Timothy George and Charles Colson on the Big Love strategy:
Big Love, HBO’s series about the “polygamists next door” in Sandy, Utah, ended its five-year run last March, but polygamy is still going strong on American television. TLC’s reality series Sister Wives, which features a real-life polygamist family named the Browns, has just been renewed for a third season.
TLC used to be called “The Learning Channel,” which prompts the question: What are Americans learning from sympathetic portrayals of polygamy in popular culture?
When Will & Grace debuted in 1998, few could have imagined that scarcely a decade later, same-sex marriage would be regarded by many Americans as a constitutional right. Catholic Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York was no alarmist when he worried aloud that the next step in the marriage debate would be another redefinition to allow polygamy and infidelity. How did we get to this point?
It began with making what was once marginalized and tolerated seem normal and mainstream by calling into question the very idea of norms. Pop culture excels at perpetuating this kind of relativism: gay characters were depicted as interchangeable with, if not superior to, their heterosexual counterparts. The message was clear: Only a bigot would make a fuss over homosexual behavior.
October 19th, 2011 | 11:37 am
I’m unclear what the connection is supposed to be between SSM and polygamy. Polygamy’s niche (and that’s what it is, a niche, one now closed HBO series and one or two active reality shows remain a niche) in pop culture is clearly due to its dramatic value. If Big Love was just about the husband married to anyone of the wives the drama value of the show would have hovered somewhere near a Lifetime movie of the week sleeper. The 3 different wives with their conflicting inter-relationships and so on made for good drama.
The implication to this argument seems to be that polygamy is such a horror story that only after we’ve been desensitized by SSM could we even begin to entertain such a marriage bloodbath. While this may work if your agenda is to accept any and all arguments against SSM regardless of their quality, it is actually kind of offensive. Polygamy has been around for thousands of years, is Biblical and is never explicitly banned. While modern Mormon’s do not practice polygamy, they believe it was sanctioned by God himself less than two centuries ago. The idea that polygamy only has an argument in an ‘anything goes’ environment is pretty unfair IMO.
October 19th, 2011 | 2:06 pm
I agree – the slippery slope from SSM to polygamy is a misnomer. Polygamy far outdates SSM, and is predicated on holy texts and ancient societies – a far more questionable precedent for policy, if you ask me – while SSM has evolved from the clear understanding of homosexuality as an inherent characteristic. To deny that gays are born gay is a prejudice akin to that which African Americans suffered – it points to their very nature, something they cannot change. Polygamy, however, is a choice, almost entirely a religious choice at that, and in America, that religion is Bible-based. Apples and oranges.
secretsandwives.com
October 19th, 2011 | 5:15 pm
^it’s pretty clear that not 100% of homosexuals, particularly women, were born that way. the gay movement seems to have embraced this logic with their LGBTQ official alphabet-soup moniker. truthfully i respect the idea some gay men have that bisexual men do not exist more than modern-day “sexually fluid” trendiness, cuz honestly, in what way are genuinely bi people “oppressed” when they can function fine heterosexually.
October 19th, 2011 | 5:37 pm
I’m unclear what the connection is supposed to be between SSM and polygamy.
It’s an either-or thing.
If marriage is whatever we want it to be, then anything and everything should and will be legal – with the burden of proof on those who object to demonstrate why it shouldn’t be.
October 19th, 2011 | 7:20 pm
Blake –
Sounds good. “Consenting adults” has a pretty good backing, and takes care of pedophilia and bestiality and rape and suchlike.
October 19th, 2011 | 8:21 pm
Consent!
October 19th, 2011 | 8:51 pm
If marriage is whatever we want it to be, then anything and everything should and will be legal
You can have whatever you want for dinner. Therefore if you have ice cream you MUST HAVE liver……
Even if ‘whatever we want’ is the argument for SSM, which its not, that doesn’t tell us what we should want or why we should want polygamy as well as SSM.
Major fallacy in barely a full paragraph.
October 19th, 2011 | 10:16 pm
If marriage is whatever we want it to be, then anything and everything should and will be legal
You can have whatever you want for dinner. Therefore if you have ice cream you MUST HAVE liver……
That doesn’t even make sense.
You are comparing two things that don’t even resemble each other, and suggesting that somehow the wild dissimilarities proves something?
My argument is that if marriage is a social construct, then it is arbitrary. If it is arbitrary, then there is no reason why it should favor one set over other sets.
The courts have already ruled on cases of polygamy. Their rulings are based on certain definitions and understandings of what marriage is and what defines it. If same-sex marriage removes those definitions, and redefines marriage in the way it would like, then the arguments against polygamy will also fall.
So will the arguments banning the marriage between siblings.
So would a lot of other arguments that currently are derided as just ‘self-evidently’ “slippery slope”.
If you determine that marriage is nothing more than celebrating “love” – with the definition of “love” being whatever anyone wants it to be – then how do you set limits on marriage at all?
Your analogy would be more accurate if you said that once you grant that people have a right to eat whatever you want, it then becomes impossible to prohibit the mixing of liver and ice cream at the dinner table.
