You seem to present it as an either/or decision but I just don’t see that

But that’s precisely my point. You do seem to see it as “either/or”. Either you can have chicken sandwich appreciation days and constitutional amendments regarding IVF, or you can do it against gay marriage… but not both.

At least, as I said, I see no evidence whatsoever that anyone’s actually doing both. Can you point to even one? Everyone seems to treat it as “either/or”… why?

and usually I don’t first seek the advice of someone taking an opposing position about how to defeat the position they adopt.

If you’re right, then it’s a good thing if you win. If I’m right, I can trust the reasoning and arguments that convinced me of that to convince others. It’s a win-win for me.

And most primarily, I’m not trying to give you advice on how to win. I’m trying to understand an element of your ‘strategy’ that makes no Earthly (or especially supernatural) sense. Maybe if you could explain the logic of it, I’d be convinced of your position.

You seem to present it as an either/or decision but I just don’t see that and usually I don’t first seek the advice of someone taking an opposing position about how to defeat the position they adopt. The Spartans were in coalition with the Athenians and contributed to the defeat of the Persians. I am thinking of their unity, not their division.

I do oppose surrogacy, IVF, etc. , like I said.

By ‘not liking it’, or by taking concrete political action, though?

See, it’s the priorities I don’t understand. If you are correct, then surrogacy and IVF are already causing harm, and more than gay marriage ever could by itself. Why waste effort on it when you could be attacking a more important problem, that also affects ‘gay marriage’ the way you’d like?

I mean, if you manage to convince people of the evils of IVF and surrogacy and sperm donation, you do a lot of good by your lights. Not only do you block any prospective gay marriages from availing themselves of those techniques, but far more important (or at least numerous) you block innumerable straight marriages from sinning. And spreading your viewpoint on those issues would, allegedly, also fight gay marriage by cementing public opinion on the goods and nature of marriage.

I mean, seriously – this seems like basic, even obvious strategy to me. I have a very difficult time grasping why churches aren’t lobbying for legislation and constitutional amendments on these grounds, if they actually believe what they say they believe.

The Spartan comparison is a side issue – I was trying to point out that, if you want to claim a metaphoric parallel, you’d best pick one more wholly worth emulating – e.g. the Athenians, who not only fought a desperate, brave, battle – but won, too.

I’ll assume your assumption is genuine. I do oppose surrogacy, IVF, etc. , like I said. A redefining of marriage to include homosexual marriage necessarily cuts off the biological nexus to children. This is a reaching beyond a generous, godly tolerance toward homosexual neighbors to an ungenerous abandonment of children, so it is not essentially generous. This redefinition would effectively separate the concept of marriage and child rearing formally and no doubt socially and would begin to make scenarios like those in Plato’s Republic or in Brave New World more eminent, more possible. 

You earlier accused me of being desperate for a fight by turning to little battles but here you would like to confound my plain, simple statements with pettifogging distinctions. But if we must, it was not only the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae but also 700 Thespians, 400 Thebans and possibly several hundred others, and the Spartans were part of a larger coalition of Greeks and the other Greeks identified with the Spartans  as their own in certain ways, at least when it came to standing against the Persians. While the Spartans had an atrocious slave culture, it is no less true it seems to me to say that they took a stand for freedom than to say that the founding fathers of America took a stand for freedom. But if you like, I could liken the counsel to be overcome by perceived power rather than truth to counseling the helots not to resist Spartan oppression because the Spartan upperclass were an irresistible whelming current against which a larger lower class could not stand.

The author uses money as an example of a socially-created institution. “If everybody
stops believing it is money, it ceases to function as money, and eventually ceases
to be money…” Marriage is likewise constituted (one of the reasons weddings are public is because it makes sure the community knows that the couple is married) socially.

But the fundamental understanding of money has changed without changing the function of it in any material way. Originally money was valuable in itself, gold or silver or something like that. It would be traded for goods and services. Then we got paper money, which was functionally an IOU – you could trade it for something tangible like gold. It was just more convenient to carry around.

And then we went off the gold standard, and ‘money’ is now a much more fluid concept, mostly defined in terms of its (fluctuating) relative value to goods and other currencies.

And yet… if you took someone from the ‘gold standard’ days in a time machine up to today, and showed them people paying cash for things, they wouldn’t be shocked or confused. It’d look quite familiar to them. They’d probably even get used to the notion of debit cards in short order, too.

So, while the author can assert that changing (expanding?) the underlying definition of marriage must change the practice thereof… his main illustrative example doesn’t support that contention.

