Social Consequence of Gay Marriage

[honkytonk]

You folks are partly on target and partly missing the point.

The point you are missing is that when the State attempts an experiment in social engineering like statutorily approving homosexual marriage, what the State is really attempting is to change the Church’s doctrine and teaching concerning marriage just as allowing the HHS Mandate requiring religious organizations to buy insurance covering contraception, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs (RU-486/mifeprex/mifepristone) is a blatant attempt by the State to change the moral doctrines and teachings of the Church.

In doing so the State is in violation of the First Amendment’s provisions concerning freedom of religion, i. e., it has exceeded its authority.

Once freedom of religion is violated, our other constitutional rights - freedom of speech, freedom of assembly for redress of grievances, freedom of the press - become greatly weakened through the imposition statutorily of the doctrines of political correctness, not to mention the possibility - and maybe probability - that a minister could become sued or arrested for violating the State’s laws concerning homosexual marriage.

The result of our loss of these constitutional rights is not a continuation of our constitutional representative democracy. It is a tyranny. It is a dictatorship.

Please be aware that the State is not the highest authority in human affairs. The highest authority is Jesus Christ - or more properly the Holy Trinity. He is Lord of the State, and He can dispose of the State - including this State - any way He wishes.

 

[wynnejj]

Wyn,

I had a hard time following your thoughts. This is what I see. Judges are lawyers. Judges see Lawyers bringing cases to court as fellow lawyers earning a living bringing cases to court. Lawyers presented with dissolution of a union in court are doing a job earning a living. This entire process is getting convuluted by Lawyers.

There are many reasons for legal gay marriages or partnerships, but one of the main reasons is the protection of the divorce process if the partnership is to dissolve. If a judge makes a divorce legitimate in a state that doesn’t recognize gay marriage, then he is in fact recognizing the legitimacy of the gay marriage in that state. Thus one of the incentives for gay marriage have been realized in a state that did not originate the marriage. A Catholic judge would be formally cooperating in intrinsic evil.

CONSIDERATIONS REGARDING PROPOSALS TO GIVE LEGAL RECOGNITION TO UNIONS BETWEEN HOMOSEXUAL PERSONS

In those situations where homosexual unions have been legally recognized or have been given the legal status and rights belonging to marriage, clear and emphatic opposition is a duty. One must refrain from any kind of formal cooperation in the enactment or application of such gravely unjust laws and, as far as possible, from material cooperation on the level of their application. In this area, everyone can exercise the right to conscientious objection.

 

[CopticChristian]

There are many reasons for legal gay marriages or partnerships, but one of the main reasons is the protection of the divorce process if the partnership is to dissolve. If a judge makes a divorce legitimate in a state that doesn’t recognize gay marriage, then he is in fact recognizing the legitimacy of the gay marriage in that state. Thus one of the incentives for gay marriage have been realized in a state that did not originate the marriage. A Catholic judge would be formally cooperating in intrinsic evil.

CONSIDERATIONS REGARDING PROPOSALS TO GIVE LEGAL RECOGNITION TO UNIONS BETWEEN HOMOSEXUAL PERSONS

Wyn,

I see two different issues here. I see no reason for legal gay marriage. I see what you are saying is that absent a marriage with two gays then there is no divorce process and the partners are on their own. In my opinion the relationship was entered into contray to marriage and the outcome is as it is.

Thus you say the incentive for gay marriage is realized in a state that did not advocate that marriage. This is a product of lawyers. I am not sure what the significance is. Are you saying that there is something significant about this? I am not sure that the Judge is recognizing anything. Justice is “blind” and is acting on a issue of marriage not necessarily agreeing that the marriage was legal, just the disollution.

A Catholic Judge could reuse themselves. Conscientous objection is valid.

 

[wynnejj]

A Catholic Judge could reuse themselves. Conscientous objection is valid.

