clean and simple and remove procreation from even within the realm of possibility of a marriage (as with SSM): Suppose people sprouted out of the ground asexually–no mothers, no fathers, no children, no families. Now please explain to me how, in such a world, an entirely inconsequential union called marriage would come into existence.
I’d suggest that before trying to come up with a 1,500 word answer for that you first read the post above by Thomas Aquinas.
May 28th, 2011 | 1:49 pm
Jan wrote:
What I don’t understand is the bigot charge.
Here’s the explanation again. I believe the Bible is the word of God, and I respect the arguments of people who believe the Bible condemns any same sex relationship, period. I no longer believe it does, but I understand and respect the argument of those who do.
What I don’t respect, and what I think betrays prejudice and – at least after all the facts are considered – intellectual dishonesty, is the attitude that automatically presumes moral fault with people who disagree, the attitude that is unwilling to recognize honesty and good motives on the other side – the attitude that is unwilling to empathize.
I also condemn a rhetorical style, like yours, that dodges questions (why should elderly gays . . . I’ve asked this a half a dozen times probably). That’s intellectual cowardice and disingenuousness. That’s less than people in a debate – and Christians certainly – owe each other.
Note too that I’m not just throwing around these charges, I tying them to specific behavior and explaining them.
May 28th, 2011 | 1:51 pm
I would like to add the thoughts of a couple leaders from the homosexual community in this debate:
Paula Ettelbrick, Executive Director of the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission, stated the following in her article “Since when is Marriage a Path to Liberation?”:
In similar form gay activist and talk radio host Michelangelo Signorile argued that the best plan “might be to fight for same-sex marriage and its benefits and then, once granted, [to] redefine the institution of marriage completely”; that is, “to demand the right to marry not as a way of adhering to society’s moral codes, but rather to debunk a myth and radically alter an archaic institution that as it now stands keeps us down.”
May 28th, 2011 | 2:13 pm
“again, if elderly straights can marry, why not gays?”
You’re changing the question from “who is allowed to marry” to “who is allowed to marry whom.”
Any man can marry any woman other than a close blood relative, and vice versa. No man can marry any man, gay or straight, and likewise for women. It is not about who is allowed to marry, it is about who is allowed to marry whom. And the principle is that marriage generally produces children, so people of the opposite sex are generally allowed to marry. People of the same sex can never produce children, so there is no social sanction for people of the same sex forming a recognized union, let alone calling it by the same name as “marriage.”
May 28th, 2011 | 2:28 pm
It is improbable that a post-menopausal human female will be impregnated by a human male her own age through an act of copulation. Probability increases when fertilization is aided.
It is impossible for a human male to be impregnated by another human male.
It is impossible for a human female to be impregnated by another human female (so called synthetic sperm disregarded).
The answer to the question, then, is the difference between improbable and impossible.
May 28th, 2011 | 2:51 pm
pentamom,
of course we’re talking about gays being allowed to marry gays. That’s obvious. And just as obvious is what I have repeatedly pointed out, that elderly straights don’t “generally” produce kids, or in fact produce them at all. Your own more, uh, more general application of the term “generally” is convenient for your argument (thanks for at least trying, which is more than your friends here have earned credit for), but otherwise makes no more sense than being even more general and saying that because couples generally produce kids, all couples should be allowed to marry. There is no reason not to be as specific as is practically possible (rights being respected, of course).
Is the state’s sole or foremost goal in sanctioning marriage is to encourage procreation and protect the kids? Then because with elderly people, kids don’t enter into it, so why let them marry? And if you oppose fertility tests, fine, then set an age limit. Is 65 for a woman too low for you? I don’t think the principle you cite is one that’s actually determining your thinking.
May 28th, 2011 | 3:12 pm
Ken,
You aren’t addressing Thomas Aquinas original point about the use of the word bigotry. He’s referring to ontology, reality, how we make moral distinctions, etc. Which is a deeper question than what you are referring to. It doesn’t bother me when others start shouting insults because it usually betrays frustration due to a lack of ideas on their part.