October 19th, 2011 | 10:22 pm
Sounds good. “Consenting adults” has a pretty good backing, and takes care of pedophilia and bestiality and rape and suchlike.
Except that same-sex marriage is a test case for whose “rights” are prioritized – adults with fantasies, or children.
Because gay marriage advocates have already argued that the “child’s best interest” standard in adoption and custody is unacceptable because it places the child’s best interest over the “rights” of people to have their “sexual identity” accommodated.
Accommodating gay marriage requires actively taking away rights from children – rights that they already have – specifically:
Gay marriage requires exploitation; it can’t function in its goal of forcing people to pretend that gays are “the same as” a real family unless children are forcibly pressured to pretend that having a stepfather is just as good as having a relationship with one’s real mother. Reality itself has to be Truthspeaked – which is recognized in other contexts as a form of child abuse (as is the concept of “parentification”, where the child’s needs suffer so that the parent’s needs can take priority, thus creating a reversal effect – where the parents are childlike, the child is forced to become parentlike, hence the oft-touted “children of gays are more mature than ordinary kids”, as if that were something to be proud of or something…)
So you can’t really apply the “consenting adults” standard, seeing as how we have already deemed sexual identities and their accompanying fantasies as “more important” than the children.
October 20th, 2011 | 3:10 am
The important thing to remember is that all issues regarding children are irrelevant at this point. The idea that adults should refrain from an action because of a theoretical harm to the children is not going to fly.
It really is very difficult to see how the arguments against polygamy are going to survive in the face of the assertion of the right and refusal to tolerate any denial of the right.
October 20th, 2011 | 6:56 am
You are comparing two things that don’t even resemble each other, and suggesting that somehow the wild dissimilarities proves something?
Indeed I am. The only thing that connects SSM and polygamy is that they are thing you happen to be against.
If SSM was enacted on the grounds that society wants to annoy Blake, then a slipperly slope argument would make sense since its presumable Blake would also be annoyed even more if polygamy was adopted afterwards. Other than that, the slippery slope gets no traction as an argument.
You assert that SSM is being enacted becase ‘we want’ it (whose we?). But what does that have to do with polygamy? Do we want polygamy? Why? Why would SSM make us want polygamy more? I am, of course, leaving out the fact that the arguments for SSM almost have never revolve around a simplistic ’cause we want it’.
The courts have already ruled on cases of polygamy. Their rulings are based on certain definitions and understandings of what marriage is and what defines it.
Please cite some cases.
October 20th, 2011 | 7:22 am
States that have established that the definition of marriage is “an arrangement of convenience between people who indulge in mutual genital titillation” have no grounds for keeping polygamy or incest between consenting adults illegal. To do so is pure bigotry.
The question is how long such states can continue to uphold the legal principle that relationships founded on consent are somehow superior to those based on brute force. After all, isn’t the precept that people should not be brutalized “religious?” Shouldn’t it now be as irrelevant to secular law as the precept that buggery is not just as satisfactory a marital act as any other?
October 20th, 2011 | 9:03 am
it can’t function in its goal of forcing people to pretend that gays are “the same as” a real family unless children are forcibly pressured to pretend that having a stepfather is just as good as having a relationship with one’s real mother.
No one is forced to pretend anything in marriage. The status of a stepfather has no inherent legal significance in marriage. If your mom, for example, married a man who wasn’t your father his relationship to you is legally indeterminate. Your biological father looses no status as your father legally simply because your mom married someone else. What relationship you have to a stepfather, whether you treat and consider him little more than an interloper who has no status as ‘real family’ or whether you consider him more of a father to you than your actual father is more or less up to you and your family, not the law.
Blake raises this point every time SSM comes up and every time his errors are painstakingly examined and every time he ignores the problems with his reasoning and raises it yet again on new SSM threads as if we have never heard them before. If I didn’t know better, I would suspect that he was the reincarnation of Sam Beckett and this is some type of sequal to Waiting for Godot.
October 20th, 2011 | 9:07 am
Resh
States that have established that the definition of marriage is “an arrangement of convenience between people who indulge in mutual genital titillation” have no grounds for keeping polygamy or incest between consenting adults illegal. To do so is pure bigotry.
Very true, but since no SSM state has done that I’m not sure what relevance this point has. I agree with you if we appoint Hugh Hefner as Grand Czar of Marriage with power to unilaterally rewrite all laws as he sees fit, this very well may come to happen.
October 20th, 2011 | 9:17 am
Quotes of someone actually saying that? Or is this an Ellis Washington quote?
Why does gay marriage require this and heterosexual remarriage doesn’t? Specifics, please.
It’s impossible for a gay couple to be the best available option in a a custody decision? The other biological parent is never, ever feckless?
What kind of exploitation, specifically, are you worried about?
You have never – not once – provided evidence for this. Not a single study, not even one anecdote.
October 20th, 2011 | 11:11 am
It’s impossible for a gay couple to be the best available option in a a custody decision? The other biological parent is never, ever feckless?