A Catholic judge should not recuse himself (unless there is precedence that he must honor against his conscience) but, should throw the case out as frivolous. It should be treated as if two room mates asked for a divorce process. If gay marriage is not recognized in Ohio, then why should divorce be processed? A Catholic judge who processes the divorce is recognizing gay marriage in yet another case of judicial activism that is formally cooperating with intrinsic evil.

 

[Peter_Shaw]

It’s a little amusing that, in recent news, a gay married couple wanted to get a divorce — and they couldn’t, because the state where they’re now living doesn’t recognize gay marriage, unlike the state where they were married. Be careful what you wish for?

I think it’s clear that a marriage has both civil and religious dimensions. In civil terms, it’s essentially the formation of a business partnership between two people, with all of the property and legal rights and responsibilities that follow from the creation of a new joint legal entity. It has to conform to the rules of civil society concerning which individuals are eligible to enter into that partnership — every society has had such rules, and gender hasn’t always been the only consideration. (Children can’t get married, for example.) These are enormously practical considerations, and no marriage could ignore them.

Marriage in a religious sense is a much deeper matter: the union of two souls, so that, as one, they can live and grow in love in the way prescribed and blessed by God, through the agency of His Church, and bring new life into the world. The business practicalities that are the concern of civil society, properly speaking, aren’t even on the table — only the requirement to live together with mutual love, respect, justice, and compassion until separated by death. (Speaking from experience, a good sense of humor helps too, but that’s another topic!)

I suggest that much of the argument comes from using the same word — “marriage” — to apply to two different, independent relationships. One can hardly have a meaningful dialog without a common definition of terms, and marriage is a word with a freight train’s worth of emotional baggage all around. It’s worth noting that much of the push to legitimize gay marriage is based in a demand for equality in the legal and property rights that are the stuff of a civil union…as well as enjoying the sentimental festivities of a wedding. Some gay couples, to be sure, are religious people in themselves, and want the religious approval of their union as well — a religious marriage, as well as a civil union. That may be understandable, although neither logical nor reasonable; to me, it sounds like wanting to have their (wedding) cake and eat it too.

I think it’s clear, also, that it’s just as possible for a same-sex couple to have as much of a fully committed, monogamous, loving, lifelong relationship as a heterosexual couple — including the latter who do so without benefit of either civil or religious marriage — and to raise (although not produce) happy and well-adjusted children, in a loving home. (Or, to put it more cynically, they’re no more likely to *fail *to do all of that than many heterosexual couples who *do *have a civil and religious marriage.) In the eyes of the Catholic Church, of course, the same-sex couple would be living in sin, even if they were completely celibate, because the union is incapable of bringing new life into the world. In light of the Church’s teaching on faith and morals, it’s utterly unreasonable to expect the Church to give its sanction to a gay marriage within the church. But outside of it?

I have what may be a contrarian viewpoint toward gay marriage and the Catholic Church. It seems to me that we’re called to be a positive influence on the larger society we’re living in, but *not *to use the machinery of the government to compel society outside the Church to adopt our morals and behavior. To be blunt, there are good arguments, outside of the Church, for legal civil unions regardless of gender — arguments that are based in fairness, justice, even civil rights, and as such have an uncomfortable moral resonance even within the Church. Yes: we’re called to be the light of the world and to condemn willful darkness, to preach the gospel, and to show the world at large what living in holiness and love looks like. We also have the responsibility to our deposit of faith not to suffer society at large to force us to live contrary to our faith and morals. And yes, our faith and morals originate in the holiness of God Himself, and are as right and true — and conducive to a sane and happy society — outside the Church as in it.

But all of that being true, does the Church have the proper authority to dictate faith and morals to those who have chosen to remain outside of her? St. Paul, in his letter to the Romans, noted that the Christian community’s responsibility to holiness lies within itself, even when it must exist in a larger sinful society, and have everyday dealings with it. If the society we’re living in chooses to legitimize same-sex civil unions, we may be on doubtful moral grounds ourselves to insist that they can’t, however passionately we may argue that it’s wrong and a perverted co-opting of the word “marriage”.