Anyway, I think many SSM proponents are well intentioned, and I sympathize with a desire to be fair. But, I still think they are wrong. I can empathize with someone who really wanted horses to be mules, but I am not going to agree that they are.
May 28th, 2011 | 4:10 pm
“I also condemn a rhetorical style, like yours, that dodges questions (why should elderly gays . . . I’ve asked this a half a dozen times probably). That’s intellectual cowardice and disingenuousness…”
Oh brother. You’ve had your mulitiple questions answered many times on this thread alone. Blake is a one man SSM encyclopedia.
Anyway, elderly heterosexuals can form real marriages because they still comprise complementary opposites and because they still form a complete reproductive whole. The heterosexual union is utterly unique even if no children are produced. Does an apple tree stop being an apple tree once it stops bearing fruit? Each still forms one half if a complete reproductive oneness. No homosexual union does this.
But all this talk of procreation is only one part of what makes marriage only possible for heterosexuals. The rest if it is rooted in important differences between the sexes that homosexual activists gloss over. Men are not women.
There are important cultural functions elderly marriages provide. For one thing, they model healthy community between the sexes. This is no small feat. Consider the plight of women at the hands of men throughout history and around the world today.
Essentially, homosexual unions and marriages are two different entities with different functions. They are not the same thing, so why the fervor to insist they are?
May 28th, 2011 | 4:26 pm
David Nickol writes in response to Aquinas:
“Absolutely the person should be protected from discrimination and be considered a member of a protected class”
Jan:
This wasn’t the point of the post at all. You’ve misread it just ad Ken has. Aquinas is using this example to make a point about ontology and the basis for making moral judgements. He’s talking about moral realism vs nihilism. Re read it.
May 28th, 2011 | 4:39 pm
Boonton,
I doubt Doug or Blake think marriage is something for the State to define, but no matter. You and I agree that it most certainly not. In my view it is the SSM movement however that is pushing to use the coercion of the State to change a circle into a square.
May 28th, 2011 | 5:32 pm
And the principle is that marriage generally produces children, so people of the opposite sex are generally allowed to marry.
I think you’re smart enough to see the flaw in this argument Pentamom. First, once again, this argument seems premised in some weird alternative universe where humans hate sex, prefer chastity and can only be coaxed into sex via some institution like marriage….which the state has to set up otherwise there just won’t be any children and like the movie Children of Men, we’ll age towards total extinction. Second if we are talking about ‘generally’ producing children then how hard would it really be to restrict marriage to those too young to collect social security? Why not restrict marriage with people we DON’T want producing children (such as chronic drug abusers, people who already have had their kids taken away for abuse, neglect etc.)? Your argument is that making such fine distinctions is just too darn hard but restricting based on same-sex is just easy enough to do therefore the state should do it. Why? Unless you have a reasonably good argument for why different sex couples will be less inclined to produce children, your argument collapses.
Finally, I’ll again note that your argument also essentially is premised on the state owning marriage whereas its the opposite. Marriage is a contract and the right to contract belongs to all humans. The state’s right to make regulations regarding the right to contract is not an ownership of that right.
May 28th, 2011 | 5:42 pm
And of course the slip side of pretending the state owns marriage is to say not only can the state keep gays out of marriage if it wants, it can assign marriages as it pleases. In other words you’ve stumbled right into full eugenics circa 1900. Let me at this point plug Chesterton’s Eugenics and Other Evils, available for free on Amazon Kindle! If you wish simply read the first half and then the ‘afterward’.
May 28th, 2011 | 5:42 pm
But but before we do anything else should we try to return to transgenderism?
May 28th, 2011 | 9:55 pm
I need to respond to Nikki H’s PC comments on Gender identity Disorder (GID) and and sexual reassignment surgery (SRS). The leading psychological experts on GID are Zucker and Bradley in Toronto and in their textbook on the topic write, “In these cases, the gender identity disorder resolves fully, and nothing in the children’s behavior or fantasy suggest that gender identity issues remain problematic…. All things considered, however, we take the position that in such cases clinicians should be optimistic, not nihilistic, about the possibility of helping the children to become more secure in their gender identity.”
