Monday, August 1, 2011

One Reason I Oppose Gay Marriage

It appears most gays have no respect for the institution of marriage.  In fact, according to a New York Times Op-Ed, the real goal of some gay marriage proponents, called liberationists, is to "knock marriage off its cultural pedestal altogether."  It also describes a mixture of conservatism and liberationism:
This vision embraces the institution of marriage, rather than seeking to overthrow it. But it also hints that the example of same-sex unions might partially transform marriage from within, creating greater institutional flexibility — particularly sexual flexibility — for straight and gay spouses alike.
This idea is most prominently associated with Dan Savage, the prolific author, activist and sex columnist who was profiled in Sunday’s Times Magazine. Savage is strongly pro-marriage, but he thinks the institution is weighed down by unrealistic cultural expectations about monogamy. Better, he suggests, to define marriage simply as a pact of mutual love and care, and leave all the other rules to be negotiated depending on the couple.
In “The Commitment,” his memoir about wedding his longtime boyfriend, Savage described the way his own union has successfully made room for occasional infidelity. “Far from undermining the stable home we’ve built for our child,” he writes, “the controlled way in which we manage our desire for outside sexual contact has made our home more stable.”
One thing curtails my pessimism:
But liberationism has been gradually marginalized in the gay community over the last two decades, and gay conservatism seems to have largely carried the day. The desire to be included in an existing institution has proved stronger than the desire to eliminate every institutional constraint.
That article also provides this:
The trouble is that straight culture already experimented with exactly this kind of model, with disastrous results.
Forty years ago, Savage’s perspective temporarily took upper-middle-class America by storm. In the mid-1970s, only 51 percent of well-educated Americans agreed that adultery was always wrong. But far from being strengthened by this outbreak of realism, their marriages went on to dissolve in record numbers.
This trend eventually reversed itself. Heterosexual marriage has had a tough few decades, but its one success story is the declining divorce rate among the upper middle class. This decline, tellingly, has gone hand in hand with steadily rising disapproval of adultery.
There’s a lesson here. Institutions tend to be strongest when they make significant moral demands, and weaker when they pre-emptively accommodate themselves to human nature.
(h/t GayPatriot)

Homosexuals do not deserve marriage until they demonstrate that they are willing to abide by the moral standards it demands.  I previously talked about the importance of the traditional family to the health of society.

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