I think the Church will survive in a society that has rejected its moral teachings, albeit with the chill of increased isolation, and the grief of seeing the outside world freely choose to reject the way that would lead them to life. But that’s been the pattern of the last two thousand years…and it may even be no more than it was always meant to be.

 

[wynnejj]

I think it’s clear, also, that it’s just as possible for a same-sex couple to have as much of a fully committed, monogamous, loving, lifelong relationship as a heterosexual couple — including the latter who do so without benefit of either civil or religious marriage — and to raise (although not produce) happy and well-adjusted children, in a loving home.

What size millstone do you wear around your neck?

 

[wes144]

When being pressed to equate homosexuality with color, Martin Luther King Jr’s Daughter made the salient point, “I know quite a few ex-homosexuals and ex-lesbians, but I don’t know of any ex-blacks!”

It is not a sin to be black or any other color.

It is a sin, unnatural, against nature, a violation of the 7th Commandment and an abomination to God to commit homosexual acts or even meditating on thoughts of the kind.

 

[CopticChristian]

When being pressed to equate homosexuality with color, Martin Luther King Jr’s Daughter made the salient point, “I know quite a few ex-homosexuals and ex-lesbians, but I don’t know of any ex-blacks!”

It is not a sin to be black or any other color.

It is a sin, unnatural, against nature, a violation of the 7th Commandment and an abomination to God to commit homosexual acts or even meditating on thoughts of the kind.

Wes,

You have found the pebble in the shoe of the homosexual that wants to link color with sex. Good one.

 

[edwest2]

To everyone:

Consider the following:

Last year, the company that handles my IRA told me I needed to add a beneficiary. So, I added my male friend who I work with. Everything was handled over the phone. Our orientation was never brought up.

I decided to add my friend to my meager bank account. A few papers were signed and orientation was never brought up.

I worked in a hospital for nearly 10 years and had to know about all the rules. Any person could visit any patient. There was no question about orientation.

Maryland has recently allowed for gay divorce even though gay marriage is not legal there.

I could leave my worldly possessions to my next door neighbor. Similar things happen all the time, without orientation being an issue.

Peace,
Ed

 

[sedonaman]

…I could leave my worldly possessions to my next door neighbor. …

Who hasn’t heard of the eccentric millionairess leaving her entire fortune to her pet cat … and having been held up in court?

 

[QuickCat]

You “think it’ll bring doom”…yet there is no evidence for it yet…and in many of these nations and US states…nothing really has changed…straight people still get married and divorced with the same regularity…well…maybe not married…I’ve read that marriage is on the decrease…but divorce is alive and well.

I’m amazed how “it’ll bring doom” to our society…after all…it’s only 1% of a very small population…5-10% of the general population are gay and lesbian…only 1-2% of the 5-10% of the sub group want to get married…amazing assertions with no basis in fact other than “doom and gloom” might happen…could happen…what if it happens…not any “it happened and this is why” proof.

I’d think if the same energy was spent on divorce as it was on gay marriage by religous people…divorce might decrease…but divorce is something that effects too many people making the laws and filling our churches…it would be too controversial to try to outlaw divorce…too many straight people would not stand for it…the small number of gay and lesbian people however that want to get married are easier targets and to deny same sex marriage to individuals that want to enter into affect no one but gay people…while divorce…well…a different story there on it’s impact to our society.

Consider the history of many of the great kingdoms of yore. Attending to their downfall was the moral decay caused by the abomination of homosexuality. This country, and many other countries, are on a slippery slope with this moral rot.

QC

 

[sedonaman]

…I worked in a hospital for nearly 10 years and had to know about all the rules. Any person could visit any patient. There was no question about orientation…

Civil & Legal Rights Claims
When the issue of homosexuals routinely being denied the right to visit their partners in hospitals was raised during debate over the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, the Family Research Council did an informal survey of nine hospitals in four states and the District of Columbia. None of the administrators surveyed could recall a single case in which a visitor was barred because of their [his] homosexuality, and they were incredulous that this would even be considered an issue.
Peter Sprigg, “What’s Wrong with Letting Same-Sex Couples Marry?” Family Research Council, In Focus: Issue No. 256.
azconservative.org/page12.php

I highly suspect that the claims of denial were based on a few cases in which the family objected, and the hospital was just honoring their wishes.