Zucker, K. & Bradley, S. (1995) Gender Identity Disorder and Psychosexual Problems in Children and Adolescents (New York: Guilford Publications, p.282.
In regard to long term follow up of SRS (sexual reassignment surgery) the 2011 study from Sweden (Dhejne C, et al.) demonstrated that persons with transsexualism, after sex reassignment, have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behaviour, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population.
Candidates for SRS may believe that they are trapped in the bodies of the wrong sex and therefore desire or, more accurately, demand SRS; however, this belief is generated by a disordered perception of self. Such a fixed, irrational belief is appropriately described as a delusion. SRS, therefore, is a “category mistake”—it offers a surgical solution for psychological problems such as a failure to accept the goodness of one’s masculinity or femininity, lack of secure attachment relationships in childhood with same-sex peers or a parent, self-rejection, untreated gender identity disorder, addiction to masturbation and fantasy, poor body image, excessive anger, and severe psychopathology in a parent. (Fitzgibbons, R., et al., National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, Spring 2009).
May 28th, 2011 | 10:39 pm
Jan,
I’m familiar with that argument, but you’re the first person on the thread to make it, at least in response to me. Blake has not. And I respect it but I don’t agree with it.
No, gays cannot form a complete reproductive whole. They cannot form fully complementary relationships, as gays can, and for that reason I see gay relationships as less than ideal, but only in the same way I see handicapped bodies as less than ideal. There is nothing immoral – beautiful, rather – in handicapped people doing as well as possible what the rest of us can do fully. Gays merely have a handicap.
Yes it’s true that heterosexual marriages “model healthy community between the sexes,” and that’s an important insight, thank you. But why should the burden be on same-sex relationships to do something similar? And if it is, don’t they just model healthy same-sex relationships between men who are attracted to men? Because that’s the bit your description leaves out: what traditional marriages actually model is healthy community not between all men and women, but between heterosexual men and women.
Yes homosexual unions and marriages are two different entities in that circumscribed respect, but why circumscribe the definition that way? Why not recognize value in each? This is where I see a lack of charity that if not derived from, or at least seems to naturally exist alongside of, a lack of empathy, and thus that at some point most often turns to a hardened heart – a refusal to empathize -, i.e. to bigotry.
Again, I respect your argument in the abstract, and consider it a worthy and important challenge, and I don’t want to presume – to judge – everyone who makes it. But when people – and I’m referring to Blake here – talk about gays as if they lack ordinary virtues, and stick to it when challenged, and refuse to answer hard questions, that’s a sign of bigotry.
You aren’t addressing Thomas Aquinas original point about the use of the word bigotry. He’s referring to ontology, reality, how we make moral distinctions, etc. Which is a deeper question than what you are referring to. It doesn’t bother me when others start shouting insults because it usually betrays frustration due to a lack of ideas on their part.
No, and I wasn’t intending to. I was referring to the common refusal to empathize, which Blake is an illustration of. You can dismiss my words as frustration, and my explanations as shouts, but as Christians we need to call sin “sin,” not least for the sake of the sinner.
May 28th, 2011 | 11:16 pm
Douglas Johnson wrote:
May 28th, 2011 | 10:47 am
“I want to add a couple other voices to this discussion, specifically those who have held leadership rolls in movement to redefine marriage.
Paula Ettelbrick, Executive Director of the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission, stated the following in her article “Since when is Marriage a Path to Liberation?”:
…being queer is more than setting up house, sleeping with a person of the same gender, and seeking state approval for doing so…Being queer means pushing the parameters of sex, sexuality, and family, and in the process, transforming the very fabric of society…We must keep our eyes on the goal…of radically reordering society’s view of reality.
In similar form gay activist and talk radio host Michelangelo Signorile argued that the best plan “might be to fight for same-sex marriage and its benefits and then, once granted, [to] redefine the institution of marriage completely”; that is, “to demand the right to marry not as a way of adhering to society’s moral codes, but rather to debunk a myth and radically alter an archaic institution that as it now stands keeps us down.”
