SPCS

SOCIETY FOR PROMOTION OF COMMUNITY STANDARDS INC.

Aussie judge rules: marriage is not discriminatory

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“We welcome last Thursday’s Federal Court ruling by Justice Jayne Jagot that banning same-sex marriage does not amount to discrimination,” FamilyVoice national research officer Ros Phillips said today [Monday, February 25, 2013]

Justice Jagot pointed out that in all cases the treatment of the person of the opposite sex is the same: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-22/same-sex-marriage-ban-challenge-tossed-by-australia-judge.html

Ros Phillips said the Federal Court ruling is common sense.  It effectively acknowledges that the gay activist slogan Marriage Equality is false and misleading.

“Equality involves treating the same things equally,” Mrs Phillips said.  “Treating different things differently is not discrimination.  Potentially fertile male-female unions and naturally sterile same-sex unions are not equivalent.  Treating them differently is recognising reality.”

Ros Phillips said marriage is about more than love – it is about conceiving, bearing and raising the next generation with both mum and dad role models.

http://www.fava.org.au/news/2013/aussie-judge-rules-marriage-is-not-discriminatory/

 

Redefining marriage is unnecessary – Gordon Copeland

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THE DEBATE on same-sex marriage lacks context because its promoters have failed to take into account the equal rights already established in New Zealand law for same-sex couples.

Everyone remembers the passing of the Civil Union Act in 2004 because of the publicity it generated. The Civil Union Act was followed by a companion Relationships (Statutory References) Act in early 2005 – the Relationships Act. It was passed by Parliament without fanfare and little publicity. It has therefore been missing from this debate because its purpose and legal effects are largely unknown to New Zealanders. Yet it is of crucial importance.

So what did the Relationships Act do? It amended more than 130 acts of Parliament to add, after every reference to “marriage” , the words “civil union and de facto” so there would be a complete and perfect legal equality between marriage, civil unions and heterosexual or homosexual de facto relationships. It means all couples, in any of these relationships, have the same rights under New Zealand law, with the possible exception of the adoption law.

Therefore, nothing is to be gained from redefining marriage to include same-sex couples, since equal rights have already been granted. That battle was fought and won in 2005.

In 1893, New Zealand was the first nation to grant women the vote, but we did not do that by redefining men to include women, but rather by recognising the equality of women. In the same way the Relationships Act does not alter the definition of marriage but rather recognises the equality of same-sex unions, be they civil union or de facto, at law.

The mantra of “marriage equality” needs to be viewed against that background. In my view, that mantra does not stand up to scrutiny because all of us can surely agree that a marriage between a man and a woman is biologically different from a union between two women or two men. Just as women and men are different, so those relationships are different (de facto relationships are different again because they exist in fact, but involve couples who are not married or in civil unions). Let us not forget that New Zealand law does permit homosexuals, who so choose, to marry [a person of the opposite sex] and some have.

Recognition of the reality that women and men are biologically different does not constitute discrimination, inequality or a denial of rights. We separate women and men for sport and boys and girls for sport and education. Most Wellington secondary schools, for example, are single-sex, but that does not mean boys from Wellington College are not the equal of girls from St Mary’s. Our laws against discrimination are founded on the principle of “different by equal”.

Consequently, although it is illegal to discriminate on the basis of gender, nationality, race, religion, marital status, and so on, in employment, housing, voting and the like, the law also recognises differences in many ways. Indeed, in our language we always, without exception, give different names to different things because life would  become confusing if a rake was called a spade or vice versa.

Marriage is too important to the stability of our society and the raising of children to risk such a radical change to its traditional definition without sound reason. In my view, no such reason has been advanced,

Marriage can result in lifelong loving relationships between the spouses. It remains the best and most stable environment in which to raise children. It has stood the test of time and is common to all cultures and nations. Like democracy, it is not perfect, but it is better than all the other models. It would be greatly strengthened if governments invested in the delivery of pre-marriage preparation and post-wedding marriage enrichment programmes by non-government organisations, because marriage underpins a successful society, while the root cause of much poverty and delinquency arises from causal, stable or broken relationships.

The Relationships Act created “relationships equality” and nothing more is necessary or desirable. The redefinition of marriage bill should not proceed.

____________

Source: Opinion Piece: Published The Dominion Post. Thursday, January 24, 2013. , p. A9

Gordon Copeland is a former MP who was in Parliament in 2004 – 2005 when the Civil Union and Relationship (Statutory References) Acts were passed. He opposed both.

 

 

Porn Users and their Support for Same-Sex Marriage

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Young adult men’s support for redefining marriage may not be entirely the product of ideals about expansive freedoms, rights, liberties, and a noble commitment to fairness. It may be, at least in part, a byproduct of regular exposure to diverse and graphic sex acts.

This is the conclusion reported on in the Witherspoon Institute: Public Discourse by Mark Regnerus, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of “How different are the adult children of parents who have same-sex relationships – Findings from the Family Structures Study,” published in the July 2012 issue of Social Science Research.

Data from the New Family Structures Study reveal that when young adult Americans (ages 23-39) are asked about their level of agreement with the statement “It should be legal for gays and lesbians to marry in America,” the gender difference emerges, just as expected: 42 percent of men agreed or strongly agreed, compared with 47 percent of women of the same age. More men than women disagreed or strongly disagreed (37 versus 30 percent), while comparable levels (21-23 percent) said they were “unsure.”