Gays are not demanding the right to adopt in cases where no better option is available.
They are demanding the right to have their “right” to access children be prioritized over the child’s rights.
They want nothing less than to be taken as fully equal. Since they are not in fact equal, that means that they demand the right to force people to lie as needed to sustain the myth of equality.
That means they not only require full access to children, but they also need to actively suppress any evidence that suggests that these children are in any way different from children raised in intact biological families.
Adopted children are allowed to grieve their losses. Motherless and fatherless children are not normally expected to pretend that there is no loss. But the children of gays are expected to go on YouTube videos, participate in studies, and feature in films like “The Kids Are All Right” – where the point is from the outset to have them testify and witness on their parents’ behalf.
How they would feel about the situation – and what they would say, and how they would react – these things were decided before they were even born. Expressing any contradictory feeling would be a betrayal of both the family and the community.
That’s a toxic environment for a child.
October 20th, 2011 | 11:22 am
A gay couples is not the same as – nor equal to – a real family.
Apart from the obvious fact that people have reason to prefer their own biological family to being adopted (which is why we should not change the rules about adoption being only for situations when it is the least harmful situation, as measured by the needs of the child rather than the desires of the adult), gays also need to pretend that there are no significant differences between a mother vs. a father – a same-sex parent relationship vs. an opposite-sex parent relationship.
Not to mention that they also need to pretend there is no difference between “your mother gave you up because she loved you and wanted what is best for you” vs. “you don’t have a mother: you mean nothing to the woman who sold us her eggs, nor to the woman who let us rent her womb. You have no maternal side of the family. Your stepfather is just as good, so stop carrying on like that – you want the fundamentalist Christians to see you and come and take daddy away to a bad place to be tortured? Which is what will happen if you don’t shape up!”
October 20th, 2011 | 12:13 pm
“You can have whatever you want for dinner. Therefore if you have ice cream you MUST HAVE liver……”
No, you can have whatever you want for dinner. Therefore, you can have *whatever you want* for dinner.
Why is that even arguable as far as that goes?
October 20th, 2011 | 1:20 pm
But the children of gays are expected to go…,
If you know a gay couple that is emotionally abusing a child I suggest you contact the police or child services. Other than that, enough of the hypothetical ancedote pretending to be a universal argument.
Adopted children are allowed to grieve their losses. Motherless and fatherless children are not normally expected to pretend that there is no loss
What about adopted children of heterosexual couples. Will you be policing them to be sure they don’t violate a ‘right to grieve’? How do you confront the fact that the ‘old school’ in regards to adoptive children was to avoid the topic of adoption at all costs including not telling the child the truth that they were adopted?
How do you confront the fact that most gay couples, married or not, do not have children (adopted fully or partially biological)?
At best Blake you only have an argument with gay couples having children, not SSM. There are plenty of couples who are legally welcome to wed but would never be allowed to keep children (i.e. career criminals, serious mental problems, drug issues etc). Even if you could ever get around to actually presenting us with arguments about gays raising kids, that wouldn’t save you from constantly distracting the threads that concern SSM.
penta…
fair enough, IF your assert that we can have ice cream for dinner based on a principle of “you can have anything you want” then that principle would seem to apply to liver, battery acid, and just about anything else a person might conceivably assert they want.
October 20th, 2011 | 1:20 pm
What kind of exploitation, specifically, are you worried about?
Adoption is ruled by the needs of the child.
That is what differentiates it from trafficking.
When a custody decision is called adoption, but it prioritizes the needs and well-being of the people who want to take possession of the child at the expense of the child, what we are talking about is not really adoption. It is selling human beings.
Freedom from exploitation requires that we recognize guardianship as a responsibility – one with obligations and responsibilities. Becoming a guardian is not just about having access to neat stuff, which you get to dispense of any way you see fit. It is also about recognizing that this neat stuff comes with strings attached: it’s not your stuff, and you don’t get to do whatever you like with it.
This is true whether the stuff in question is material or spiritual or emotional. The guardian who must determine how to handle someone else’s wealth knows that he can’t just pocket the wealth: that would be embezzlement. Yet a child’s well-being is every bit as important as the trust fund left in that child’s name, and neither judges nor parent-guardians have the right to misappropriate “emotional stuff” to feed their own emotional desires first.
When you are a guardian, you have a moral and legal obligation to act on behalf of the person you are guarding. There is no reason what-so-ever to suppose that a child would rate the experience of having both a mother and a father as irrelevant. The two relationships are not perceived as identical, and both are highly valued and highly treasured relationships. The experience of having a “same sex parent” and the experience of having an “opposite sex parent” are likewise both valuable and highly valued relationships.
Valuing something of great value as insignificant – worthless – zero – for the purposes of misrepresenting the child’s interests (so that the guardian can use his position as guardian to redistribute resources away from how those resources would be allocated if everything were tallied honestly) is not good guardianship. It is fraud.
