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beautifulduckweedKate Rothwell, more than any other blogger I read, makes me want to hug her after I read one of her entries. She's charming and funny and kinda cranky sometimes and just really, really adorable. (She'd probably object to my characterization of her.) Anyway, her Thursday 13 yesterday was pretty awesome: Thursday Thirteen Reasons I'm Personally Threatened by Gay Marriage.
That entry of Kate's had a link to a Baptist numbnut's detailed list of why Gay Marriage Will Ruin America and Allow Satan To Enter Your Children's Crotches. Now, shooting down a dimwitted thumper's arguments isn't particularly hard to do, yet I feel compelled to do it, anyway. Must be because I'm bored at work, or something. *koff* Let the fun begin! Bold points are those the good1 James A. Smith, Sr. My rebuttals are directly below.
10. Many homosexuals are on our side. While the homosexual lobby has pushed for the "right" to "marry" as part of its broader public policy strategy to gain acceptance and endorsement, it’s clear that many homosexuals really don’t want to marry. Indeed, homosexuals see marriage as a key feature of the heterosexual culture which they wish to demolish in their attempt to radically change sexual morality in our society.
Some gay people aren't too concerned about marriage rights, and some oppose it, sure. Hey, there are still women who oppose equal rights and suffrage, and fully subscribe to the idea of female submission in the Biblical mode. Just because the members of a splinter group oppose expanding their own rights doesn't mean they're necessarily right, but furthermore, I'm pretty sure the number of gay people who would vote for a constitutional amendment that bans the possibility of gay marriage is vanishingly small.
The point about how TEH GAYS WANT TO RUIN HETEROSEXUAL CULTURE OH NOES is ridiculous and completely unsupported. Somehow, I doubt Mr. Smith has had extensive contact with gay people. If he did, he'd realize that homosexuals have plenty of drama to deal with on their own; destroying hetero culture by demolishing marriage as an institution is probably last on the list, probably somewhere after "Scrub kitchen grout throughly with toothbrush."
Just a guess.
9. America is on our side. Especially after last summer’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling which overturned Texas’ law against sodomy, American public opinion has been galvanized against “gay marriage” with significant majorities opposed.
This is a classic example of the bandwagon fallacy. Folks, just because a lot of people believe something don't mean it's true, or good, or should be made into public policy. America was opposed to miscegenation, too, and allowing women to vote. Lots of incredibly bad ideas have had tremendous popular support. I will avoid invoking Godwin's law, but I'm sure you get the idea.
8. History is on our side. Never in human history has marriage meant anything other than the union of a man and a woman. Further, no society -– at least until very recently -– has recognized the legitimacy of same-sex "marriage."
This is why fundies suck at debate: their allergy to knowledge that's not Bible-based means that their education has amazing skips and gaps. Human history HAS encompassed marriages that mean something other than the union of a man and a woman. Many, many cultures (Semitic cultures and Chinese cultures immediately come to mind) have allowed polygamy--polygyny, to be exact. (I'll get to non-standard/non-monogamous Biblical marriages in point number 1.) Other cultures have allowed the practice of polyandry, though this is much more rare than polygyny, but assorted Asian cultures (especially on the Indian sub-continent) as well as African and indigenous American societies have practiced this at one time or another.
And furthermore, this point assumes that marriage has been and still is this monolithic, unchanging institution based on some sort of holy law, when marriage has mostly been concerned with property inheritance and alliance-building. Folks, it's a social construct, not some kind of Godly creation, and it's a construct that has evolved (and continues to evolve) over millennia. The current view of marriage as a romantic binding of two hetero souls is largely Western and, if I remember correctly, a view that became popularized some time during the Victorian era. (I may be talking out of my ass on this one, but![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lilithsaintcrow and heyokish could perhaps provide more insight into this?)
7. Language is on our side. The words "homosexual" and "marriage" cannot be combined logically to mean anything; they are oxymoronic: two words that are contradictory. It is literally a redefinition of language to suggest marriage can mean anything other than the union of a man and a woman.
Only if you define "mariage" to include only one man and one woman, which renders his argument tautological. His core point is completely meaningless, because language is an exercise in consensus, and therefore constantly being redefined. If enough people decide today that the word "scroofynibble" is going to refer to the animal currently known as a "cat," then to all intents and purposes, scroofynibble = cat. There's no one-on-one correspondence between reality and the word, although onomatopoeia sometimes comes close. This is obvious even to non-linguists like me--but then I know what the word "etymology" means, and its implications thereof.