 

[Trader]

1. The state cannot recognize same sex so-called marriage without denying the right of children to both a father and a mother.
2. A government that denies the basic human rights of its citizens loses its moral authority to govern.
3. Governments without moral authority can retain power only by use of coercion.

Pope Benedict knows from both 2000 years of church history and his own personal experince in 20th century Europe how much evil can flow from a government without moral authority. I don’t know how much clearer the Church can be when it teaches that same sex so-called marriage is an intrinsic evil that must always be opposed.

The first time I saw some church leaders connect the redefinition of marriage to the destruction of society, I thought it was hyperbolic. It really is not.

 

[sedonaman]

1. The state cannot recognize same sex so-called marriage without denying the right of children to both a father and a mother.
   …
2. Governments without moral authority can retain power only by use of coercion.

…

Another example of Leftism in practice requires the taking away of peoples’ rights.

---

Previous generations of social experimenters have caused unimaginable misery for millions of people. None of them have ever been held accountable.

 

[Joe_Corn]

what have been the consequences of contraception, no fault divorce? Prior to the pill there were 4 or 5 STDs; now there or over 50. The divorce rate was a couple percent, not its 50%, adultery and fornication went through the roof and abortions took off into the millions and now, we are moving to homosexual marriage.

We have become so depraved that we can’t see the evil of men having intercourse with other men’s rectums? News flash, a rectum is not a vagina; it the exit for excrement. Homosexuals have a high rate of depression and a suicide rate 4 x the norm, not to mention a little forgotten thing called AIDS. Even the liberal Obama admin won’t allow a man to donate blood if he had sex with another man even once; that’s how dangerous it is. Can you say Sodom and Gomorrah?

 

[rossum]

1. The state cannot recognize same sex so-called marriage without denying the right of children to both a father and a mother.
2. A government that denies the basic human rights of its citizens loses its moral authority to govern.
3. Governments without moral authority can retain power only by use of coercion.

This already happened many years ago, yet I see no signs of the coercion you are saying must have happened. Just rephrase your first point slightly:

1. The state cannot recognize divorce without denying the right of children to both a father and a mother.

Your argument is obviously incorrect, since the legalisation of divorce has not had the consequences you predict.

rossum

 

[sedonaman]

… Your argument is obviously incorrect, since the legalisation of divorce has not had the consequences you predict.

rossum

The impacts of divorce on society have not been trivial:

Social costs of private conflicts

Whether a couple loses the ability to negotiate, or whether they never had it in the first place, the dissolution of their union has significant spillover effects. The instability in their relationship is likely to be detrimental to their children. The children of unmarried or divorced parents are more likely than other children to have emotional, behavioral and health problems. As these children become old enough to go to school, they absorb more educational resources than other children because the school has to deal with lowered school achievement, poor school attendance, and discipline problems. As these children mature, they are more likely to get into trouble with the law, commit crimes, abuse drugs, and end up in jail.

These costs are more than purely private costs to the mother and father. The costs of health care, schooling, and mental health care are not entirely private in this society, no matter how much libertarians might wish they were. In modern America, a child who cannot behave in school is a cost to the local school district as well as to all the other children in the classroom. A seriously depressed person or a drug-addicted person is likely to make demands on the public health sector. If the child ends up in the criminal justice system, as the children of unmarried parents are significantly more likely to do, he or she will be a significant cost to the state.

