SPCS

SOCIETY FOR PROMOTION OF COMMUNITY STANDARDS INC.

Ten Q&A on Same-Sex Marriage Canards and Evasions – American Thinker

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Forces pushing for genderless marriage are a wellspring of fallacies and unanswered questions about the consequences.  Let’s explore some of them.

1. What’s love got to do with it?

Nothing.  Romanticizing this debate by claiming that any two people in love should have a civil right to civil marriage is a foolish distraction.  Neither judges nor legislators have any business discussing “affection” as a factor in defining civil marriage.  Clergy who bless marriages have a legitimate and separate role in discerning the internal dynamics of couples.  But not the state.

2. What is the state’s interest in marriage?

First, to recognize the union that produces the state’s citizens.  Second, to encourage those who sire and bear the citizens to take responsibility for rearing them together.  That’s all, folks.  Proponents of genderless marriage often answer this question with non sequiturs such as property rights (irrelevant), civil rights (extraneous to the question), and “love and stability” (not a function of state involvement).

3.  Why should state interest in marriage be about children if not all marriages produce children?

It’s thoroughly irrelevant that many heterosexual couples lack children because of intent, infertility, age, or health.  Claiming that this is relevant to the case for genderless marriage suggests the “fallacy of composition”: inferring that something must be true of the whole from the fact that it is true of some part of the whole.  Citizens of the state can exist only through the female-male union, no matter how the union occurs — whether traditionally, artificially, or in a petri dish.  That’s the only fact that provides any grounds for state interest in marriage.

4. What about marriage for the sake of same-sex households with children?

We just don’t have the right to deliberately deprive children of knowing their biological mothers or fathers.  But genderless marriage ultimately requires us to do this.  It requires society to sanction the refashioning of familial bonds in alienating and experimental ways.   Use of surrogates and egg or sperm markets put children at ever-increasing risk of being treated more as commodities than as human beings.  Laws supporting genderless marriage cannot help but ramp up these trends to newer and crueler levels.

Read more:

American Thinker, April 6, 2013.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/04/ten_qa_on_same-sex_marriage_canards_and_evasions.html#ixzz2PluE44p3

Stella Morabito has published several op-eds on same-sex marriage in The Washington Examiner.

Same-sex ‘marriage’ threatens civil liberty – Bruce Logan – Opinion – NZ Herald

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Same sex marriage is not an issue of equality nor the success of any couple’s marriage. It is not about the value or validity of homosexuality. The issue is about the link between the state and marriage in civil society. Who decides what marriage is and what it’s for?

Marriage is neither essentially religious nor a product of tradition. It is not the child of the state.

Neither is marriage what Lynne Featherstone the British Equalities Minister claims. “Marriage is a right of passage for couples who want to show they are in a committed relationship, for people who want to show they have found love and wish to remain together until death do them part.” Her historical vision is limited; her logic is deficient and her fusion of the Anglican Prayer Book with modern idiom disingenuous.

Marriage is the consequence of who we are. We do not make it; it makes us. Marriage would not exist if there were not two complementary sexes. And that’s why it does exist.

We are male and female. In the simple and hopeful business of being alive we have children in a union of consenting responsibility, love and thankfulness.

It is the fusing of two opposite halves of the human being through which new life may be created.

That some couples decide not to get married does not change the biology. That some cannot have children or decide not to is beside the point.

The so-called conservative case for same-sex marriage favoured by the British Prime Minister (and apparently by our own Prime Minister) tumbles out of a category error. “Marriage is a good thing. It stabilises the lives of those who participate; especially men. Therefore they should be able to marry each other if they are committed.”

But as soon as same-sex marriage is granted, marriage has been changed to something profoundly different; from an institution prior to the state to one determined by the state.

Of course the state has had regulations around marriage for a very long time. But with the advent of same-sex marriage we have given the state a role it never had.

If the state defines marriage the family is no longer an independent institution of civil society declaring daily to the state its limitations. While we are a long way from Stalinism in New Zealand this was the kind of power Stalin wanted.

If the state passes a law that changes the nature of marriage, and consequently family, then every citizen’s liberty is endangered. Why? That area of most intimate human life that was once outside the power of the state to control will be watered down. In becoming the author of marriage the state must eventually erode religious freedom and then freedom of speech.

The ‘new marriage’ will become an institution that the state must enforce. Any exemption given initially to the church will be temporary and dependent only on threatened moral sensitivities. It will not be enough for the church to be good or even right when all the social forces are moving against it.

Human rights were once seen as a cornerstone of liberty because they were the consequence of a free society aware of state limits. They protected the independent spheres of authority in civil society (marriage, family and religion and others).