But even if we accept his core assumption as true, i.e., that language is unchanging and should never be changed, then he's ignoring the fact that current usage of the word "marriage" can, in fact, refer to homosexual union. Marriage is used in the larger sense of uniting things together, and oftentimes they aren't even human, or tangible. Phrases like "marriage of flavors," "marrying two pieces" and "married to an idea" are common parlance.
But perhaps it was too much to hope for this person to have consulted a dictionary before opening his gob.
6. Religious liberty is on our side. America’s First Amendment protects the free exercise of religion. Nevertheless, homosexuals who now lobby for same-sex "marriage" will not stop at mere governmental endorsement of their immoral activity; one day they will insist that all society -– including evangelical churches -– condone, protect and even bless these "marriages." Far-fetched? Look at the numerous examples of the deterioration of religious freedom of those with politically incorrect, biblical convictions.
Three very easy rebuttals to this one:
a) Banning gay marriage would in fact infringe on the religious freedoms of gay people who belong to a religion that don't discriminate against them.
b) As far as I know, the fags and fag lovers aren't lobbying for fundies to lose the right to marry, or even for fundies to lose the right to bitch long and hard about fags marrying. Allowing fags to marry is just that: allowing fags to marry. I don't see how allowing gay people to marry would somehow infringe on a dipshit Baptist's religious freedom. He's still free to be a dipshit and to say dipshit things, associate solely with other dipshits, and write long, dipshitty letters to the editor about those goddamn fags, man, I can't believe they're now allowed to marry, I mean COME ON, ever since gays were allowed to marry I've caught my son thumbing through a copy of Martha Stewart's Living, and you know what that leads to.
In sum: Three cheers for the First Amendment!
c) With the glaring exception of the whole polygamy/Mormon thing, I can't think of any other time the American government has successfully strong-armed a religion into modifying its practices, but on the other hand, I can think of several instances of powerful churches exerting an undue influence on public policy (the teaching of Intelligent Design theory and creationism in schools, abortion, contraception, the HPV vaccine, euthanasia, sex ed policy, indecency laws in broadcasting and, of course, gay marriage bans--I trust I've made my point?).
Legalizing something won't make the government force the church to do jack-shit. For example, contraception is legal, as is abortion, but churches are still free to (and many do) condemn both roundly. When churches are liberalized, the pressure comes from the congegration and members of the church administration, not the government.
In sum, I'm not sure what "eroded freedoms" this guy is talking about, unless it's, say, the freedom to beat the everloving snot out of his wife without legal consequence because she didn't make his ham sammich fast enough and he has Biblical dominion over her, dammit.
5. The "slippery slope" argument is on our side. Those who demand that same-sex "marriage" must be legalized have an obligation to explain why marriage is not appropriate for any other deviant sexual pattern adults and/or minors would wish to enter into. If homosexual "marriage" must be permitted, why shouldn’t polygamy, incest, pedophilia and other sexual immorality? Indeed, how will these practices be denied if "gay marriage" is granted?
First of all, WHAT standards of deviancy is he using? Many people don't view homosexuality as deviant in and of itself, and the gaiety has gone through various waves of acceptance and vilification throughout different periods of history and in different cultures. If he's trying to use current fundamentalist Christian standards, then he'd also have to argue that heterosexual people who engage in a host of other deviant practices (BDSM, watersports, scat fetishes and furries, just to scratch the surface) should be barred from marriage.
Second of all, implying that bestiality and pedophilia are on par with homosexuality is comparing apples to oranges. Pedophilia encompasses an urge to fuck little kids. Homosexuality encompasses an urge to fuck somebody of your own sex. One pretty much precludes the possibility of informed consent; the other doesn't. There's a WORLD of difference there, folks.
As for polygamy: to be honest, I don't think it should be illegal. The way it's been traditionally practiced has been incredibly creepy, with the man holding a disproportionate amount of power, but then so has monogamous marriage, and we've managed some decent inroads there. Really, if a group of people want to get married, I don't see why they shouldn't, as long as they're of age and entering the union of their own free will.
It's pretty funny for somebody who's so worked up about freedom of religion to be pretty hot to trot to impose his Baptist convictions about religious morality on everyone else.