This is worth repeating. It’s also worth repeating Andrew Sullivan who wrote that monogamy is not really a gay thing and that marriage would need to change to accommodate the gay “openeness” toward sex.
May 28th, 2011 | 11:37 pm
The anti-gay marriage people are claiming that reproduction is central to marriage. Why isn’t there a marriage vow that you’re going to reproduce? Even if there was a such vow, what would this be based upon? Also, if technology were developed that allowed two women to have a baby with both of their genes, would this stop your objections?
Jan writes that gay marriage isn’t valid because of “important differences between the sexes”. What specific differences do you mean, and why are they important? You mean like men have deeper voices? Or women have wombs? More importantly, why do these differences make my marriage to my wife valid?
May 29th, 2011 | 3:02 am
Jan,
“You’re a stereotype.”
That’s a revealing answer. I’ve explained that I’ve talked to people on this site and have concluded that these individuals and probably many others are bigots. That statement suggests that I’ve actually listened to people and reached a conclusion. I might be wrong about my conclusion, but at least I listened and talked. You just assumed, which is typical. One of the characteristics of bigots is that assumption plays an oversized role.
“ You offer no reasons, no logic, no facts, no arguments.”
I’m sorry our conversation didn’t start a month ago. It’s true that I’m offering no facts or logic now, but it’s too late. I’ve written you all off now. If we had talked a month ago, I would have offered plenty, but I don’t think you all’re worth any more breath than I’m wasting. I once thought that conservative Christianity offered a valuable reminder, but I’m not so sure now. What I hear is one long grouse. Liberal Christianity tends to discount the value of protecting the unborn and of chastity and monogamy, but after talking to you all for eight months, I find more honesty, humanity, and even Christianity in my straight friends who are atheists than I do in the people I know well here.
“Your a sentimental emotivist.”
You only say that because you haven’t listened to what I’m actually saying. You’re only listening to what you think I’m saying. A worse way of saying that is that you’re only listening to what you HOPE I’m saying. I’ve told you that I’ve met a lot of bigots on this site. You reply, how dare you call us bigots. Can’t you see that I’ve only called bigot those I think are bigots? I’ve made my judgments on individual cases. It’s your own prejudice that makes you think I’ve judged everyone. It’s that prejudice that makes you bigoted.
“That’s hilarious is that if you’re not busy stereotyping others( you keep referring to me as if I were a man!) you’re busy calling people names like some knuckle dragging clansman!!”
How am I stereotyping you? I’ve never called anyone a name. I’ve offered an analysis. I think that many of the people I’ve talked to here are bigots, but that’s an analysis, not a name. I’ve never called someone a “knuckle dragging clansman.” I’ve never even thought it. I often wonder what’s wrong with the Christians on this site, who are more willing to assume the worst about someone than the best.
The question of your sex is an interesting one. I work down the hall from a man named “Jan.” Why should I think you’re a woman? You’ve never referred to yourself as a woman. Should I somehow intuit your femininity? If I can’t figure out you’re a woman, does that mean that I’m prejudiced or does it mean that you are insufficiently female? Have you noticed that most of the commenters on this site are men? Why is that? Is it a problem that I’ve assumed you are a man like most of the other commenters, or is it a problem that more women don’t read and comment on this site? My sister told me to visit this site, but she doesn’t comment on it. What’s up with that?
“And really, if you hate this site so much, why do you keep reading it?”
Think more carefully about your thought process. Reread my comment, and notice that I didn’t say that I hated this site. I find some of the writers stimulating, and I share some of the positions the writers hold, but I find some of the writers erroneous and others flat wrong. What I was objecting to in my first entry was the quality of the commenters, which I find largely horrible and which you’ve done nothing to improve.
As I explained, I read this site for the sake of my sister. We’ve had many productive conversations as a result.
“”Like I said earlier, you are a clueless idiot.
Do you feel proud having told me I’m an idiot? Does is make you feel closer to Christ?
I attend a reconciling congregation every week, which means that every week I sit in a pew next to a close friend who is straight, gay, or transgendered, and I ask them to pray for my soul. I ask them to help me become a better father and husband. And do you know what? They do. And they go further. One gay man teaches my learning disabled son how to read. One transgendered woman teaches my daughter how to play mandolin, though Esolen would want my daughter to address the woman as “Mister” because she was born with a penis.
