Our Biggest Weakness: Same Sex Marriage Blogalogue

Tony, thanks for the article.

My response to the article is that, for heterosexuals, the need for strict marriage law is the same as ever before. Birth control has not stopped heterosexuals from reproducing billions of babies worldwide, and contracepted women average two pregnancies over the course of their lifetimes.

Next, the fact that people no longer frown upon out-of-wedlock births is not progress, but regress. Single parenting is tough work, and is perhaps the largest single predictor of future troubled kids. Single parenting involves a severely weakened economic environment, disciplinary environment, legal environment, and supervisory environment---and these are the key ingredients of poverty and delinquency. Such a weakened developmental environment hurts both kids and the single parent who has to spend long decades scrambling to raise the children alone.

While it's true that people no longer *think* of sex as being linked with procreation, the reality is that heterosexual sexuality continues to be linked with procreation, and so we still need traditional marriage laws to protect the economic dependents (i.e, women and children) created during sex acts.

Next, the article says: "The only way to strengthen the older form of marriage...would require repealing no-fault divorce laws." Obviously, I concur. In fact, justice with regards to contract law demands that no party has the right to economically injure another party with no penalty.

The idea of a single parent who both makes a stable income and raises infants at the same time is a myth. In reality, that single parent either shoves the kids off to grandma and granddad 8 hours a day, or else that parent forks over 1/2 of his or her annual salary to a full time nanny. The loss of the original deserting partner *must* be replaced one way or another, at great personal trouble and cost to the responsible single parent.

Panthera,

I've enjoyed the back and forth, and wish to make this my final post for a while as well.

I hope gays can appreciate that most arguments for defending traditional marriage law have nothing at all to do with gays, but rather with the unique material and economic needs of heterosexual women and children. Gays and heterosexuals have very different outcomes to their coupling, and thus the contracts are naturally very different in what they need to stipulate and obligate for the partners. I think that civil unions make sense, given that forcing identical contract stipulations for remarkably different enterprises directly harms heterosexual couples and their children. (Different enterprises require different legal stipulations.)

I'm glad we agree that divorce ought to be rare, but it is laws that shape, inform, and ultimately control behavior in people. So, any marriage law for heterosexuals that permits easy divorce and stipulates nothing with regard to children will logically and inevitably expose heterosexual couples to mass easy desertion. (For sex is easy, but the family obligations that result from heterosexual sex are difficult and life-long---and attraction and romance alone provide only weak and short-lived bonds, thus the need for legal bonds.)

You said: "maybe you should consider another approach to achieving our mutual goals of a safe, sane, loving environment for marriage and the children who sometimes result." Well, just as you recognize the importance of law for your cause and agenda, I likewise recognize the importance of law for my cause and agenda. So, I see no reason to "consider another approach," given that we both agree law matters above all else. We are both seeking LEGAL remedies.

Finally, heterosexuals are indeed wildly fertile, even if less so than the Islamists, who do not attempt to sterilize themselves. So long as heterosexuals continue to be tasked by nature with the procreation and nurture of the next billion citizens of our planet, those heterosexuals and their kids desperately need good laws that *prohibit* spousal desertion of children and build the long-range expectation of family duties. Sadly, gay marriage law does neither, for gay marriage is a short-range romance contract, not a life-long child-raising contract.

Finally, although I've had nothing to say about the breeding habits of different ethnic groups, and since you mentioned it, I feel the need to say that population equals destination. If one group wildly outbreeds another and migrates towards the same living space, the group with the larger population dominates and obtains the rule of authority over the territory and the other groups. That's just the way all populations work on this planet we all occupy. So, dwindling populations in the West equate to the impending collapse of the Western peoples by mere attrition. It's impossible for it to be reversed, given our low birth rates. The West is contracepting itself out of existence and out of a future.

So, Is thing really gonna happen?

I admit I feel duped, I began reading then find myself checking each day to see a response.

Has it been put to death yet as a good idea that just couldn't do anywhere?