4. Nature is on our side. One need not hold to any particular religious convictions to understand from common sense that men and women are different. Same-sex relationships are contrary to the natural order. "Gender distinctions are not simply an artificial social construct," Focus on the Family’s Glenn Stanton has written. "Men and women are uniquely designed to complement each other physically, emotionally and spiritually."
Actually, nature comes down on the side of the homos, since homosexual non-human animals exist. Thumpers love to argue both sides of this one: when you point out that gay animals exist, they quickly abandon the whole "homogaiety jest ain't natural" argument and switch to "But we're people! We should be able to restrain our impulses!" Which then implies that there are unnatural heterosexuals out there, and if it's unnatural, isn't that BAD?
Gender distinctions aren't artificial social constructs, that's true--but then leaping from that to "men and women are uniquely designed to complement each other" is a whole other thing entirely. First of all, were people really designed? That's an assumption with plenty of room for debate. And not only that, but the variation WITHIN the population is oftentimes greater than the variation BETWEEN the populations, as has been observed with, say, measures of intelligence. Complementarity and compatibility can be found within the gender just as well as between genders; to argue otherwise, one would have to show that gay relationships were somehow inherently less stable or functional than straight relationships, and the existence of stable, happy gay relationships as well as the large numbers of unhappy, unstable straight relationships prove that this isn't so.
3. Children are on our side. A primary reason for marriage is procreation –- bringing children into the world. Children need both mothers and fathers. "Deliberately depriving a child of a mother or a father is not in the child’s best interest," Stanton notes. Research demonstrates the critical value of both fathers and mothers in the formation of children.
Assuming that a homosexual couple doesn't opt to use artificial insemination and/or surrogate mothers, I have one word for the Good1 Mr. Smith: Adoption. The base assumption that children need both fathers and mothers is also a matter for debate. Do children really need a parent of each gender, or do they need positive adult role models and stable, sensible, loving parents?
2. The restoration of the family is on our side. Even before the current campaign for "gay marriage," it’s clear that America is in the midst of a massively dangerous, destructive experiment with marriage at severe cost to families and our society. Between 1960 and 2000, U.S. households with married couples declined from 78 to 52 percent, with the total number of households with unmarried partners increasing by 72 percent just between 1990 and 2000. The explosion of no-fault divorce and serial marriages is further undermining the biblical ideal for marriage. Same-sex "marriage" will accelerate these damaging trends.
And here is where Smith completely loses me. WHAT does this have anything to do with gay marriage? It has to do with people (finally, and thank God for that) becoming less uptight about sex and cohabitation losing its stigma. Logically, gay marriage can only INCREASE the numbers of people getting married and DECREASE the numbers of people living without the blessing of matrimony, unless some malicious fag slips a rider into the legislation that, say, forces 2 straight couples to divorce for every gay couple who's married. I mean, c'mon.
1. America must be on God’s side. All truth is God’s truth, which is why all the foregoing reasons against homosexual "marriage" are valid. God’s Word explains why they are true. Every reason to oppose "gay marriage" is secondary to the fact that God has spoken. Starting in the Bible’s first book with the creation of man and woman, which as the pinnacle of creation He calls "very good" (Gen. 1:31), and continuing through the last book, God’s plan for marriage is abundantly clear.
Oooh, this is a good one! Let's look at Biblical marriage, shall we? First of all, if "wife" in Genesis 2 is to be taken literally, Adam essentially married his clone (since Eve was made from his rib)--so it looks like God looked kindly upon this incestuous marriage, if incest is defined as "marrying somebody immediately related to you." Oh, and speaking of incest, the foundation patriarch, Abraham himself, married his half-sister, Sarai (later renamed Sarah). And there are a number of polygamists in the Bible, most famously Solomon. So, according to the Bible, incest and polygyny are most assuredly allowed (and maybe pedophilia? It's been years since I've read the Bible, and nothing immediately comes to mind, but given how fucked-up that book is, it wouldn't surprise me). Would Mr. Smith please explain how these practices will be denied if marriage according to the Biblical mode is granted?
And not only that, but there's nothing in the Bible that specifically precludes homos from marrying. There are about three passages that condemn homosexuality, including the infamous one in Leviticus that says a man who lays with another man as a woman should be put to death, but dude: Leviticus is full of passages about putting people to death, among them lobster-eaters and people who see their parents naked. If we didn't allow people who violated Biblical laws the right to marry, only a fraction of a fraction of the population would have that right.