By the way, Esolen says that I should address people only by how I perceive them. If I think a person looks like he or she has a penis, I should call them a man. But you object because I presumed you are a woman. Should I assume you have a penis because in my experience people named Jan are men? Should I assume that you have neither a penis nor a vagina because I watched SNL sketches about Pat? Or should I just guess?
“Like I said earlier, you are a clueless idiot.”
Think really hard about this and ask your friends. I said that most of the people on this are bigots. I didn’t say all, and I implied that I had good reasons and long conversation to back me up. You, on the other hand, apply what I’ve said to everyone and then claim I’m wrong. The word idiot doesn’t come to mind, but a couple of other do.
—
Blake,
“I have a lot of empathy for gays who are good people and who do right by their loved ones (including their family). I believe that is the majority of gays.”
Tell me more, Blake. Which gays do you really, really like? Which ones in particular represent Christ to you? Which ones exemplify the Christian life? Which ones do you seek to imitate?
For myself, I can say that I admire the way that this one fathers his child or the way that that one attends to her sweetheart. But how about you?
—
Douglas,
“I want to add a couple other voices to this discussion, specifically those who have held leadership rolls in movement to redefine marriage”
Whatever value that purported leaders may have, tell me about the lesbian Christian friends you have. What do they say? If you don’t have any lesbian Christian friends, then go down to a reconciling congregation and find some. Bigotry thrives in ignorance.
—
David,
“I think almost everyone who objects to legalizing same-sex marriage objects not because the definition of marriage can be changed, but rather because the definition of marriage can’t be changed, and legalizing same-sex marriage is incompatible with what they believe marriage was, is, and will always be, no matter what civil laws say”
Some day I hope to change your mind about abortion and even about belief in Jesus, but in the meantime, I appreciate your understanding of Jesus’s teaching concerning marriage.
“Blake, read or listen to the speech. Blake, read or listen to the speech.”
Nicely done, David. Your persistence with Blake shows you to be better man than I.
—
Douglas,
“Now please explain to me how, in such a world, an entirely inconsequential union called marriage would come into existence.”
In Genesis, we are taught that the purpose of marriage is not so much to children but to end our loneliness so that we may rule over the earth and leave our birth family.
I’ve watched many a woman and quite a few men do exactly that. Where do you go to church?
—
Ken,
“What I don’t respect, and what I think betrays prejudice and – at least after all the facts are considered – intellectual dishonesty, is the attitude that automatically presumes moral fault with people who disagree, the attitude that is unwilling to recognize honesty and good motives on the other side – the attitude that is unwilling to empathize”
Having read such eloquence, I should just erase everything I’ve said. Thank you.
—
SteveP,
“It is improbable that a post-menopausal human female will be impregnated by a human male her own age through an act of copulation. Probability increases when fertilization is aided.”
If I were only interested in progeny, I would have divorced my wife years ago. Genesis tells us the purpose of marriage is to end loneliness not to create children.
—
Jan,
“Blake is a one man SSM encyclopedia”
You agree with Blake’s conclusions. To agree with his reasoning means that you have to think it through, and I doubt you’ve done so.
For example, Blake says that it is perfectly acceptable for gays to have sex and to raise children as long as they don’t claim that those children are truly theirs. Is that true for you? Do you think gay sex is ok?
—
Ken,
Thanks for your 10:39 post. You remain, as always, a model, especially when I have lost my patience with my Christians brothers and sisters.
May 29th, 2011 | 8:29 am
Boonton, conflating gays with infertile couples is incorrect, because gays are not infertile, nor do they necessarily wish to remain childless. You are trying to confuse the state of “being eligible for benefits but not claiming them” with the act of “claiming benefits but not being eligible for them”.
The correct comparison is not between gays and infertile couples, but between gays and other couples who plan on using adultery as a reproductive strategy.