For example, he states that “Man/woman marriage is the only institution that can
confer the status of husband and wife, that can transform a male into a husband (a social identity quite different from “partner”), and thus that can transform males into husband/fathers”.

But he doesn’t go on to explain why allowing marriage between ‘persons’ would in any way impact the terminology or social understanding in the case where males and females marry.

Sure, going off the gold standard changed several government monetary policies. But… it didn’t change the main use-case for money, spending it. So I think I need a more detailed cause-and-effect relation as to how the negative effects Stewart anticipates will actually come about.

Instability is part of what “same-sex relationships” mean. Disrupted homosexual relationships are the norm in the lifestyle. Let’s look at some scientific research that demonstrates this.

One of the largest studies of same-sex couple revealed that only seven of the 156 couples had a totally exclusive sexual relationship. The majority of relationships lasted less than five years. Couples with a relationship lasting more than five years incorporated some provision for outside sexual activity in their relationship. The researchers stated, “The single most important factor that keeps couples together past the 10-year mark is the lack of possessiveness. . . . Many couples learn very early in their relationship that ownership of each other sexually can be the greatest internal threat to their staying together.”[i]

Partner instability is also present in lesbian relationships. In a 2010, in a peer-reviewed journal, that shows lesbian relationships to be statistically less stable than heterosexual relationships.[ii]

In a 2010 report, the US National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study, 40 percent of the couples who had conceived a child by artificial insemination had broken up.[iii] Lisa Diamond reported in her book, Sexual Fluidity, that “more than two-thirds of the women in my sample had changed their identity labels at least once after the first interview. The women who kept the same identity for the whole ten years proved to be the smallest and most atypical group.”

Babies need to be protected from such unstable relationships that cause serious psychological harm by deliberately depriving them either of a mother or a father.

[i] McWhirter, D. and Mattison, A. 1985. The Male Couple: How Relationships Develop. Prentice Hall.
[ii] Schumm, W. (2010) Comparative Relationship Stability of
Lesbian Mother and Heterosexual Mother Families: A Review of Evidence Marriage and Family Review, 46: 499-509.
[iii] Gartrell, N. & Bos, H. (2010) US national Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study: Psychological Adjustment of 17-year-old Adolescents, Pediatrics, Volume 126, Number 1, July 2010, 28-36.

Read the papers that I link to above and learn the problems of your catagory error’s.

Then and only then will you be able to see clearly enough…

First, I want gay couples to be held to the same standards as stepparents when it comes to respect, recognition, and resources. If marriage ‘isn’t procreative’ this shouldn’t be a big deal.

Which would be a big step up from where it stands now in places like Michigan and Virginia.

Now, what if the other biological parent voluntarily relinquishes parental rights? (Note that this happens pretty frequently with girls giving up children for adoption.) Would you ban that generally, or just in the case of gay unions?

It is a violation of their right to religious belief to force them to recognize a gay union as equal to a procreative one.

Oh, well, that’s easy, then. Hasn’t happened to Westboro Baptist, so it won’t happen to you. You’ve got nothing to worry about. You can still tell a random gay couple in the park, or even your own child, that they aren’t “really married”.

Glad we’ve got that behind us!

Gay rights probably wouldn’t even be a battle if not for the prior weakening of marriage.

Careful of your phrasing. Do you specifically mean “gay rights to marriage“? Or ‘gay rights’ generally – like, say, to association or employment or housing? I’ll assume you mean the former for now.

Demands for gay rights are based on a weak marriage model.

So strengthen marriage. Fight against IVF and surrogacy and divorce. If you’re right, you’ll do far more good there than fighting against just ‘gay marriage’ ever could. As I’ve pointed out, any progress you make on those fronts will automatically mitigate the negative impacts you see from ‘gay marriage’.

And since ‘gay marriage’ is always going to be dwarfed by the heterosexual kind, comparisons about splinters and beams come to mind.

In the fight against abortion, activists don’t like to be called ‘anti-abortion’. They prefer ‘pro-life’, and strive to present a better model. Present a better model for marriage, make it attractive, and – by your own words above – you solve the ‘gay marriage’ ‘problem’.

You could similarly have asked the Greeks at Thermopylae if it was worth fighting against the hordes of Persians for freedom.

Um… you might want to be more careful of your metaphors, too. The Spartans at Thermopylae weren’t fighting for freedom. Certainly not for the helots that formed the vast majority of their society. (Like the two thousand luggage-bearing slaves they put on the front-line – unarmored and barely armed – as sword-fodder.)

I don’t think those guys are the ones you want to emulate or invoke.

http://www.marriagelawfoundation.org/publications/Facts.pdf

Both these and more can be found at

http://www.marriagelawfoundation.org/index.html