And really, d'you know what's the most frequently condemned sexual practice in the Bible? Adultery and fornication. And yet here we go, allowing these adulterers and fornicators the right to marry. Tsk. I expect the legislators to get right on that, because God knows I don't want to expose our precious, precious children to the ravaging effects of extra-marital infidelity and...oh. Wait. Never mind, then.
1And by good, I mean "incredibly stupid."
That entry of Kate's had a link to a Baptist numbnut's detailed list of why Gay Marriage Will Ruin America and Allow Satan To Enter Your Children's Crotches. Now, shooting down a dimwitted thumper's arguments isn't particularly hard to do, yet I feel compelled to do it, anyway. Must be because I'm bored at work, or something. *koff* Let the fun begin! Bold points are those the good1 James A. Smith, Sr. My rebuttals are directly below.
10. Many homosexuals are on our side. While the homosexual lobby has pushed for the "right" to "marry" as part of its broader public policy strategy to gain acceptance and endorsement, it’s clear that many homosexuals really don’t want to marry. Indeed, homosexuals see marriage as a key feature of the heterosexual culture which they wish to demolish in their attempt to radically change sexual morality in our society.
Some gay people aren't too concerned about marriage rights, and some oppose it, sure. Hey, there are still women who oppose equal rights and suffrage, and fully subscribe to the idea of female submission in the Biblical mode. Just because the members of a splinter group oppose expanding their own rights doesn't mean they're necessarily right, but furthermore, I'm pretty sure the number of gay people who would vote for a constitutional amendment that bans the possibility of gay marriage is vanishingly small.
The point about how TEH GAYS WANT TO RUIN HETEROSEXUAL CULTURE OH NOES is ridiculous and completely unsupported. Somehow, I doubt Mr. Smith has had extensive contact with gay people. If he did, he'd realize that homosexuals have plenty of drama to deal with on their own; destroying hetero culture by demolishing marriage as an institution is probably last on the list, probably somewhere after "Scrub kitchen grout throughly with toothbrush."
Just a guess.
9. America is on our side. Especially after last summer’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling which overturned Texas’ law against sodomy, American public opinion has been galvanized against “gay marriage” with significant majorities opposed.
This is a classic example of the bandwagon fallacy. Folks, just because a lot of people believe something don't mean it's true, or good, or should be made into public policy. America was opposed to miscegenation, too, and allowing women to vote. Lots of incredibly bad ideas have had tremendous popular support. I will avoid invoking Godwin's law, but I'm sure you get the idea.
8. History is on our side. Never in human history has marriage meant anything other than the union of a man and a woman. Further, no society -– at least until very recently -– has recognized the legitimacy of same-sex "marriage."
This is why fundies suck at debate: their allergy to knowledge that's not Bible-based means that their education has amazing skips and gaps. Human history HAS encompassed marriages that mean something other than the union of a man and a woman. Many, many cultures (Semitic cultures and Chinese cultures immediately come to mind) have allowed polygamy--polygyny, to be exact. (I'll get to non-standard/non-monogamous Biblical marriages in point number 1.) Other cultures have allowed the practice of polyandry, though this is much more rare than polygyny, but assorted Asian cultures (especially on the Indian sub-continent) as well as African and indigenous American societies have practiced this at one time or another.
And furthermore, this point assumes that marriage has been and still is this monolithic, unchanging institution based on some sort of holy law, when marriage has mostly been concerned with property inheritance and alliance-building. Folks, it's a social construct, not some kind of Godly creation, and it's a construct that has evolved (and continues to evolve) over millennia. The current view of marriage as a romantic binding of two hetero souls is largely Western and, if I remember correctly, a view that became popularized some time during the Victorian era. (I may be talking out of my ass on this one, but
lilithsaintcrow and heyokish could perhaps provide more insight into this?)7. Language is on our side. The words "homosexual" and "marriage" cannot be combined logically to mean anything; they are oxymoronic: two words that are contradictory. It is literally a redefinition of language to suggest marriage can mean anything other than the union of a man and a woman.
Only if you define "mariage" to include only one man and one woman, which renders his argument tautological. His core point is completely meaningless, because language is an exercise in consensus, and therefore constantly being redefined. If enough people decide today that the word "scroofynibble" is going to refer to the animal currently known as a "cat," then to all intents and purposes, scroofynibble = cat. There's no one-on-one correspondence between reality and the word, although onomatopoeia sometimes comes close. This is obvious even to non-linguists like me--but then I know what the word "etymology" means, and its implications thereof.
