WOW! The College Fix has this incredible story about the quickness of this fascistic movement’s growth (H/T to Gay Patriot):
It’s uncommon at Jesuit universities these days for someone to openly share a traditional Catholic viewpoint.
When it happened at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, the school was so spooked it called the Los Angeles Police Department.
Both the police and the university’s Bias Incident Response Team are investigating the stated belief that only two genders exist, male and female, as a hate crime.
A Loyola alumni office employee discussed her views on sexual orientation, which align with the Roman Catholic Church, with three students who were hanging up posters on the subject on April 14.
Cosette Carleo, one of the students involved, told The College Fix in a phone interview that the hate crime under investigation is “denying transgenderism.”
Carleo’s account agrees in part with an email by the husband of the employee with whom she tangled.
The employee told Carleo, who identifies as gender-neutral, that only two genders exist, male and female, according to the student. Carleo told The Fix that statement was the hate crime.
Carleo responded that “you can have your opinion” as long as it doesn’t “deny my existence.”
FPIW visited the campus of the University of Washington to see if students would affirm or reject Joseph Backholm’s new chosen identity: a 6’5″ Chinese woman.
I think the really important part is at the end when it is pointed out that how are these people going to make the real [tough] decisions in life than truly matter if they cannot deal with simple realities. I can see this thinking with How Obama deals with foreign affairs. This brings to mind as well the recently “famous” dragon-lady, which is a man mutilating his body to become a female… wait for it… dragon. I have more on this in my Transspecies post, but Gay Patriot ends his post on the matter with this:
So, does this mean that businesses will be required to provide this creature with a sunny rock to warm itself in the afternoon sun on? Will states that exempt businesses from having to cater to this be subject to boycotts in services of the LGBQTAR (As in ‘Reptilian’) coalition of the perpetually aggrieved?
I really didn’t think it was going to happen this fast when I predicted last week that schools were going to need all new bathrooms soon to accommodate “transgender children.” That case involved a Missouri high school senior who triggered a large protest when he insisted on changing in the girls’ locker room. I clearly failed to anticipate just how quickly the SJW forces can move because one school district in the San Francisco area is already on top of the problem. They’re going to entirely unisex bathrooms to avoid insulting any “differently gendered” students, by golly, and they’re starting with the elementary school. (Yahoo News)
[….]
Who could possibly have guessed that the epicenter for erasing the concept of gender from the early education system would come from San Francisco? I suppose if you indoctrinate them early enough you can really strike a blow for change, but this highly disturbing trend isn’t just taking place in the left coast granola-centric community. This entire concept of restructuring the human race in abject denial of fundamental, biological reality – not to mention millennia of attempting to instill civil behavior for young ladies and gentlemen – should be a warning sign. We’re managing to tear down our own house from the inside and the government seems to be perfectly willing to finance the wrecking ball.
When you read a facepalm inducing story like this you might be wondering, well how many kids are having gender issues in kindergarten? The obvious and easy answer is that none of them are, but some of them have parents who watch Rachel Maddow or read Sally Kohn too frequently and you never know what they’ll be getting up to with their own children. Another case in point comes to us once again not from California, but from Nashville, Tennessee. Hang on to your hats for this one. (Yahoo)
Christiane Davis, a stay-at-home mom, lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with her husband, Jeremiah, and their two kids, A.J. and Patrick. What most people wouldn’t know at first glance is that A.J., which stands for Andrew Jackson, is a female-to-male transgender child.
On Nov. 14, 2007, Davis gave birth to a baby girl named Nadine. Davis began seeing signs that her child was a boy rather than a girl early on. By the time A.J. turned three, he was refusing to wear “girly” clothes. Another issue was A.J.’s hair: He did not want it to be touched. “He didn’t want me to put it up into little clips or bows,” she said.
Davis thought she was going to have a tomboy and didn’t want to label her child anything. She thought her then daughter was just a strong-willed little girl. But it went beyond that.
The story just goes downhill from there. I can’t even imagine what’s going to become of the Davis family’s daughter in later years but it seems to be beyond our control. I’m just hoping they’re not going to try chemically altering her body to delay the onset of puberty or begin scheduling surgery on her….