If marriage becomes what the state determines citizens will no longer have any legal, or ultimately moral framework independent of the state to argue their case about family form. Families will become what the state decides. In France this is probably the pivotal constitutional issue around which the same sex marriage debate spins.

It is doubtful there is any society known to history or anthropology where social order has not been based on marriage between a man and a woman.

It has always been an historical and universal understanding of a binding contract to enhance social order and encourage responsible child care. Societies that fail to understand this devalue their children. We should know that. We have plenty of evidence.

We have never had such a plethora of data pointing out the fundamental economic, social and psychological benefits of vigorous and enduring married families. Marriage is pivotal to intergenerational order. Without it we have a shambles and increasing poverty.

* Bruce Logan is a former Auckland schoolteacher now living in France.

Source: Bruce Logan: Same-sex marriage threatens civil liberty

New Zealand Herald 29 August 2012

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10829995

Gay marriage and preserving religious freedom for celebrants – Prof Rex Ahdar, Law Faculty, Univ. Otago

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Professor Rex Ahdar, Faculty of Law, University of Otago, comments on the conscience clause inserted into section 29 of the Marriage (Definition of Marriage) Amendment Bill by the Government Administration Committee, to protect religious liberty. He asks:

“Will all marriage celebrants be immunized?

“Will marriage celebrants who object, on the ground of religious belief or conscience, to conducting marriage ceremonies for homosexual and lesbian couples be protected in law?”

Read his blog post:

Gay marriage and preserving religious freedom for celebrants

http://pundit.co.nz/content/gay-marriage-and-preserving-religious-freedom-for-celebrants

Same-sex ‘marriage’: Religious objectors face pressure to capitulate

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“As this movement to legalize and normalize gay marriage continues, those who object on religious grounds will find themselves increasingly pressured to capitulate.

“Consider Canada, where gay marriage was legalized in 2005. In the years since, there have been between 200 and 300 legal proceedings against opponents of same-sex marriage. For instance, in Saskatchewan, a homosexual man asked a state marriage commissioner to conduct his wedding. The commissioner, an evangelical Christian, declined to conduct the ceremony and referred the man to another commissioner. The gay couple sued, and the commissioner was fined $2,500. Are we seeing the same pressures brought to bear against those who object to gay marriage in America?

“On March 10, 2006, Catholic Charities in Massachusetts was forced to end its adoption ministry because it would not place children with homosexual couples. eHarmony was sued in California for refusing to offer its dating service to gays. A Methodist camp in New Jersey lost its state tax exempt status for not hosting a same-sex union in its marriage pavilion.”

Extract from What you can do about same-sex marriage

[Read more…]

Louisa Wall MP: Background to sponsor of ‘Same-Sex ‘Marriage’ Bill

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Labour List MP Louisa Wall, sponsor of the Marriage (Redefinition of Marriage) Bill which renders the concepts of “marriage”, “mother” “father”, “bride” and “bridegroom” meaningless by its proposed amendments to the Marriage Act 1955, has stated, dogmatically:

“I’ve never not been out. I think I realised I was gay in my late teens and from then on I’ve had female partners. For me, it’s always been a part of who I am, so I’ve never felt a need not to share that.” [Emphasis added].

The vast majority of New Zealanders will genuinely struggle to comprehend the meaning of her claims. Whilst apparently sincere, they appear imaginery and fictional. She is so very dogmatic! – “I’ve never not been out“. Presumably she actually believes she has been a lesbian from birth – i.e. ‘hard-wired’ genetically to be sexually attracted only to women. If so, she has never provided any evidence for this and such a claim is not supported in the scientific literature (i.e. empirical scientific proof of the existence of a so-called gay gene).

What then do her dogmatic claims actually mean, if anything? They appear to be meaningless and delusional. For a start she contradicts her claim about never not being “out” when she says she thinks she first came to the realisation of her ‘orientation’ in her “late teens” and only “from then on .. had female partners.” Perhaps she could tell the public how she knows as a fact that her lesbian ‘sexual orientation’ already existed from her infancy to “late teens”.

If a heterosexual male sportsman claimed in an interview with Woman’s Weekly that he had “never not been out as heterosexual”, would any of the thousands of discerning, rational-minded scholarly readers of the magazine have queried the meaning of such a claim and/or perhaps even raised queries about the validity or truthfulness of this claim? Of course they would, many of them no doubt! Some might have wondered if he had suffered a “brain fade” like John Key or David Shearer, not regarding an investment portfolio or a failure to disclose a pecuniary interest to parliament, but with regard to his sexual identity.

