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JimG
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A rational judge should not make assumptions about what effect same sex marriage will or will not have in the future. He is basing his assertions on his own assumptions.
Arguments against gay marriage "not those of serious people"?
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SMGS127
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To be fair, he does have case studies involving several countries and several American states from which to derive evidence from.
Obviously I’m not endorsing SSM, I’m just saying that it’s not like there aren’t case studies.
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SMGS127
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There is no evidence that being exposed to homosexuality changes sexual orientation in children. In fact, the fact that homosexuals are raised by heterosexuals 99% of the time would seem to disprove this theory.
It’s not hard to see how a simple error in-utero could cause a child to develop the hormonal responses to the “wrong” pheromones based on their gender. And original sin causes birth defects all the time.
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JimG
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I would recommend to him a couple of other sources about the effect of family stability on civilization, and the effects of the sexual revolution on marriage and family stability. The first is Carle Zimmerman’s “Family and Civilization,” the second is Mary Eberstadt’s “Adam and Eve After the Pill.”
The Eberstadt book shows the documented deleterious effects of contraception and sexual license on marriage and family. They are not good. The Zimmerman book shows the effects of family stability on civilizational stability, covering several millennia. Same sex ‘marriage’ is simply one more step in the loss of the meaning of marriage. The previous steps began with contraception and continued through the deconstruction of marriage during the sexual revolution.
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SMGS127
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I don’t disagree with you that two people of the same sex cannot enter into a marriage.
HOWEVER, based on the American legal definition of marriage, which simply describes itself as a commitment ceremony with tax benefits, he has case studies on whether SSM further declines the meaning of marriage. And it does not. Marriage has already been so eroded of all meaning that SSM is completely logical based on the American understanding of it.
If we had a true, theological definition of marriage installed legally, you would have a much sounder argument.
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JimG
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Well, this amounts pretty much to a contention that marriage has already been destroyed, so gay marriage is not capable of harming it further.
My point is that marriage has up until recently always been understood as a conjugal institution, protected by the state only because of its conjugal and procreative purposes. This has been the case for thousands of years, in societies that recognized polygamy or monogamy. Even societies which accepted same sex relationships did not accord them the status of marriage. Because they were not conjugal or procreative, they were of no interest to the government.
The conjugal view of marriage wasn’t theological. It wasn’t religious. It was just based on the fact that there were men and women and their union created children, and children are needed for the continuance of the state, which therefore had an interest in marriage and family stability.
Beginning with the Protestant cave-in in 1930, widespread acceptance of contraception itself began to destroy the conjugal and procreative meaning of marriage, because it delinked marriage and children, turning children into optional commodities. We’ve gone much further than that now in the sexual revolution.
So I take it the judge’s point of view is just from the past 60 years. Conjugal marriage, which has been the norm for millennia, is now already destroyed, so there is no further need to accord it state protection. I presume then that the state no longer has an interest in family or societal stability.
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TK421
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A small minority of people are homosexual, but a much larger percent is presumably at least somewhat bisexual.
The problem here is that the present permissive, hedonistic culture has very little field experience with just how strong cultural inhibition and example can be in helping to tame sexuality, because right now, the average youth growing up is going to have their sex drive hooked up to a microphone, thanks to outside influences encouraging it and stimulating it. This is a far cry from a time when you could draw a picture of a woman’s breasts on the wall of a cathedral of all places and get away with it. How? Because the culture wasn’t hypersexualized.
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SMGS127
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TK421
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I can’t decisively prove my point, but numbers on LGBT individuals are going to be very sketchy. The best science on human sexuality tells that our sexuality is more like a scale than it is a polemic. You have X people that identify themselves as bisexual, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t higher potential. We’re moving into uncharted territory right now, but based on previous homoerotic cultures, there were seemingly much more than a measly 3% that were willing to engage in that kind of thing. We musn’t forget that while we started calling the West “post Christian” after WW2, even W. Europe is still heavily influenced by centuries of its influence, including among secular people. Yes, they are permissive towards LGBT, but they’re still a ways off from the degradation of previous cultures.
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MarkInOregon
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View attachment 20264
Don’t know if this worked but the attached is from the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. Been a while since I read it but possibly something in here may speak to what the judge said.
The peace of Christ,
Mark
Don’t know if this worked but the attached is from the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. Been a while since I read it but possibly something in here may speak to what the judge said.
The peace of Christ,
Mark
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JimG
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The referenced article argues for the conjugal view of marriage, which has the weight of history and civilization behind it. To this view is opposed the current and more recent revisionist view which sees marriage merely as a union of two persons with feelings of intimacy toward each other and is recognized as a contractual relationship by the state.
The paper is well argued. However, I suspect that it is the sort of argument that would be called “unserious” by the judge. He would give little credence to the civilizational weight of traditional marriage, but would instead give credence to studies done in the past twenty years. He would give little weight to the statistics of decline documented in Mary Eberstadt’s “Adam and Eve After the Pill” since she is documenting the disastrous effects of a contraceptive culture and the sexual revolution rather than same sex marriage specifically. But in fact it is all of a piece. Same sex unions are merely a contnuation of the decline that she documents.
Nor would he likely give much credence to Carle Zimmerman’s massive study of “Family and Civilization,” disregarding it as mere history, with which the law cannot concern itself. But societies are affected by changes in family stability regardless of whether the law recognizes it. The effects are real.