Political Correctness creeps its way into American life in the worst ways imaginable. With thanks to — of course — leftist ideology and management. For instance, a triple-amputee Iraq veteran struggles with VA bureaucracy, or the covering up veterans’ deaths at the now infamous Arizona VA hospital. And while the following is not an “American” story, it highlights the onerous decay of “government guided” healthcare:
Moonbatterynotes that military criminals play into the above example with a truly unique American story that wreaks of tragedy.
A Democratic Administration has predictable priorities:
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has formally approved the request of Pvt. Bradley Manning, convicted for leaking classified documents to Wikileaks, to be temporarily transferred out of military custody in order to undergo expensive hormone therapy and surgery to become a woman.
Manning leaked the documents while in a snit because he wasn’t getting along with his boyfriend. Any number of Americans and their allies had their lives placed in danger as a result. A sane civilization would have promptly executed Manning for treason.
Instead, we are paying for a criminal’s sex change. A criminal that caused — directly — the deaths of U.S. military [and allies] deaths as well as intelligence operators deaths leading also to the shutting down of many undercover operations meant to protect the general public from future terrorist attacks.
As the [supposed] medical needs of Manning, convicted in 2013 and sentenced to 35 years in prison for stealing 750,000 classified defense department documents in order to disseminate them to Wikileaks, were being assiduously attended to by America’s defense establishment, untold hundreds of American servicemen and women suffering from genuine life-threatening and acute medical conditions have allegedly been left to die on at least seven waiting lists managed by the US Veterans Administration. …
Phoenix VA doctor Dr. Sam Foote was the first to publicly expose the scandal when he claimed that up to 40 people in his jurisdiction alone had died preventable deaths while on VA waiting lists.
Sex change treatments can last several years and, in Manning’s case, will cost taxpayers up to $40,000. The 2014 published Medicaid reimbursement for a colonoscopy is $479.39.
It all makes perfect sense for an administration that honors IDAHOT Day instead of Armed Forces Day.
See my post on Obama ignoring “Armed Forces Day” but pandering instead to the LGBT community. I am sure the LGBT community is proud that its own Leftist have made “Chelsea” its honory parade marshall:
Today, the nation’s largest Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Pride Celebration Committee announced on its website that WikiLeaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning has been chosen to represent the event as a 2014 Honorary Grand Marshal. (HotAir)
Below, Michael Medved deals with two issues from President Obama’s recent Executive Order “Payment Fairness Act” push through. He [Medved] deals first with the continuing distortion of Obama’s family history by Obama himself. Then he gets to the meat of the issue (followed by some of the WSJ article mentioned in the clip):
…In its annual report, “Highlights of Women’s Earnings in 2012,” the Bureau of Labor Statistics states that “In 2012, women who were full-time wage and salary workers had median usual weekly earnings of $691. On average in 2012, women made about 81% of the median earnings of male full-time wage and salary workers ($854).” Give or take a few percentage points, the BLS appears to support the president’s claim.
But every “full-time” worker, as the BLS notes, is not the same: Men were almost twice as likely as women to work more than 40 hours a week, and women almost twice as likely to work only 35 to 39 hours per week. Once that is taken into consideration, the pay gap begins to shrink. Women who worked a 40-hour week earned 88% of male earnings.
Then there is the issue of marriage and children. The BLS reports that single women who have never married earned 96% of men’s earnings in 2012.
The supposed pay gap appears when marriage and children enter the picture. Child care takes mothers out of the labor market, so when they return they have less work experience than similarly-aged males. Many working mothers seek jobs that provide greater flexibility, such as telecommuting or flexible hours. Not all jobs can be flexible, and all other things being equal, those which are will pay less than those that do not.
Education also matters. Even within groups with the same educational attainment, women often choose fields of study, such as sociology, liberal arts or psychology, that pay less in the labor market. Men are more likely to major in finance, accounting or engineering. And as the American Association of University Women reports, men are four times more likely to bargain over salaries once they enter the job market.
Risk is another factor. Nearly all the most dangerous occupations, such as loggers or iron workers, are majority male and 92% of work-related deaths in 2012 were to men. Dangerous jobs tend to pay higher salaries to attract workers. Also: Males are more likely to pursue occupations where compensation is risky from year to year, such as law and finance. Research shows that average pay in such jobs is higher to compensate for that risk.
