My Rebuttal

Some random drive-byer has posed what I’m sure he thinks is a rhetorical, unanswerable question on my comment board, regarding my position on gay marriage. In the future, posts of this nature from people I don’t know will meet an ignoble end in the form of my dashboard’s ‘trash’ icon. However, this one time, I’m going to offer a rebuttal. I’m doing this for two reasons: One, to disprove his false premise that this is in any way an issue of equal rights, and two, because people on my side of this debate are too often intimidated into silence by language of the type used here (which equates, by insinuation, the pro-marriage position with discrimination and inequality). Here’s the comment in question:

"It looks like you don't support gay marriage and I wonder why you don't think everyone should have equal rights?"

Despite hysterical claims to the contrary, this debate isn’t about equal rights. The members of the gay community are not second class citizens; they can work, go to school, exercise, play sports, worship, eat in restaurants, buy and sell property, and in general go about their lives exactly the same as I can. Society does not forbid them their choice of partner, no more than it does me mine. And they are perfectly entitled to marry anyone they want, provided that person is of the opposite sex, since that is an immutable, defining characteristic of the relationship called ‘marriage’. A homosexual and myself are both completely equal in that regard; we are both entitled to marry any person of the opposite sex who will have us, and both totally unable to have the same type of relationship with a person of our own gender. That is the very definition of equality.

Furthermore, the term ‘marriage’ is not something that can be applied with any meaning to any relationship other than a heterosexual one. Marriage in a societal sense exists to reign in the (very different) male and female reproductive strategies; this is for the benefit of the couple, yes, but much more importantly, for the benefit of any offspring that pair produces. Since homosexual couples do not have competing reproductive drives, and by their very nature cannot produce children without outside assistance, the relationship of marriage cannot (and never can) be used to describe a homosexual couple, no matter how committed to each other they might be.

Like it or not, that’s not something that can ever be changed. Even if we all agreed tomorrow to call homosexual relationships ‘marriages’, all we’d be doing is playing word games, because traditional marriages will always be fundamentally different. No matter what some uninformed voter or activist judge decides tomorrow, people of the same gender can no more engage in a marriage than I can mortgage my wife or marry a piece of real estate. And the law would not be promoting inequality by refusing to allow me to label those sorts of relationships in those ways; I’d simply be delusional for trying to apply those labels where they clearly do not fit.

I’d really like to leave it there, but I don’t think the danger that this whole concept poses to society can be overstated. Over the last 50 years, marriage has already been dramatically weakened, going from something that a man and woman must enter into before having sex and having children to something that is looked on as optional or old-fashioned. This has had ruinous results. The number of single-parent households has skyrocketed since the 60’s, and the children raised in these households live in poverty, commit crimes, go to prison, and abuse drugs at rates exponentially higher than their dual-parent counterparts. While gay marriage might conceivably produce a very few stable homes for adopted children, the cheapening of traditional marriage, and the resultant damage to future generations, would far outweigh that single, debatable benefit.

Think I’m wrong? Look at what’s happened to marriage in the Netherlands.

I could go on, but I think that’s enough of a response to a one-sentence drive-by. Any further comments on the subject by people I don’t know are simply going to go the way of the dodo. Sorry, the First Amendment doesn’t protect your right to free speech on a private blog- only I do. And the only speech I’m protecting is that from people I know. Deal with it.

So, I guess we'll talk about the weekend sometime later, then. Hope everyone had a good one.