I would expect that studies of the effect of gay marriage done in the recent past would reflect the fact that marriage is already in serious decline compared to the earlier years of the 20th century when divorce was uncommon as was out of wedlock pregnancy. Studies done in the recent past are measuring from an already debased baseline. They start from a state of marriage in serious decline and ask, how did same sex marriage make it worse? Well, not much. Will studies done a hundred years from now show that same sex marriage had little impact? Or will they show that it simply accelerated the decline of marriage?
The paper is well argued. However, I suspect that it is the sort of argument that would be called “unserious” by the judge. He would give little credence to the civilizational weight of traditional marriage, but would instead give credence to studies done in the past twenty years. He would give little weight to the statistics of decline documented in Mary Eberstadt’s “Adam and Eve After the Pill” since she is documenting the disastrous effects of a contraceptive culture and the sexual revolution rather than same sex marriage specifically. But in fact it is all of a piece. Same sex unions are merely a contnuation of the decline that she documents.
Nor would he likely give much credence to Carle Zimmerman’s massive study of “Family and Civilization,” disregarding it as mere history, with which the law cannot concern itself. But societies are affected by changes in family stability regardless of whether the law recognizes it. The effects are real.
I would expect that studies of the effect of gay marriage done in the recent past would reflect the fact that marriage is already in serious decline compared to the earlier years of the 20th century when divorce was uncommon as was out of wedlock pregnancy. Studies done in the recent past are measuring from an already debased baseline. They start from a state of marriage in serious decline and ask, how did same sex marriage make it worse? Well, not much. Will studies done a hundred years from now show that same sex marriage had little impact? Or will they show that it simply accelerated the decline of marriage?
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50yroldTOBfan
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No, he doesn’t. Because no meaningful evidence exists yet of the long term effects of homosexualizing marriage in the USA, since it has only been legislated a decade or less. The data that does exist from other countries like in Scandinavia tends to support the belief that homosexualizing marriage weakens the concept of marriage/family/procreation/stability.
So what little data there is, tends to support the traditional marriage argument.
I think JimG is absolutely right. The judge is simply saying that he doesn’t THINK redefining marriage will affect straight people’s perception of marriage. Just like advocates of no-fault divorce didn’t THINK it would raise the divorce rate significantly. Oops.
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EasterJoy
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Actually, the Church backed the successful challenge of California’s miscengenation law in 1948:
laalmanac.com/vitals/vi70.htm
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EasterJoy
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Same-sex marriage:
- Normalizes sexual relations which are disordered. This is quite different from refraining to criminalize them.
- Makes disordered sexual relations the equivalent of natural relations.
- In making inherently infecund relations the equivalent of fecund relations, removes openness to fecundity as a reason for marriage.
- Encourages out-of-wedlock pregnancy through gamete donation and surrogacy
- Diminishes the importance of biological parents in the lives of their children, instead implying the parental role is a “caretaking” role that can be fulfilled equally well by anyone, regardless of whether the child’s parents are living and able to be in their lives.
- Further ingrains the lie of divorce, particularly no-fault divorce, which is that family members are interchangeable and replaceable, as suits the adults of the household.
- Further ingrains the lie that a child has no right to expect to have been conceived within marriage and raised by his or her own parents.
- Further ingrains the lie that children are among the optional accoutrements of marriage, not an essential good of marriage.
- Further ingrains the idea that children are a “thing” to want or not want, whose right to exist and even whose will to exist of course depends upon being “wanted,” rather than human persons whose intrinsic dignity is reason enough for their full inclusion into and welcome by society.
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Rau
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From a secular perspective, the State need only use a different name - something other than marriage - to apply to same sex persons, to achieve a rational outcome. That would eliminate secular arguments against such unions, which would be purely legal arrangements facilitating shared assets, mutual care and so forth. The arguments of substance then move on to adoption criteria, surrogacy, IVF, etc.
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Rau
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The church should pay all the costs, and the state should pay the church a fee to hold the event in its city (rather than somewhere else) in order to secure economic benefit. Free enterprise at work.I work at a law firm. The problem is that practice of law is filled with lots of sexual sinners and atheists. Perhaps more so than other industries. I know a large number of attorneys who have cheated on their spouses, been divorced multiple times, are homosexual, etc. People even have sex in their offices after hours. It’s very much like what you see on TV.
Judges come from that environment.
Also, some attorneys are self-righteous.
When St. Pope John Paul II came to Philadelphia in the 1979, the city built a $200,000 altar & for security for an outside for Mass on the Parkway, in front of the Cathedral Basilica. The city was sued by a law school student… a so-called CATHOLIC law school student who claimed that it broke the separation of Church and State. The city denied the charges and said that it was spending the money to encourage tourism and economic development. The altar was to stay up and outside for several weeks after the Pope’s visit for pictures, etc. Over 1 million people attended Mass with the Pope and the city wanted to capitalize on it. The law school student won.
Because of that law suit, when the World Meeting of Families comes to Philadelphia in 2015, all funds will need to be supplied by the Archdiocese and the private sector. No city dollars can be used, even for police.
I’m sorry… but a religious event that brings one million people to a city is a major boost to the local economy and deserving of police protection.
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