Are gays willing to recognize that being married means monogamy? If gay marriage ever becomes fact, laws protecting family members, children, and taxpayers against adulterous reproduction – and the frauds and misrepresentations they rely on – must become a priority. Are gays going to understand that, or are they going to feel singled out because “obviously” they cannot “found a family” except through adultery?
May 29th, 2011 | 10:06 am
Richard
In regard to long term follow up of SRS (sexual reassignment surgery) the 2011 study from Sweden (Dhejne C, et al.) demonstrated that persons with transsexualism, after sex reassignment, have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behaviour, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population.
Wouldn’t the proper comparision here, though, be comparing those who had sex reassignment surgery with transsexuals who didn’t?
Ken
No, gays cannot form a complete reproductive whole. They cannot form fully complementary relationships, as gays can, …
What exactly do we mean by complementary relationships? The usual definition of complements I have in mind are opposites that nevertheless work together. The classic example I can think of is salt and pepper….not really opposites but two different things that nonetheless work together on food.
So one way of thinking of complements here would be male-female sex organs. But certainly there must be a little bit more to this argument than just plumbing. So is the argument that male and female are different but together they complement themselves, pros in one make up for cons in aother and so on? But then what about a man who marries a woman with many masculine traits? Is that voiding the advantage of complentariness to a degree that the marriage should be disallowed? Should the woman be told flatly that since she acts so manly she should only be allowed to marry other women since the wise clerk that issues the marriage licenses can see that’s the only way a truely complementary relationship could be achieved?
Yes it’s true that heterosexual marriages “model healthy community between the sexes,” and that’s an important insight, thank you.
Well more matter of factly its only a model of community between the sexes. There’s a long tradition of those who take religious orders who have given us a model of chaste ‘brother-sister’ relationship between the sexes. It’s nice that many heterosexual marriages have the potential to offer a good model for community between the sexes, but a huge number of heterosexual marriages offer no model at all, except maybe a negative model for how the sexes should NOT interact (i.e. abusive relationships). Certainly we can tolerate a lot of couples that fall very far short of being an ideal model, I’m not sure why it’s so vitally important that 3-5% of the population may simply not be a heterosexual model. And what exactly are we saying when this is asserted? That gay men should marry women? That’s going to create ideal model marriages for heterosexuals!
Much more pragmaitically, I’ve known a few very long term marriages (by which I mean 20+ years and does NOT end in divorce). Trying to observe as honestly as possible, I can say the one thing they all have in common is that none of them are ‘models’. They are all a ‘little strange’, each in their own way. I’m sure many new marriages (let’s say under those under 10 years) share many common patterns but if you really get into marriage as it’s written you are, in a real sense, mapping out truely unknown territory which you’re not going to map out ahead of time with ‘models’ or common sense. Beyond the rookie stage of the first decade or so, you will cease to be the person you are today and will be someone else almost entirely.
Jan
This is worth repeating. It’s also worth repeating Andrew Sullivan who wrote that monogamy is not really a gay thing and that marriage would need to change to accommodate the gay “openeness” toward sex.
Marriage would hardly need to change to accomodate the non-monogamous. There have been plenty of non-monogamous straight marriages for thousands of years. But I think the point you and the activists you cite miss is that, well, society doesn’t get married, two individual people do. It’s nice to think you’re changing society but reality is waking up each morning in bed with someone for year after year may sound mundane and simple when compared to ‘changing society’ but it’s actually quite the opposite. And it’s not ‘state approval’ that you get with a marriage license, as if its purpose was to hand out stickers saying ‘good job’ like this was elementary school. With that license comes your financial and legal obligations to another person. With it comes the fact that you can have your paycheck infringed because they didn’t pay their credit card, for example. While these things sound mundane, reality is it’s actually a pretty big deal. How many people do you allow to access your bank accounts? Ruin your credit? Decide to pull the plug on you if you’re in a coma?
Non-monogamous marriages have always existed but few openly non-monogamous ones have lasted very long. At the end of the day just living intimately with someone for years is hard enough of a balance to maintain, adding the complications of extramarital affairs just makes a nearly impossible job all the harder.