But even if we accept his core assumption as true, i.e., that language is unchanging and should never be changed, then he's ignoring the fact that current usage of the word "marriage" can, in fact, refer to homosexual union. Marriage is used in the larger sense of uniting things together, and oftentimes they aren't even human, or tangible. Phrases like "marriage of flavors," "marrying two pieces" and "married to an idea" are common parlance.
But perhaps it was too much to hope for this person to have consulted a dictionary before opening his gob.
6. Religious liberty is on our side. America’s First Amendment protects the free exercise of religion. Nevertheless, homosexuals who now lobby for same-sex "marriage" will not stop at mere governmental endorsement of their immoral activity; one day they will insist that all society -– including evangelical churches -– condone, protect and even bless these "marriages." Far-fetched? Look at the numerous examples of the deterioration of religious freedom of those with politically incorrect, biblical convictions.
Three very easy rebuttals to this one:
a) Banning gay marriage would in fact infringe on the religious freedoms of gay people who belong to a religion that don't discriminate against them.
b) As far as I know, the fags and fag lovers aren't lobbying for fundies to lose the right to marry, or even for fundies to lose the right to bitch long and hard about fags marrying. Allowing fags to marry is just that: allowing fags to marry. I don't see how allowing gay people to marry would somehow infringe on a dipshit Baptist's religious freedom. He's still free to be a dipshit and to say dipshit things, associate solely with other dipshits, and write long, dipshitty letters to the editor about those goddamn fags, man, I can't believe they're now allowed to marry, I mean COME ON, ever since gays were allowed to marry I've caught my son thumbing through a copy of Martha Stewart's Living, and you know what that leads to.
In sum: Three cheers for the First Amendment!
c) With the glaring exception of the whole polygamy/Mormon thing, I can't think of any other time the American government has successfully strong-armed a religion into modifying its practices, but on the other hand, I can think of several instances of powerful churches exerting an undue influence on public policy (the teaching of Intelligent Design theory and creationism in schools, abortion, contraception, the HPV vaccine, euthanasia, sex ed policy, indecency laws in broadcasting and, of course, gay marriage bans--I trust I've made my point?).
Legalizing something won't make the government force the church to do jack-shit. For example, contraception is legal, as is abortion, but churches are still free to (and many do) condemn both roundly. When churches are liberalized, the pressure comes from the congegration and members of the church administration, not the government.
In sum, I'm not sure what "eroded freedoms" this guy is talking about, unless it's, say, the freedom to beat the everloving snot out of his wife without legal consequence because she didn't make his ham sammich fast enough and he has Biblical dominion over her, dammit.
5. The "slippery slope" argument is on our side. Those who demand that same-sex "marriage" must be legalized have an obligation to explain why marriage is not appropriate for any other deviant sexual pattern adults and/or minors would wish to enter into. If homosexual "marriage" must be permitted, why shouldn’t polygamy, incest, pedophilia and other sexual immorality? Indeed, how will these practices be denied if "gay marriage" is granted?
First of all, WHAT standards of deviancy is he using? Many people don't view homosexuality as deviant in and of itself, and the gaiety has gone through various waves of acceptance and vilification throughout different periods of history and in different cultures. If he's trying to use current fundamentalist Christian standards, then he'd also have to argue that heterosexual people who engage in a host of other deviant practices (BDSM, watersports, scat fetishes and furries, just to scratch the surface) should be barred from marriage.
Second of all, implying that bestiality and pedophilia are on par with homosexuality is comparing apples to oranges. Pedophilia encompasses an urge to fuck little kids. Homosexuality encompasses an urge to fuck somebody of your own sex. One pretty much precludes the possibility of informed consent; the other doesn't. There's a WORLD of difference there, folks.
As for polygamy: to be honest, I don't think it should be illegal. The way it's been traditionally practiced has been incredibly creepy, with the man holding a disproportionate amount of power, but then so has monogamous marriage, and we've managed some decent inroads there. Really, if a group of people want to get married, I don't see why they shouldn't, as long as they're of age and entering the union of their own free will.
It's pretty funny for somebody who's so worked up about freedom of religion to be pretty hot to trot to impose his Baptist convictions about religious morality on everyone else.