This example illustrates how homosexuals have captured the language by using words such as “out” and denoting a ‘meaning’ to it that serves the exclusive homosexual agenda, but makes no sense when used  by a heterosexual. A whole series of oxymorons arise when such words are used together with the word “heterosexual”: e.g. “gay-heterosexual” and “out-heterosexual”. The absurdity of the concept of “gay-marriage”/ “same-sex marriage” is plain to see for any rational person who has not been seduced/taken-in by the emotional appeal/deception of the pro-“same-sex marriage” homosexual activists.

But is it even possible for a heterosexual to “out” himself or herself? Clearly homosexuals do “it” on a regular basis, on national TV etc. to score international headlines. But the very idea of a Maori sports-star  MP “outing” himself/herself to colleagues in parliament in a Maiden Speech, as a heterosexual i.e. confessing one’s attraction to persons of the opposite sex, is preposterous! So why have MPs and the New Zealand public tolerated and applauded the ‘courage’ and “honesty’ of current Labour homosexual MPs such as Louisa Wall and Maryan Street, and Green MP Kevin Hague, for using the vehicle of the House of Representatives to “out” themselves to the New Zealand public? Why have these homosexuals felt it necessary to foist such ‘important’ information related to their intimate private affairs-‘sexual orientation’, onto the rest of us using the platform of parliament?

Clearly such well-orchestrated homosexual disclosures, are part of a deliberate political agenda – driven by highly questionable tactics and ethics – to use parliament to secure alleged “human rights” for a “gay” minority – a class defined only by its sexual activities involving same-sex attraction rather than opposite sex attraction. The “social change” these activists champion is  fixated in sex – on their so-called “human-rights” agenda that if accepted and enshrined into law, will normalise sodomy and other practices engaged in by homosexuals and ‘elevate’ (so they believe) them to a new status on a par with heterosexual marriage. It is all part of the plan to try and destigmatise homosexual sexual practices and gain acceptance for their lifestyle.

The homosexual crusade for “gay rights” including “same-sex marriage”, is based on a series of false premises such as the claim that “marriage equality is a human right”. Contrary to their delusional claims, heterosexual marriage is fundamentally different from homosexual ‘marriage’, as the former involves the union of opposite sexes, while the latter does not. Equality does NOT mean the same in the context of marriage, as they falsely claim.

All people of the same sex do not have equal rights to get married, as a number of categories (see Schedule 2 of the Act) among those of the same sex (e.g. men) are excluded. For example, under the Civil union law and under the proposed bill, a man A cannot marry his same-sex civil union partner’s father (father of B), subsequent to and in the event of A-B’s same-sex civil union (or ‘marriage’) being dissolved. The law forbids it. However, another man, unrelated to A and B can marry B’s father under the proposed bill.

Women’s Weekly reported:

“The 41-year-old’s passion for social change is what led her [Louisa Wall] into politics.

“Already in a civil union with partner Prue Tamatekapua , a lawyer specialising in Treaty of Waitangi issues, the couple ­first met through the Maori Women’s Welfare League in 2007.

“The new bill will mean that couples in a civil union can simply ­fill in a form to change their status to that of a married couple. But Louisa and Prue aren’t going down that route.

“Louisa and mother-of-two Prue had their ceremony at Te Mahurehure Marae in Point Chevalier, Auckland, where 200 guests helped celebrate their union in 2010.

“While comfortable with her own personal situation, Louisa believes it’s vitally important for individuals and couples to have options. “We made the decision to have a civil union, but for Charles Chauvel [a gay Labour MP] and his partner, that wasn’t good enough – they decided to go to Canada and get married.”

“… there is only one thing missing in Louisa’s life – a baby. While she would love to be a mother and has tried to conceive in the past, her efforts have been unsuccessful.”

Here we learn that Louisa and her partner Prue Tamatekapua have no intention of changing their civil union relationship to a marriage, even if Wall’s legally flawed bill becomes law. Instead of fighting for hers and Prue’s right’s, Louisa says she is fighting for the rights of other homosexuals to be able to get married. If so, Prue and Louise will never be “spouses” in law, if the bill becomes law, and will be unable to adopt children as a same-sex couple. With the biological clock ticking any woman (lesbian or heterosexual), truly wanting to have her own baby, will need the ‘services’ of at least one person from the opposite sex known as “male” to produce a child.

The term “same-sex marriage” is meaningless once the real unique distinction (relative to other types of relationships) of marriage, based on the exclusive one male-one-female nature of the relationship, is broken down by adding same-sex couples to the traditional marriage mix. For this reason there must remain a separate category-status distinction in law that recognises marriage as an exclusive relationship between two opposite sex partners.

Source of quotes:

Labour MP Louisa Wall: Fighting for our rights. By Vicky Tyler

Women’s Weekly. 28th March 2013

http://www.nzwomansweekly.co.nz/celebrity/labour-mp-louisa-wall-fighting-for-our-rights/