While the BLS reports that full-time female workers earned 81% of full-time males, that is very different than saying that women earned 81% of what men earned for doing the same jobs, while working the same hours, with the same level of risk, with the same educational background and the same years of continuous, uninterrupted work experience, and assuming no gender differences in family roles like child care. In a more comprehensive study that controlled for most of these relevant variables simultaneously—such as that from economists June and Dave O’Neill for the American Enterprise Institute in 2012—nearly all of the 23% raw gender pay gap cited by Mr. Obama can be attributed to factors other than discrimination. The O’Neills conclude that, “labor market discrimination is unlikely to account for more than 5% but may not be present at all.”…
Again, and again, the Dems from the President on-down spread this lie! While I deal with this quite well here… I will now add another post dealing with this myth, lie, political tactic. Below will be a few video/audio clips as well as The Wall Street Journal and Powerline posts/articles on the matter.
Professor Christiana Hoff Sommers was recently interviewed by Larry Elder explains this nonsense in an erudite and concise manner::
Powerline says that the President is in trouble when it can’t even fool CNN: AEI’s Mark Perry sets out the “analysis” proving pay discrimination at the White House here in a form even the folks at CNN can understand. If Obama can’t fool those who want to believe at CNN with this line, who ya gonna fool? Again, Powerline posts (10-20, 2012)Thomas Sowell’s response to the matter:
At the Hofstra University presidential debate this past Tuesday (I’m working from the WaPo transcript here), Candy Crowley called on Katherine Fenton to ask this groaner of a question: “In what new ways to you intend to rectify the inequalities in the workplace, specifically regarding females making only 72 percent of what their male counterparts earn?”
This is such an old canard I thought that Governor Romney might challenge the premise of the question. Equal pay for equal work is the law of the land, Katherine. The proposition that the statistical disparity in pay you mention results from employment discrimination has been examined and disproved many times over. The great Thomas Sowell addressed it in chapter 3 of Economic Facts and Fallacies (summarized in the video below). Katherine, the premise of your question falls into the category of “fallacy.”
What is truly scary is that everyone may know your pay at some point… this may be no-longer private:
The first bill President Obama signed into law was the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, but five years later, the White House is still talking about the gender wage-gap.
At a White House briefing on Wednesday, Betsey Stevenson, one of President Obama’s economic advisers, said female employees need to know how much their male colleagues earn, so they can tell if they’re being paid equally.
It pictures two women, one in a pink dress carrying a handbag, the other in an orange dress, and both are wearing oh-so-practical stilettos. This is exactly what working women wear to work every day, right? All those women who are lawyers, and doctors, and cashiers, and investment bankers, and biochemists, and nursing assistants and architects and engineers and cashiers at the Piggly Wiggly? Perhaps this is why Obama was so focused on dry-cleaning bills at the White House signing ceremony? This is just not great messaging or symbolism for a White House that wants to also focus on women in minimum wage jobs. It screams “Sex and the City,” not “9 to 5.”
Ouch!
It didn’t get much better for Senate Democrats. Republicans took a look at their payroll records and found they also have a wage inequality problem.
It turns out President Obama isn’t the only hypocritical Democrat, in fact Senate Democrats have their own problems when it comes to equal pay. We pulled the official payroll records of various offices and calculated the average pay for men and women in each office for the most recent 6 month period available. Since some employees only worked a portion of the six month period, we calculated how much each person was paid per day in order to give an accurate representation. Here’s what we found:
Mark Udall pays women 85 cents for every dollar that a man makes.
Mary Landrieu pays women 88 cents for every dollar that a man makes.
Mark Begich pays women 82 cents for every dollar that a man makes.
Mark Warner pays women 75 cents for every dollar that a man makes.
Gary Peters pays women 67 cents for every dollar that a man makes.
That means on average, these five Democrats on the ballot in battleground states pay women in their office 79 cents for every dollar made by a male employee.
Garcetti focuses on pay-rate myths in the genders. Again and again the Right has to deal with these mantras of the Left. Video of Mika Brezezski spreading this lie is included in the audio.
…But no subject gets her going more than when I ask if she really sees a connection between society’s attempts to paper over the biological distinction between men and women and the collapse of Western civilization.