If you are a gay man or woman with a child in elementary school, I predict that by the time your child reaches college, we will have the vocabulary in place to describe the forms of emotional embezzlement used by people such as in cases like this – impoverishing the lives of some by stealing from their identity, their life-experiences, their relationships and relationship-networks, and their emotional lives in order to artificially enrich or enhance the experiences, reputation, political agenda, emotional or fantasy life, and/or identity of the ones who have taken what isn’t rightfully theirs.
Gays aren’t the only ones who don’t want to be forced to live someone else’s lie.
October 20th, 2011 | 1:51 pm
Boonton, what exactly is your argument for same-sex marriage? Driving around CT, I see bumper stickers that read “love makes a family.” This was the name of the now-defunt organization that was devoted to redefining marriage in CT, and eventually convinced our Supreme Court to do so. If this is the principle that motivates same-sex marriage, it is not clear to me why it excludes polygamy. Similarly with claims that “everyone has a right to marry who they love,” or “it does not personally effect you, so you should not care.” As to choice, some polygamists maintain that they are ‘born that way’ (see http://www.lovemore.com/faq.php#pio). Indeed, the best the courts have been able to muster by way of distinction is this from the CA Supreme Court: “Our nation’s culture has considered the latter types of relationships [polyamorous and incestuous relationships] inimical to the mutually supportive and healthy family relationships promoted by the constitutional right to marry.” The same, of course, could be said of homosexual relationships, but that did not seem to bother this court very much. If marriage is simply a contract between adults, what ‘harm’ occurs if it is three rather than two. People can only ‘give themselves’ to one other person? Are you sure about that? Is that true in every conceivable situation? What are your precise objections to polygamy? You simply assert that it has nothing to do with same-sex marriage, rather than actually explaining why it does not. Somehow I doubt that you’ll be leading the charge against polygamy when the debate comes up.
October 20th, 2011 | 2:14 pm
Blake –
In what way? An example would be helpful. Describe a typical case. If you could point to an actual, non-fictional instance (hint: “The Kids Are All Right” was a movie), it’d be even more awesome.
“Equal” in what sense? Considered for adoption? Is a child better off adopted by a gay couple or staying in an orphanage or foster care, for example?
I asked you for even one account of a child being ‘pressured’ to do so. You replied, basically, that you ‘just knew’ they had been.
October 20th, 2011 | 2:32 pm
Adoption is ruled by the needs of the child.
no such alteration has ever been proposed to this idea.
When a custody decision is called adoption, but it prioritizes the needs and well-being of the people who want to take possession of the child at the expense of the child, what we are talking about is not really adoption. It is selling human beings.
The problem here, and this has been pointed out to you numerous times on multiple threads which you refuse to answer, is that invaraibly you cannot divorce the willingness of guardians from the needs of the child. In abstract a child may be ideally raised by his biological father and mother, in reality if you have an unwilling or unable father then a willing stepfather is in the best interest of the child to have as an adoptive parent.
What does this have to do with SSM? Nothing. In regards to gays being parents, the fact is its almost impossible to have a situation where gays are becomming adoptive parents of children against the will of fit and willing biological parents.
Mike P
. If this is the principle that motivates same-sex marriage, it is not clear to me why it excludes polygamy.
Not for nothing but we’ve literally spent thousands of words on this over hundreds of posts and at the end of the day the only thing you’re willing to read from ‘the other side’ is a bumper sticker?
I know for a fact I’ve spent a great deal of time on this blog and others commenting on why I think there’s serious differences in the arguments for SSM and for polygamy. Have you really just come here recently? I mean I really don’t mind going through this all again, but next SSM thread that comes up must we pretend like its still all brand new?
October 20th, 2011 | 3:34 pm
“Equal” in what sense? Considered for adoption? Is a child better off adopted by a gay couple or staying in an orphanage or foster care, for example?
I wouldn’t mind letting gays adopt in situations where committed parents – willing to provide an intact family environment – aren’t available.
It’s having to pretend that having “two daddies” is somehow just as good as having a mom and a dad that I have a problem with.
It’s not just harmful to the kids. It’s harmful to the very concept of “truth”. When your government has the power to force you to say that something untrue is true, you’re in dystopia territory.
October 20th, 2011 | 3:36 pm
Adoption is ruled by the needs of the child.
no such alteration has ever been proposed to this idea.
Go back and review the history of gay rights vs. adoption agency concerns.
There is no argument that doesn’t boil down to one of the big two arguments, and both of those fall apart if you assume that kids matter as much as gays do.
Not even “more than” – just “as much as”.
October 20th, 2011 | 3:43 pm
No, Boonton, I’m not new here, but I do not read your personal blog. It’s not just a bumper sticker. It was the name of a prominent and successful gay rights group in CT. I assume that they meant what their name said when they picked that name. How many people in the gay rights movement would disagree with the sentiment that ‘love makes a family’? Not many. They embrace lazy platitudes that sound nice but have disturbing implications. That is, unless you don’t find polygamy disturbing (and most left-wing intellectuals do not).