We see this with heterosexuals too. In areas where monogamy declines (such among African Americans), marriage declines rather than marriages becoming less monogamous. I would take activists with a grain of salt here. When it comes to marriage, at least, they can only speak for themselves and marriage is one area where reality trumps rhetoric quite dramatically. The 70′s had plenty of swinging heterosexuals who were going to remake marriage too, they barely made it half a decade before looking dated.
May 29th, 2011 | 2:18 pm
Are gays going to understand that, or are they going to feel singled out because “obviously” they cannot “found a family” except through adultery?
Blake,
Adoption is not adultery. What I find strange is that, as far as I can recall, no one here who is opposed to same-sex marriage has called you out for slandering legally married heterosexual couples who adopt. They are, and no doubt always will be, the vast majority of adopters.
Adopting children is one of the most selfless things people can do, and yet you condemn it as “adultery” in order to attempt to discredit same-sex marriage. In the process, you insult and demean all couples and individuals who adopt.
Everything you have said about same-sex couples who wish to have children applies to legally married heterosexual couples who cannot conceive their own children and seek to have children through adoption, artificial insemination, surrogacy, and so on.
May 29th, 2011 | 3:25 pm
Ken writes:
“No, gays cannot form a complete reproductive whole. They cannot form fully complementary relationships….
Jan responds:
And that is one reason why homosexual relationships are not marriages. They are something else.
Ken:
“Yes it’s true that heterosexual marriages “model healthy community between the sexes,” and that’s an important insight, thank you. But why should the burden be on same-sex relationships to do something similar? ”
Jan responds:
This burden is not on homosexuals. It is an aspect of marriage. Gay relationships model something different.
Ken again:
“Yes homosexual unions and marriages are two different entities in that circumscribed respect, but why circumscribe the definition that way? ”
Jan responds:
Because we ought to describe reality accurately. We have dozens of different names for tomatoes alone!! A saw is not a hammer is it? A friend is different than a cousin. Even a Partnership is different than a Corporation.
Ken,
We agree on all this. I think we probably agree on quite a bit. I also agree with your admonitions toward empathy and compassion. Perhaps we only disagree on what is just, fair and compassionate. For me, the starting point is to understand the functions and purposes of each relationship. Once those things are clear, then we can figure out what is compassionate and fair.
May 29th, 2011 | 3:30 pm
Michael,
Like I said, I can’t take you seriously. You’re funny, like a dog that keeps returning to his own vomit…or something.
May 29th, 2011 | 4:46 pm
Blake,
Let me take your points in reverse order of how you raised them:
1. “Are gays willing to recognize that being married means monogamy? ” Are straights? No one forces anyone to have a monogamous marriage.
2. “The correct comparison is not between gays and infertile couples, but between gays and other couples who plan on using adultery as a reproductive strategy.”
Despite numerous attempts to question you, you refuse to address the problems with your argument. You haven’t addressed what ‘laws’ supposedly exist that obligate you to your inlaws and they they wouldn’t apply to SSM couples if they do exist. You haven’t explained how SSM produces ‘fake family trees’ via the legal assumption that if your spouse gives birth you are the legal father. Since men do not give birth this would not come up with a SSM couple.
3. “You are trying to confuse the state of “being eligible for benefits but not claiming them” with the act of “claiming benefits but not being eligible for them”.” I think of it as a marriage’s potential is determined in part by what people bring to it and part by what people make of it. Just as one business owner won’t enjoy exactly the same things from a successful business that different successful owner will, few if any marriages will reap all the potential benefits. For example, one benefit of marriage is that you automatically inherit your spouses assets should he or she die before you. But clearly if they have no assets when they die there will be nothing to inherit. Or if you die first then you won’t enjoy that benefit, or if both if you die at once then neither will.
Your attempt to draw a distinction between gay couples and infertile one rings hallow.
May 29th, 2011 | 7:25 pm
Boonton,
by being models I don’t mean conforming to a one-size-fits-all look. I mean that in truly committed long terms relationships, if you’ll forgive the cliché, iron sharpens iron. The same thing goes for the masculinity and femininity at work in the relationship – male-female relationships need not model some ideal, prescribed sexual balance to be complementary.