She starts by pointing to the diminished status of military service. “The entire elite class now, in finance, in politics and so on, none of them have military service—hardly anyone, there are a few. But there is no prestige attached to it anymore. That is a recipe for disaster,” she says. “These people don’t think in military ways, so there’s this illusion out there that people are basically nice, people are basically kind, if we’re just nice and benevolent to everyone they’ll be nice too. They literally don’t have any sense of evil or criminality.”
The results, she says, can be seen in everything from the dysfunction in Washington (where politicians “lack practical skills of analysis and construction”) to what women wear. “So many women don’t realize how vulnerable they are by what they’re doing on the street,” she says, referring to women who wear sexy clothes.
When she has made this point in the past, Ms. Paglia—who dresses in androgynous jackets and slacks—has been told that she believes “women are at fault for their own victimization.” Nonsense, she says. “I believe that every person, male and female, needs to be in a protective mode at all times of alertness to potential danger. The world is full of potential attacks, potential disasters.” She calls it “street-smart feminism.”
Ms. Paglia argues that the softening of modern American society begins as early as kindergarten. “Primary-school education is a crock, basically. It’s oppressive to anyone with physical energy, especially guys,” she says, pointing to the most obvious example: the way many schools have cut recess. “They’re making a toxic environment for boys. Primary education does everything in its power to turn boys into neuters.”
She is not the first to make this argument, as Ms. Paglia readily notes. Fellow feminist Christina Hoff Sommers has written about the “war against boys” for more than a decade. The notion was once met with derision, but now data back it up: Almost one in five high-school-age boys has been diagnosed with ADHD, boys get worse grades than girls and are less likely to go to college.
Ms. Paglia observes this phenomenon up close with her 11-year-old son, Lucien, whom she is raising with her ex-partner, Alison Maddex, an artist and public-school teacher who lives 2 miles away. She sees the tacit elevation of “female values”—such as sensitivity, socialization and cooperation—as the main aim of teachers, rather than fostering creative energy and teaching hard geographical and historical facts.
By her lights, things only get worse in higher education. “This PC gender politics thing—the way gender is being taught in the universities—in a very anti-male way, it’s all about neutralization of maleness.” The result: Upper-middle-class men who are “intimidated” and “can’t say anything. . . . They understand the agenda.” In other words: They avoid goring certain sacred cows by “never telling the truth to women” about sex, and by keeping “raunchy” thoughts and sexual fantasies to themselves and their laptops.
Politically correct, inadequate education, along with the decline of America’s brawny industrial base, leaves many men with “no models of manhood,” she says. “Masculinity is just becoming something that is imitated from the movies. There’s nothing left. There’s no room for anything manly right now.” The only place you can hear what men really feel these days, she claims, is on sports radio. No surprise, she is an avid listener. The energy and enthusiasm “inspires me as a writer,” she says, adding: “If we had to go to war,” the callers “are the men that would save the nation.”
And men aren’t the only ones suffering from the decline of men. Women, particularly elite upper-middle-class women, have become “clones” condemned to “Pilates for the next 30 years,” Ms. Paglia says. “Our culture doesn’t allow women to know how to be womanly,” adding that online pornography is increasingly the only place where men and women in our sexless culture tap into “primal energy” in a way they can’t in real life.
A key part of the remedy, she believes, is a “revalorization” of traditional male trades—the ones that allow women’s studies professors to drive to work (roads), take the elevator to their office (construction), read in the library (electricity), and go to gender-neutral restrooms (plumbing)…
The Berkeley City Council recently debated the merits of adding sex-change operations to the city employee medical insurance plan, and tabled the idea for future consideration. Berkeley City employees remain trapped in their gender until further notice. (American Spectator)
It’s official — the former Golden State is now a freak show:
California lawmakers approved a bill Wednesday that would require public K-12 schools to let transgender students choose which restrooms they use and which school teams they join based on their gender identity instead of their chromosomes. …
California’s bill would give students the right “to participate in sex-segregated programs, activities and facilities” based on their self-perception, regardless of their birth gender.
That is, since as we all know liberal ideology trumps physical reality, you are whatever gender you say you are — or if you are a horny teenager with no sense of shame, whatever gender will get you a pass to the girls’ showers.