October 20th, 2011 | 3:43 pm
The two arguments, btw:
(1) The “reverse the usual procedures/assumptions/burden of proof” argument:
“I don’t see why kids need X, therefore we should assume they don’t until and unless proven otherwise”
(In other words: I can adopt unless you can prove I shouldn’t – and of course if you try to prove I shouldn’t, then you’re a bigot and your evidence doesn’t count.)
(2)The “some pigs are more equal than others” argument:
“My rights as a gay person matter as much as anyone’s…” (In other words, kids have rights, I have rights, my rights matter more because gays are a protected identity group and kids are not.)
If there is an argument in favor of treating gay couples as equal to intact families – that doesn’t have some hidden variant on either of these two arguments – I’d be interested in hearing it.
October 20th, 2011 | 3:44 pm
Go back and review the history of gay rights vs. adoption agency concerns
Bzzzz fail.
If a kid has healthy, willing and fit biological parents why is he in an adoption agency?
October 20th, 2011 | 3:47 pm
It’s having to pretend that having “two daddies” is somehow just as good as having a mom and a dad that I have a problem with.
Bzzz Fail again. Who is being forced to take any side on this question? Were you forced to believe, for example, that your childhood wouldn’t have been better if you had a different set of parents than the ones you did? Even if you didn’t, many kids go thru at least periodic stages where they believe things like that. I’m unaware of how marriage laws prevent such beliefs let alone actually stake out a claim as to whether or not it maybe true in a particular case.
October 20th, 2011 | 4:19 pm
Bzzz Fail again. Who is being forced to take any side on this question?
Adoption should preference parents who are willing to do what is right for the child.
Any parent – whether gay or single – who isn’t willing to provide both a real mother and a real father for the child is not committed to the child’s best interests.
How much compromise should be allowed for genuinely unadoptable, unwanted children might be a debate worth having. But when we are talking about children who could be adopted by an intact family, and have a full and complete and rich family experience, then certainly a family that isn’t willing and able to provide that should not be counted as being “just as good”.
Such a family is not as good. They’re not committed and they aren’t providing an optimum environment.
Therefore, it’s not clear how these couples are “parents” at all. They’re not biologically parents, and they’re not parents-in-actions. They’re just people who bought kids.
Check out the plethora of gay couples who use their kids shamelessly in studies, YouTube videos, and films like “The Kids Are All Right” for proof that gay couples aren’t committed to the child’s well-being.
Gay persons who are ready to take on the responsibility of parenting must grow up, leave Fantasyland behind, and do what is right for the kid.
October 20th, 2011 | 4:25 pm
Go back and review the history of gay rights vs. adoption agency concerns
Bzzzz fail.
If a kid has healthy, willing and fit biological parents why is he in an adoption agency?
What does this have to do with the argument you are quoting?
October 20th, 2011 | 8:31 pm
Blake –
Example, please. At this point I’ll even settle for a hypothetical one, since clearly you can’t point to anything in reality.
What’s the proportion of ‘gay parents’ who labor to sever all ties with the other biological parent? Just a rough estimate would be fine, I know you can’t point to any actual numbers.
October 21st, 2011 | 6:38 am
Adoption should preference parents who are willing to do what is right for the child.
OK, tell me when have you ever heard of someone saying “I don’t want a kid, I don’t want to take care of a kid, I won’t do it no no no” and an adoption agency saying “you’re drafted to be a parent!”
Any parent – whether gay or single – who isn’t willing to provide both a real mother and a real father for the child is not committed to the child’s best interests.
The only people who can provide a ‘real mother/father’ are the real mother and father. If the kid is in an adoption agency, then by definition that option isn’t possible.
Or perhaps you mean that only male-female couples should adopt kids and, say, a single priest who adopts a kid is ‘denying’ the child a ‘real mother’ (meaning a woman who is not technically the kids biological mother). This gets the causality backwards. The hypothetical priest is not responsible if the kids biological mother is unavailable. Nor is he at fault for not being born a woman. Nor is he at fault if no woman willing to adopt the child can be found. You can only say he ‘denied the child a mother’ if he took some positive act that thwarted either the child’s biological mother or some fit potential adoptive mother from having the child.
Check out the plethora of gay couples who use their kids shamelessly in studies, YouTube videos, and films like “The Kids Are All Right” for proof that gay couples aren’t committed to the child’s well-being.
Exactly what proof this constitutes is beyond me. I notice you exhibit quite a double standard here. Kid saying he doesn’t like his gay parents, proof the gays are exploiting the kid. Kid saying he’s ok with his gay parents, proof the gays forced the kid to say that. Studies saying there’s no problem, proof the gays used their kids ‘shamelessly in studies’ (how exactly do you *use* your kid in a study anyway?). Fictional dramatic movie, well that’s proof too. While we’re at it, less include McDonald’s not keeping the beloved Shamerock Shake on the menu. More proof!
Here’s the rule, you don’t get to have any proof unless you first are willing to committ to an actual standard of proof. For example, if you want to say apples are unhealthy, you first must agree to some objective standard of what unhealthy is. If it is “associated with cancer, diabetes, obesity and/or heart disease” then if your study fails to show apples are associated with that you have no proof. You don’t get to decide the standards post hoc willy nilly.