Jan responds:
And that is one reason why homosexual relationships are not marriages. They are something else.
Whether they are or not is the heart of the matter, isn’t it? That’s what we’re debating. From that flows the answers to what gay relationships model, and how to accurately describe reality. I think your replies are really non-answers to those questions, in that they’re assertions, not arguments.
Perhaps we only disagree on what is just, fair and compassionate. For me, the starting point is to understand the functions and purposes of each relationship. Once those things are clear, then we can figure out what is compassionate and fair.
Lo and behold, we do agree on that. :-)
Blake,
when you call third-party infertility “adultery,” you seem to base your opinion on one fact while ignoring others. Will you at least concede that the spirit of the act is entirely different? No one cheats on anyone else, and lust and illicit romance are not the motives. And do you call third-party infertility among straights “adultery” too?
Michael,
thanks again for the humbling compliment. If only I were more patient in the rest of life. Hah! Your words will be a spur.
May 29th, 2011 | 8:42 pm
Ken
by being models I don’t mean conforming to a one-size-fits-all look. I mean that in truly committed long terms relationships, if you’ll forgive the cliché, iron sharpens iron. The same thing goes for the masculinity and femininity at work in the relationship – male-female relationships need not model some ideal, prescribed sexual balance to be complementary.
So let’s return to my question about a woman who happens to be very masculine. Will you tell her she may not marry a man if she wants too? That she may only marry a woman or if she does marry a man he must be one with exceptional femininity? At this point is it the state’s business to decide if a couple has a proper balance of opposites that are complementary to each other or should this rather be the couple’s decision. Your argument may in fact be correct, maybe the ideal SSM will not be as good as the average DSM. But the slew of failed marriages we produce indicates that we don’t normally stop people from trying poorly thought out marriages anymore than we stop people from starting poorly thought out business ideas.
May 29th, 2011 | 9:01 pm
Ken writes:
“Whether they are or not is the heart of the matter, isn’t it? That’s what we’re debating. From that flows the answers to what gay relationships model, and how to accurately describe reality. I think your replies are really non-answers to those questions, in that they’re assertions, not arguments.”
Ken,
It seems we’ve reached an impasse. WhT your saying is similar to someone saying that he isn’t sure if soccer is the same as NFL football, or if peaches are the same as apples. All I can do is point to the differences, to show they are different. That in itself is an argument. If, for example, you were to insist that an NFl football game was the same thing as a match during the World Cup…well, there’d be nothing I could say. There’s no argument for that.
May 29th, 2011 | 9:15 pm
Boonton offers:
Well more matter of factly its only a model of community between the sexes. There’s a long tradition of those who take religious orders who have given us a model of chaste ‘brother-sister’ relationship between the sexes. It’s nice that many heterosexual marriages have the potential to offer a good model for community between the sexes, but a huge number of heterosexual marriages offer no model at all…
None of this addresses the issue at hand. It’s all a red herring. You might as well be saying that tennis is also a game played with racquets!
“Marriage would hardly need to change to accomodate the non-monogamous. There have been plenty of non-monogamous straight marriages for thousands of years…”
Again, a red herring.
Often, Boonton, you’re arguments amount to finding aberrations, or exceptions and trying use them as proofs of some sort. That won’t cut it. There are always exceptions. So what?
May 29th, 2011 | 9:17 pm
@Michael
“I attend a reconciling congregation every week, which means that every week I sit in a pew next to a close friend who is straight, gay, or transgendered, and I ask them to pray for my soul. I ask them to help me become a better father and husband. And do you know what? They do. And they go further. One gay man teaches my learning disabled son how to read. One transgendered woman teaches my daughter how to play mandolin, though Esolen would want my daughter to address the woman as “Mister” because she was born with a penis. ”
Michael, it sounds like you’re part of a very caring community. Your posts are thoughtful and insightful, and I appreciate them. Concerning some of your posts and some of the people that have responded to them, I’m reminded of the Biblical verse “Don’t cast pearls before swine”.
May 29th, 2011 | 10:41 pm
Jan,