I mentioned this desire to control nature in the past, but here is yet another example of this lunacy! In May Michael Medved commented on this bill [now law]:
Like legislating control of weather (Climate Change policies), the narcissism in legislating against the ideal that nature or God has honed or created is jaw-dropping narcissism. We should be able to celebrate this ideal handed to us by nature and/or God… instead our society is attacking it for the first time in human history. With no consequences, so they think.
Dennis Prager point out that “many in the university are not even intellectually open in the natural sciences if an idea may clash with Left-wing opinion.” He continues,
In a talk before fellow economists, the same Lawrence Summers, when he was president of Harvard University (he had been secretary of the Treasury under President Bill Clinton), addressed the issue of why there were so many fewer women than men in some areas of science, in math, and in engineering. He suggested that among other reasons, one might be that women’s brains are less suited to these subjects than men’s brains. More than one hundred Harvard professors signed a petition against President Summers, Left-wing alumni threatened not to give any more money to Harvard, and the vast majority of Harvard’s professors kept a cowardly silence while their colleagues sought to suppress completely respectable intellectual inquiry. Consequently, President Summers felt forced to apologize. In the year 2005, nearly four centuries after Galileo was forced by the then-dominant Catholic Church to recant observable scientific facts about our solar system, the president of Harvard University, an institution whose motto is Veritas (“Truth”), was forced by the now-dominant Left to recant observable facts about men and women.
Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph (New York, NY: Broadside Books, 2012), 102-103.
Like religious fundamentalists seeking to stamp out the teaching of evolution, feminists stomped Harvard University President Lawrence Summers for mentioning at a January 14 academic conference the entirely reasonable theory that innate male-female differences might possibly help explain why so many mathematics, engineering, and hard-science faculties remain so heavily male.
Unlike most religious fundamentalists, these feminists were pursuing a careerist, self-serving agenda. This cause can put money in their pockets.
Summers’s suggestion—now ignominiously retracted, with groveling, Soviet-show-trial-style apologies—was that sex discrimination and the reluctance of mothers to work 80 hours a week are not the only possible explanations for gender imbalances in the math-science area. He noted that high school boys have many more of the highest math scores than girls, and suggested that this might reflect genetic differences. He also stressed the need for further research into all three possible explanations.
The foul brute may as well have rapped that women are “hos,” or declared that they should be kept barefoot and pregnant. The most remarkable feminist exercise in self-parody was that of MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins, who famously told reporters that she “felt I was going to be sick,” that “my heart was pounding and my breath was shallow,” that “I just couldn’t breathe, because this kind of bias makes me physically ill,” and that she had to flee the room because otherwise “I would’ve either blacked out or thrown up.”
Such fatuous feminist fulminations have been good fun, as have the eviscerations of Hopkins as a latter-day “Victorian maiden exposed to male coarseness, [who] suffers the vapors and collapses on the drawing room carpet in a heap of crinolines,” in the words of George Will. (More on Hopkins below.) But most of the commentary has glossed over one important point:
For all its foolishness and irrationality, the feminist hysteria about Summers furthers the career agendas of feminists who seek thinly veiled job preferences or quotas for themselves and their friends. Such preferences are most easily justified as a remedy for male bias. And bias can more easily be blamed for gender imbalances if the possibility that more men than women are gifted with math-science brilliance is banished from public discourse.
This feminist-careerist agenda is conveniently ignored by the less hysterical critics of Summers, who make no claim that he said anything inaccurate but nonetheless reproach him for what a Los Angeles Times editorial portrayed as a gratuitous and insensitive ego trip. To the contrary, until his disgraceful capitulation to the power of political correctness, Summers was making a much-needed effort to break the self-serving feminist-careerist stranglehold on honest discussion of gender imbalances….
Recent studies highlight a long-held suspicion about the brains of males and females. They’re not the same. So how does the brain of a female look and function differently from a male’s brain, and what accounts for these differences?
Disparities Start Early in Life
Scientists now know that sex hormones begin to exert their influence during development of the fetus. A recent study by Israeli researchers that examined male and female brains found distinct differences in the developing fetus at just 26 weeks of pregnancy. The disparities could be seen when using an ultrasound scanner. The corpus callosum — the bridge of nerve tissue that connects the right and left sides of the brain — had a thicker measurement in female fetuses than in male fetuses.