Let’s also make a note how Blake has hijacked a SSM thread, once again, with a different issue, SSP (same-sex parenting).
October 21st, 2011 | 10:03 am
The only people who can provide a ‘real mother/father’ are the real mother and father. If the kid is in an adoption agency, then by definition that option isn’t possible.
Are you saying adoptive mothers aren’t “real”?
Your argument relies on pretending gender doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter. Well, if gender is irrelevant, then the laws don’t need to be changed – it doesn’t matter what gender your spouse is, as long as you are both loving people.
October 21st, 2011 | 10:26 am
Studies saying there’s no problem, proof the gays used their kids ‘shamelessly in studies’ (how exactly do you *use* your kid in a study anyway?).
Parents have an obligation to prioritize their child’s well-being, and that means considering the impact a study will have on a child’s life. The possibility that these children might have grief issues was apparently never even considered – this is no doubt related to the overt agenda present in these studies.
If we were talking about parents who were committed to using their kids to prove that a particular fundamentalist religious doctrine were the best one for raising kids – instead of your own particular religious views being defended – you would have no difficulty in seeing the problem.
The studies gays and lesbians have produced are blatant.
Every one I have seen has been conducted by a researcher with activist affiliations. It ought to be obvious that kids are going to be pressured inappropriately if the study is being conducted by someone who is “out” as a lesbian.
Every one I have seen has had questionable methodologies and inadequate controls.
Those studies you cite are pretty blatant. It ought to be obvious that questionnaires and interviews are just ridiculously inappropriate, for example.
Of course, there’s also the fact that the variables they study happen to be largely irrelevant – measuring things like GPA means little enough (seeing as how there is no direct correlation between GPA and happiness, or GPA and good parenting) but as a measure, it means even less when the parents know going in that this is what they are going to be evaluated on.
Where are the studies that measure the factors that are known to be issues with adopted or IVF kids, motherless or fatherless kids? That cuts a little too close to home, doesn’t it? The reason there are no studies probing for repressed grief or damaged identity is that gays know darned well their whole argument requires that the kids be measured according to drastically different standard than the ones gays use when measuring their own “issues”.
There is a narrative, and these kids aren’t permitted to deviate from it. I have witnessed with my own eyes how the “gay community” teaches that these children must fear Christians as people who desire to harm their parents, and this is used as a subtle weapon to keep the kids out of the “off limits” or taboo questions or thoughts.
That is why these children are giving answers that match exactly the answers that were decided on their behalf before they were even born.
October 21st, 2011 | 10:38 am
Are you saying adoptive mothers aren’t “real”?
Of course they are. But now we’re getting to the core of the problem with your argument, whose doing the denying here?
Consider my hypothetical of a priest who adopts a child. Is he denying the child a mother? Not unless he actively somehow thwarted, for no just reason, some woman, biological or adoptive, taking the role of mother in the child’s life. He hasn’t denied the child a mother, though, because he wasn’t born a woman or because he decides his obigation to the adoptive child doesn’t require him to leave the priesthood and marry a woman and so on.
Your argument relies on pretending gender doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter. Well, if gender is irrelevant, then the laws don’t need to be changed – it doesn’t matter what gender your spouse is, as long as you are both loving people.
Wait are you talking about adoption law, adoption procedures or marriage law?
October 21st, 2011 | 10:53 am
Exactly what proof this constitutes is beyond me. I notice you exhibit quite a double standard here. Kid saying he doesn’t like his gay parents, proof the gays are exploiting the kid.
I will admit I have never heard a kid saying he does not like his gay parents.
Nor have I ever seen any film footage of people lining kids up to testify against their gay parents.
October 21st, 2011 | 10:59 am
Here’s the rule, you don’t get to have any proof unless you first are willing to committ to an actual standard of proof.
I use as my standards of proof the same rules that custody decision-makers use.
Gays are the ones who want special exemptions.
As far as your “double standard”, I have already linked here numerous names of very legitimate titles on the study of that form of child abuse which is known as “parentification”. It is my assertion that the pressure being put on these kids to affirm their parents as parents is an example of parentification, and those books I linked (or you can go to Amazon.com and type in “parentification” and choose the book of your choice) is the standard I wish to have my assertion compared against.
I also wish it to be noted that every family court in all 50 states (and possessions) recognizes the child as having the legal rights I keep yammering on about. What I ask for is not a special rule to keep gays from adopting or from using IVF: it is only that they be required to follow the same rules (as far as what constitutes “good parenting”) that hetero parents are expected to adhere to.
October 21st, 2011 | 12:27 pm
Blake –
Of course, the evidence you submit for this is the studies that find that “children of gays are [slightly] more mature than ordinary kids”.
So, the studies that find that homeschooled children are more mature (e.g. http://learninfreedom.org/socialization.html or https://www.hslda.org/docs/nche/000000/00000068.asp ) are likewise evidence those children are being abused, right?
Right?