4. Nature is on our side. One need not hold to any particular religious convictions to understand from common sense that men and women are different. Same-sex relationships are contrary to the natural order. "Gender distinctions are not simply an artificial social construct," Focus on the Family’s Glenn Stanton has written. "Men and women are uniquely designed to complement each other physically, emotionally and spiritually."
Actually, nature comes down on the side of the homos, since homosexual non-human animals exist. Thumpers love to argue both sides of this one: when you point out that gay animals exist, they quickly abandon the whole "homogaiety jest ain't natural" argument and switch to "But we're people! We should be able to restrain our impulses!" Which then implies that there are unnatural heterosexuals out there, and if it's unnatural, isn't that BAD?
Gender distinctions aren't artificial social constructs, that's true--but then leaping from that to "men and women are uniquely designed to complement each other" is a whole other thing entirely. First of all, were people really designed? That's an assumption with plenty of room for debate. And not only that, but the variation WITHIN the population is oftentimes greater than the variation BETWEEN the populations, as has been observed with, say, measures of intelligence. Complementarity and compatibility can be found within the gender just as well as between genders; to argue otherwise, one would have to show that gay relationships were somehow inherently less stable or functional than straight relationships, and the existence of stable, happy gay relationships as well as the large numbers of unhappy, unstable straight relationships prove that this isn't so.
3. Children are on our side. A primary reason for marriage is procreation –- bringing children into the world. Children need both mothers and fathers. "Deliberately depriving a child of a mother or a father is not in the child’s best interest," Stanton notes. Research demonstrates the critical value of both fathers and mothers in the formation of children.
Assuming that a homosexual couple doesn't opt to use artificial insemination and/or surrogate mothers, I have one word for the Good1 Mr. Smith: Adoption. The base assumption that children need both fathers and mothers is also a matter for debate. Do children really need a parent of each gender, or do they need positive adult role models and stable, sensible, loving parents?
2. The restoration of the family is on our side. Even before the current campaign for "gay marriage," it’s clear that America is in the midst of a massively dangerous, destructive experiment with marriage at severe cost to families and our society. Between 1960 and 2000, U.S. households with married couples declined from 78 to 52 percent, with the total number of households with unmarried partners increasing by 72 percent just between 1990 and 2000. The explosion of no-fault divorce and serial marriages is further undermining the biblical ideal for marriage. Same-sex "marriage" will accelerate these damaging trends.
And here is where Smith completely loses me. WHAT does this have anything to do with gay marriage? It has to do with people (finally, and thank God for that) becoming less uptight about sex and cohabitation losing its stigma. Logically, gay marriage can only INCREASE the numbers of people getting married and DECREASE the numbers of people living without the blessing of matrimony, unless some malicious fag slips a rider into the legislation that, say, forces 2 straight couples to divorce for every gay couple who's married. I mean, c'mon.
1. America must be on God’s side. All truth is God’s truth, which is why all the foregoing reasons against homosexual "marriage" are valid. God’s Word explains why they are true. Every reason to oppose "gay marriage" is secondary to the fact that God has spoken. Starting in the Bible’s first book with the creation of man and woman, which as the pinnacle of creation He calls "very good" (Gen. 1:31), and continuing through the last book, God’s plan for marriage is abundantly clear.
Oooh, this is a good one! Let's look at Biblical marriage, shall we? First of all, if "wife" in Genesis 2 is to be taken literally, Adam essentially married his clone (since Eve was made from his rib)--so it looks like God looked kindly upon this incestuous marriage, if incest is defined as "marrying somebody immediately related to you." Oh, and speaking of incest, the foundation patriarch, Abraham himself, married his half-sister, Sarai (later renamed Sarah). And there are a number of polygamists in the Bible, most famously Solomon. So, according to the Bible, incest and polygyny are most assuredly allowed (and maybe pedophilia? It's been years since I've read the Bible, and nothing immediately comes to mind, but given how fucked-up that book is, it wouldn't surprise me). Would Mr. Smith please explain how these practices will be denied if marriage according to the Biblical mode is granted?
And not only that, but there's nothing in the Bible that specifically precludes homos from marrying. There are about three passages that condemn homosexuality, including the infamous one in Leviticus that says a man who lays with another man as a woman should be put to death, but dude: Leviticus is full of passages about putting people to death, among them lobster-eaters and people who see their parents naked. If we didn't allow people who violated Biblical laws the right to marry, only a fraction of a fraction of the population would have that right.