But of the men who view pornographic material “every day or almost every day,” 54 percent “strongly agreed” that gay and lesbian marriage should be legal, compared with around 13 percent of those whose porn-use patterns were either monthly or less often than that. Statistical tests confirmed that porn use is a (very) significant predictor of men’s support for same-sex marriage, even after controlling for other obvious factors that might influence one’s perspective, such as political affiliation, religiosity, marital status, age, education, and sexual orientation.

The same pattern emerges for the statement, “Gay and lesbian couples do just as good a job raising children as heterosexual couples.” Only 26 percent of the lightest porn users concurred, compared to 63 percent of the heaviest consumers. It’s a linear association for men: the more porn they consume, the more they affirm this statement. More rigorous statistical tests confirmed that this association too is a very robust one.

Theoretically, the same pattern should hold when considering support for marriage in general. And it does, though not quite as distinctively. The less time spent viewing porn, the less critical men are of the institution of marriage. Forty-nine (49) percent of the lightest porn users “strongly disagreed” with a statement suggesting that “marriage is an outdated institution” (and an additional 26 percent simply “disagreed” with it), compared with 14 percent of the heaviest porn users.

Why?

Porn also undermines the concept that in the act of sexual intercourse, we share our “body and whole self … permanently and exclusively.” On the contrary, it reinforces the idea that people can share their bodies but not their inmost selves, and that they can do so temporarily and (definitely) not exclusively without harm.

Moreover, the web’s most popular pornographic sites do little to discriminate one sex act—or category of such—from another. Gazers are treated to a veritable fire-hose dousing of sex-act diversity. (These are not your grandfather’s Playboy.) So, add to the sharing of bodies temporarily and nonexclusively a significant dose of alternative forms of sexual activity—positions, roles, genders, and numbers—and that’s basically where porn presses its consumers today: away from sex as having anything approaching a “marital meaning” or structure of the sort outlined in the article cited above

Source: See “Porn Use and Supporting Same-Sex Marriage”  by Mark Regnerus, The Witherspoon Institute: Public Discourse 20th December 2012. http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/12/7048/

The Clear Agenda of Same-Sex “Marriage” (SSM) Lobbyists

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The push for the State sanctioning (legalisation) of same-sex “marriage” (SSM) has followed on from the passing of the Homosexual Law Reform Act on 9 July 1986.

The Homosexual Law Reform Act was introduced to the New Zealand parliament by Labour MP Fran Wilde in 1985. It legalised consensual sex between men aged 16 and older. It removed the provisions of the Crimes Act 1961 that criminalised this behaviour.

The case – Quilter v Attorney-General [1998] had its origin in early 1996 when three female couples (lesbians) in long-term relationships were denied marriage licences by the Registrar-General because marriage under the common law was between one man and one woman. The High Court decision rejecting the lesbians’ case of alleged discrimination and inequality, was appealed to the Court of Appeal (then New Zealand’s highest court) in December 1997. The Court of Appeal upheld the High Court ruling.

Dissatisfied with this the SSM lobbyists pursued their grievances of alleged “discrimination” to the United Nations. On 30 November 1998, two couples involved in Quilter case took their case to the U.N. Human Rights Committee, claiming that the country’s ban on same-sex marriage violated the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The Committee rejected it on 17 July 2002.

Again dissatisfied, SSM lobbyists withdrew from all Court action to pursue their goals of SSM “rights” under a different name (“civil union”) via legislative change. On 9 December 2004 Parliament passed the Civil Union Bill, establishing civil unions for same-sex and opposite-sex couples. The Civil Union Act came into effect on 26 April 2005 and the vast majority of the homosexual community applauded it for removing alleged “discrimination” and “inequality”.

However, soon they became dissatisfied with Civil Unions with SSM lobbyists alleging that they were still discriminated against because they could still not obtain a marriage licence. Their clear agenda was to achieve SSM by using parliament to introduce into the Marriage Act a definition of marriage that did not limit it to a male-female union but widened it to include same-sex unions.

In August 2012, Louisa Wall – an openly lesbian Labour MP – spoke in parliament in support of her private member’s bill at First Reading – The Marriage (Definition of Marriage) Amendment Bill –  currently being considered by the Government Administration Committee.  It removes all gender specific language from Schedule 2 (“Forbidden Marriages”) of the Marriage Act, but retains the terms “legal wife” and “legal husband” in s. 31 dealing with marriage vows taken before a marriage celebrant. It is due to be reported back to parliament from the committee on 28 February 2013.

SUMMARY: The Clear Agenda of the Homosexual SSM Lobbyists:      

(What’s Next? !)

First: To ensure that same-sex couples can legally obtain a marriage licence and that homosexual men and lesbian women in such relationships can legally refer to their same-sex partner  by the appellation “legal husband” and “legal wife”.

Second: Once parliament has legally sanctioned the oxymoron “same-sex marriage” and legally validated these oxymoronic appelations, such as “legal wife” – to apply to SSM; SSM Lobbyists believe they will have the same “rights” as a heterosexual couples to jointly adopt children because the new law will treat them as “spouses”. At present The Adoption Act 1955 only allows for an adoption order to be applied for by “2 spouses jointly in respect of a child” or “by the mother or father of the child, either alone or jointly with his or her spouse”. In effect the SSM Lobby want to short-circuit due process (proper consideration of changes to Adoption Laws and the rights of adopted children to have a father (male) and mother (female)).