October 21st, 2011 | 12:39 pm
Exactly what rules are hetero parents required to adhere too? I know two different familes that adopted. I’m aware of no law that required them to notify their kids that they were adopted, to assist them in finding their ‘real parents’ or to allow the kids to not refer to them as ‘mom’ or ‘dad’.
When I do a quick search on ‘parentification’ I find it defined as forcing a child to take on adult roles before they are emotionally or physically capable of doing so. I agree with you, that should not be done to kids. But it seems the type of thing that is remarkably case by case centered.
In other words, take an adult putting a lit cigarette out on a child’s skin. I can pretty much say such a thing would be child abuse anytime anywhere. “Taking on adult roles before they are able”, though, is a very vague concept that seems to require examining each case on an individual basis to me. Sure I’ll go along it can be child abuse. It can also be not child abuse depending on the family, circumstances, context and so on. I also don’t see anything about it that particularly relates to SSM, SSP, homo or hetero parents or adoptive versus biological parents.
October 21st, 2011 | 12:50 pm
To be more specific, I think I’ve witness ‘parentification child abuse’ first hand. It was the first Christmas after my brother-in-law left his wife. My mother-in-law (his mother) passed away just a week after and his wife and kids were all living with us so it was a very emotionally raw Christmas. After the gift exchange, she took him into her area and tried to get the kids to read these letters she had them write about how bad they felt he walked out. They broke down and couldn’t do it, she yelled at them and then he hollared at her and then stormed out before any of us could do anything. Crappy times all around.
Bad? Yes. “Parentification” Sure, and probably very, very common. Kids being pushed to enlist themselves in taking sides in the adult relationship of their parents. Child abuse? Well yes but I don’t think it merited a complaint to child services or a criminal investigation. Parents are human and there’s not many ways to dissolve a marriage without the emotions leaking out. In terms of the gov’t that was really an issue of ‘mind your own business’. Now if it continued and she kept trying to force the kids to read their dad the riot act and it kept causing emotional distress to an extreme level then we might have a problem that would merit state intervention.
So in general I’d be careful where I tread with pushing this idea as a way to oppose SSM. The road your going down sounds to me like trying to micromanage family life with regulators telling parents not only of SSM couples but just about all adoptive and blended families how they should handle the questions about biological parents and the circumstances of the family.
October 22nd, 2011 | 1:24 am
To be more specific, I think I’ve witness ‘parentification child abuse’ first hand.
So?
It doesn’t change the fact that people can still ask, straight-faced, ‘how can I possibly prove that gays can raise kids with two daddies if we’re not allowed to use our kids in social experiments?’
As if the kid exists for you to use that way. As if the kid has no life of his own, but is just an NPC in YOUR role playing game.
There are lots of parents who mistreat their kids in lots of ways. But gay marriage can’t exist without exploitation. Whereas real marriage preserves family units, gay marriage is inherently parasitic.
Or put it another way: would you be willing to drop the entire gay marriage debate if studies proved that not having access to gay marriage doesn’t affect gay workers’ productivity at all? Of course not. That misses the whole point, doesn’t it? It’s about rights, and things we have reasons to value – specifically (and this list comes straight from the mouths and pens of gay activists):
– the right to not live a lie
– the recognition that nobody should be treated like a second class citizen
– the right to not be deprived of significant, socially valued relationships
By those standards – the standards that gays themselves use – what they are doing to their children is a violation of basic human rights – that is, “civil rights”.
Living the myth that a child “has two daddies” – and that “having two daddies” does not involve grief and loss – is living a lie.
Being deprived of legal rights that other children have is to be treated like a second class citizen.
And having a mother-relationship, father-relationship, same-sex parent, and opposite-sex parent – these are all valuable relationships, and to deprive a child of any one of them is at least as serious as depriving anyone of a spouse.
To which the gay rights activist casually justifies. “Lots of kids are raised without one parent,” they say. Well, by that token, lots of people don’t get married, too.
Gays want to treat parenting as an “experience” that they are “entitled to”. But gay marriage doesn’t work if we recognize that children are people too, and that what is abusive for a grown man doesn’t stop being abusive just because you’re doing it to a helpless kid – a kid that you’re claiming to be taking care of.
In what sense these people think they are parents is beyond me. They don’t even recognize the difference between “to care for” vs. “to use”. They are users and takers, not parents. You can come up with as many examples of individuals who abuse their kids and it won’t change the fact that what gays want to do to and with their kids shows that they don’t even understand what parenting is: they lack the maturity to even play the role of the adult in a relationship.
October 24th, 2011 | 9:28 am
To reiterate the question I asked before: What’s the proportion of ‘gay parents’ who labor to sever all ties with the other biological parent?
Thankfully that doesn’t happen. At least, you’ve presented not even a single actual example of it.
Wow, I already need to repeat the question again? What’s the proportion of ‘gay parents’ who labor to sever all ties with the other biological parent?
October 24th, 2011 | 11:42 am
I think we are at an end here. Blake has admitted he’s ok with Same Sex Parenting. He has certain ideas about how SSP need to approach the issue of how SSPs should treat the issue of biological parenthood with their children….how do they explain the status of where their bio-parents are and why they are being raised by SSP rather than bio-parents and such….