And really, d'you know what's the most frequently condemned sexual practice in the Bible? Adultery and fornication. And yet here we go, allowing these adulterers and fornicators the right to marry. Tsk. I expect the legislators to get right on that, because God knows I don't want to expose our precious, precious children to the ravaging effects of extra-marital infidelity and...oh. Wait. Never mind, then.
1And by good, I mean "incredibly stupid."
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-06-09 09:20 pm (UTC)I read in Ann Crittenden's The Price of Motherhood (which every woman should read, yo!) about an interesting phenomena. The more economically taken-advantage-of mothers as a social class get, the more the prevailing society starts moaning about the sanctity of marriage and motherhood. Interesting, no?
Speaking of marriage and Christianity, let's look at Jesus. He was a religious leader, at a time when you couldn't be a rabbi unless you were married. An unmarried rabbi was like a fish without gills; you just didn't see 'em. (And no, I'm not basing this on the fucking Da Vinci Code. I'm basing it on research into Judaic law and culture.)
But do we hear about this when the Christians moan about marriage? No. Let's even talk about the aspects of the Apostles that could qualify as polyamory, especially in the young Christian churches.
Although I have to separate from you on the polygamy issue, Candy. Polygamy (more specifically, polygyny) is used as a tool to oppress women and get middle-aged men some teenage snatch (just Google Warren Jeffs if you doubt me on this one, or take a serious look at Joseph Smith.) Between consenting adults is fine, but polygyny is not used in our society or culture between consenting adults. It's just not. So while I allow the consenting-adults codicil, I still consider myself anti-polygyny, while pro-polyamory.
Agh. Too much ranting. Sorry.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-09 09:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-09 09:42 pm (UTC)In short, my problem isn't the theoretical practice of polygyny between consenting adults. It's the practical application of said safeguards. Frankly, with the way the justice system works, polygyny (and I'm taking the FLDS as my test population here) is seen as a largely-unprosecutable crime. I can't see any safeguards that would match a determined religious wacko's hunger for fresh females. (Manson? Koresh? Jones? Bueller? Just kidding about the last one.)
Adding into this, I think, is the fact that the justice system is by and large still a male preserve (as I've noted before.) There's a healthy helping of "boys will be boys" when it comes to something like this; a harem might be illegal but when compared to say, drug charges, one is going to get the resources to be prosecuted and the other is not.
To sum up, I can't see that practically, given our current social climate, polygyny can be overtly legalized and still adequately policed to safeguard teenage girls. That's my objection, not the theoretical freedom to marry nine men if I so desire.
Christ, not that I desire it. I'd be running around picking up dropped clothing the rest of my days...
no subject
Date: 2006-06-09 09:52 pm (UTC)However, each and every one of them is also free to marry other girls/boys. DOH!
I agree with you that policing/enforcing this sort of thing could become a nightmare, and that legalizing polygamy would be a policy nightmare. Intellectually, I'm not opposed to it; I do have lots of objections to the way it's historically been practiced.
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Date: 2006-06-09 09:55 pm (UTC)I dunno. A harem of skinny geek boys just sounds like too much laundry and dishwashing to me. *sigh* Having a husband is just like having another kid some days. More than one of them? No way.
--but I will fight the oppressors for the RIGHT for Stan to have babies...*gives best Monty Python smile*
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Date: 2006-06-09 10:01 pm (UTC)So: hot, skinny geek boys who aren't afraid to do chores, cook and go out dancing with me, and aren't squeamish about seeing or touching the occasional pen0r. That's not a tall order, right?
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Date: 2006-06-09 10:13 pm (UTC)Quest for the Fabled Geekboy, anyone? I'd buy THAT video game...
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Date: 2006-06-10 08:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-10 08:13 am (UTC)That doesn't even make 10 criteria in a list. See, we women aren't that hard to please...
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Date: 2006-06-10 01:07 pm (UTC)the guy reminds me of a less rabid Ann Coulter . . . best to ignore stupidity like this as much as possible.
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Date: 2006-06-11 06:36 pm (UTC)And yes, taking potshots at this guy was TOO easy, but I had to do it. Fiction writers talk about feeling pressure building up when they have a story to tell; I feel that same sort of pressure, but mostly when I read the stupid. I had to type that out or stew away all day.