The demand that the government be neutral among family forms is unreasonable. The reality is that married-couple families and childless people are providing subsidies to those parents who dissolve their marriages or who never form marriages. Libertarians recognize that a free market needs a culture of law-abidingness, promise-keeping, and respect for contracts. Similarly, a free society needs a culture that supports and sustains marriage as the normative institution for the begetting, bearing, and rearing of children. A culture full of people who violate their contracts at every possible opportunity cannot be held together by legal institutions, as the experience of post-communist Russia plainly shows. Likewise, a society full of people who treat sex as a purely recreational activity, a child as a consumer good and marriage as a glorified roommate relationship will not be able to resist the pressures for a vast social assistance state. The state will irresistibly be drawn into parental quarrels and into providing a variety of services for the well-being of the children.

The naked individual

The alternative to my view that marriage is a naturally occurring pre-political institution is that marriage is strictly a creation of the state. The Supreme Court of Massachusetts notoriously asserted this position. If this is true, then the state can recreate marriage in any form it chooses. Implicit in this view is the decidedly non-libertarian view that the state is the ultimate source of social order.

Listen to this self-described progressive bring the implicit connection between the expansive state and the deconstruction of marriage out of the shadows. Writing in the Nation in March 2004, New York University Queer Studies professor Lisa Duggan addressed the marriage promotion portion of welfare reform:

Women and children . . . (according to the welfare reform model) should depend on men for basic economic support, while women care for dependents — children, elderly parents, disabled family members, etc. Under such a model, married-couple households might “relieve” the state of the expense of helping to support single-parent households, and of the cost of a wide range of social services, from childcare and disability services to home nursing. Marriage thus becomes a privatization scheme: Individual married-couple households give women and children access to higher men’s wages, and also “privately” provide many services once offered through social welfare agencies. More specifically, the unpaid labor of married women fills the gap created by government service cuts.

This statement brings the statist worldview front and center. Under this vision, the most basic relationships are not between husband and wife, parent and child, but between citizens and state. The family is not the natural unit of society. The most basic unit of society is not even the libertarian individual, embedded within a complex web of family, business, and social relationships. Rather, the natural unit of society is the naked individual, the isolated individual, standing alone before the state, beholden to the state, dependent upon the state.

hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/6909

 

[stewstew03]

divorce

without denying the right of children to both a father and a mother.

This is a ruse. Same-sex marriage is not the moral equivalent of heterosexual divorce.

 

[edwest2]

I highly suspect that the claims of denial were based on a few cases in which the family objected, and the hospital was just honoring their wishes.

It would be worthwhile to hear from a homosexual person who was denied the right to visit a patient due to his or her orientation.

Peace,
Ed

 

[edwest2]

what have been the consequences of contraception, no fault divorce? Prior to the pill there were 4 or 5 STDs; now there or over 50. The divorce rate was a couple percent, not its 50%, adultery and fornication went through the roof and abortions took off into the millions and now, we are moving to homosexual marriage.

We have become so depraved that we can’t see the evil of men having intercourse with other men’s rectums? News flash, a rectum is not a vagina; it the exit for excrement. Homosexuals have a high rate of depression and a suicide rate 4 x the norm, not to mention a little forgotten thing called AIDS. Even the liberal Obama admin won’t allow a man to donate blood if he had sex with another man even once; that’s how dangerous it is. Can you say Sodom and Gomorrah?

Hold on, Joe. Don’t let the media create reality for you. Obviously, there are some of us who know the same things you know. And remember, it was voted down in all states where it was on the ballot, twice in California. This is not an “us vs them” situation. Just continue to pray and speak the truth in charity. Contrary to a shocking TV commercial I saw that indicated the Church only allowed “certain” people into the Church building, God knows every private thing I do. The Church, as the Father’s House, has its arms open.

The Church has clearly presented the social consequences. It is clear that this is only another social experiment that will have negative results. And finally, with almost every country on Earth involved in World War II, followed by the massive, under half hour, nuclear destruction potential of the Cold War, I’d put this in perspective. I saw a photo of Vladimir Putin and his wife (with veil) in Church not that long ago. I watched as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was reduced to the Russian Federation.

Peace,
Ed