I fully agree with him that if this issue is approached very badly it could rise to the level of child abuse. Just as you can have cases where divorcing parents end up inflicting child abuse on their kids either intentionally or unintentionally. In those cases you cannot speak in generalities but address specific cases as they may arise.
October 24th, 2011 | 4:58 pm
I’ve always thought that polygamy is just formalized (and legalized) adultery. That is, if the adultery in question lasts a bit, which in many cases, it does.
And if polygamy were legalized, I bet there would be an increasing number of women who would settle for an arrangement of sorts, that is, a trio. The man doesn’t leave his wife, he never promises that and fails on his promises, nor does he end his adultery, he makes his lover into a second wife.
Now, the majority of adulterers need the farce and the lies to cover up the lover, otherwise they imperil the relationship with the wife they are duping (or half-duping, or not even duping at all). But simply having to acknowledge that there is adultery can make some wives snap. While the pretense that it’s not happening is stronger, some people bear with it. Then there are money issues which get more complicated with polygamy.
You know how asinine homosexual activists complain about a heteronormative society? Well, polygamists should use the same symbolic language to make us laugh– like a “couplenormative” society is so unfair and oppressive.
And the poor polygamists are being treated like second-class citizens because of those horrible Christian bullies who don’t let them redefine marriage. Of course, anyone who does not approve of polygamy is nothing but an intolerant bigot. But you already knew that.
October 24th, 2011 | 5:12 pm
Ray -To reiterate the question I asked before: What’s the proportion of ‘gay parents’ who labor to sever all ties with the other biological parent?
If you are so interested in the answer, why don’t you provide it?
Surely, you’re such an unbiased, reliable source of information on the issue, aren’t you?
I mean, you do know everything that is happening to every child ever adopted by homosexuals, don’t you?
And if I were able to find some children who had polygamous parents and these children were doing OK, surely this proves that both polygamy and homosexual marriage are A-OK, doesn’t it?
Actually, I’m waiting for the APA to come out with a statement saying that many polygamists live happy, productive lives “just like the rest of us.” Therefore, there cannot be anything wrong with polygamy! And because the desire for wanting polygamy cannot be categorized as a mental illness, this alone means it’s psychologically and emotionally A-OK in every way. So says the criteria from the APA!
If this kind of shpiel works for people with a disoriented sexuality, it certainly could work for polygamy!
October 25th, 2011 | 1:42 pm
Bob
I think the issue with polygamy is more complicated. The fact is legally marriage is today structured as a two person partnership. Gender roles were ditched from marriage law quite a while ago but the number set up wasn’t ditched.
So with legal polygamy you’re confronted with the very real issue of how exactly would it work, which you’re not with SSM. Its roughly analgous to the NFL allowing women to play professional football. You may note its probably not a good idea to have female football players in the NFL but the way a football game would work wouldn’t fundamentally change. Of course you may feel it would ruin the quality of football games, but the game itself would still work the same way. But what if the NFL opted to allow 3 teams to play each other at the same time? If you think about that, you’ll realize while you could probably create a ’3 team football’, it would obviously not work according to current NFL Rules. What rules would it work with? There’s probably an infinite number of possibilities.
So with legal polygamy, how exactly would it work? For example, today in a marriage if one spouse dies, the other inherits their assets and most of their debts. What happens in a 3-person marriage? Do they split evenly? Does seniority have an impact? Or what about divorce. Today if one person wants a divorce, that’s it the marriage ends. What happens in 3-way marriage? Do the remaining two people remain married or do they all become single again and have to form a new marriage if the two want to be married? Are new members added with the permission of all or some of the members of the polygamous marriage?
So all this then leads to the fact that there is no polygamy to implement. There’s a huge grouping of potential systems that you could classify as polygamy and since there’s no way for the current structure of marriage law to accomodate any of them, you’d have to pick one type of polygamy and mount an argument for adopting it.
What may be confusing is that in earlier ages when you had strict gender roles set down in marriage law, it was really a ‘redefinition’ to have SSM but not one to have polygamy! For example, if you have marriage law set up with stict roles for the husband and strictly *different* roles for the wife, then SSM becomes problematic (whose the wife? whose the husband? the legal structure requires both roles be assigned to different people!) but not polygamy. A man with two wives simply serves as husband while the wives serve as wives. But gender roles in marriage started disappearing not in the 1960′s but more like the 1860′s if not before. To put them back into marriage law would require a true ‘redefinition’. SSM, quite frankly, doesn’t. Maybe it does to accept on the theological level or the social level or the personal level, but that’s not the gov’ts problem.
October 26th, 2011 | 2:17 pm
Bob – I mean, you do know everything that is happening to every child ever adopted by homosexuals, don’t you?
Nope. On the other hand, I’m not making sweeping generalizations that would require knowing that.
Blake, on the other hand, is.
Well, it would certainly call into question the idea that polygamy was universally harmful to kids. It would make such arguments harder to mount.
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