Observations of adult brains show that this area may remain stronger in females. “Females seem to have language functioning in both sides of the brain,” says Martha Bridge Denckla, PhD, a research scientist at Kennedy Krieger Institute.
Consider these recent findings. Researchers, using brain imaging technology that captures blood flow to “working” parts of the brain, analyzed how men and women process language. All subjects listened to a novel. When males listened, only the left hemisphere of their brains was activated. The brains of female subjects, however, showed activity on both the left and right hemispheres.
This activity across both hemispheres of the brain may result in the strong language skills typically displayed by females. “If there’s more area dedicated to a set of skills, it follows that the skills will be more refined,” says David Geary, PhD, professor of psychological sciences at the University of Missouri.
As a whole, girls outperform boys in the use of language and fine motor skills until puberty, notes Denckla. Boys also fall prey to learning disabilities more frequently than girls. “Clinics see a preponderance of boys with dyslexia,” Denckla tells WebMD. ADHD also strikes more boys than girls. The symptoms displayed by girls and boys with ADHD differ, too. Girls with ADHD usually exhibit inattention, while affected boys are prone to lack of impulse control. But not all differences favor girls.
Boys generally demonstrate superiority over female peers in areas of the brain involved in math and geometry. These areas of the brain mature about four years earlier in boys than in girls, according to a recent study that measured brain development in more than 500 children. Researchers concluded that when it comes to math, the brain of a 12-year-old girl resembles that of an 8-year-old boy. Conversely, the same researchers found that areas of the brain involved in language and fine motor skills (such as handwriting) mature about six years earlier in girls than in boys…
[….]
Geary suggests that women use language skills to their advantage. “Females use language more when they compete. They gossip, manipulate information,” he says. Geary suggests that this behavior, referred to as relational aggression, may have given females a survival advantage long ago. “If the ability to use language to organize relationships was of benefit during evolutionary history, and used more frequently by women, we would expect language differences to become exaggerated,” he tells WebMD. Women also use language to build relationships, theorizes Geary. “Women pause more, allow the other friend to speak more, offer facilitative gestures,” he says.
When it comes to performing activities that require spatial skills, like navigating directions, men generally do better. “Women use the cerebral cortex for solving problems that require navigational skills. Men use an entirely different area, mainly the left hippocampus — a nucleus deep inside the brain that’s not activated in the women’s brains during navigational tasks,” Geary tells WebMD. The hippocampus, he explains, automatically codes where you are in space. As a result, Geary says: “Women are more likely to rely on landmark cues: they might suggest you turn at the 7-11 and make a right at the church, whereas men are more likely to navigate via depth reckoning — go east, then west, etc.”….
…The female and male brain is different and the two brains process information differently. The good news is that with some conscious effort communication can be enhanced between the brains and frustrations lowered.
In general, female brains tend to employ both sides of their brain to process information while male brains tend to rely primarily on their dominant or language side to process. As the dominant hemisphere tends to be analytic, problem solving, task oriented, detailed, and verbal this helps to explain male behavior. A female brain can also process in this manner, but the non-dominant hemisphere that can process emotion, meaning without words, empathy, tone, and disposition is also engaged by the female.
Perhaps this helps to explain why females enjoy shopping while most men view it as a chore, women vote differently than males, men and women struggle communicating with each other, and men do not understand psychotherapy. Men tend to be more isolative, less talkative, and focused on solution. Women tend to be more group oriented, more talkative, and focused on the means and not necessarily the ends. This gets played out in the U.S. at this time as women and men tend to view the same debate between candidates differently (men tend to focus on content and women both content and style)…
(This audio is a FLASHBACK from JUNE 17, 2008) The only reason I know that is because of the reference to this L.A. Times article, “The Right to Love” (Reproduced in full in the appendix)
I wanted to share here some conversation and further thinking on a topic that was discussed vigorously amongst friends while partaking in choice hops this past Halloween weekend. The below is written in conversation style (almost all my posts are like this) for friends. So it will seem personal at times.
A plea for friends who are in relationships… this is meant for continued deeper reflection. Take your time and reflect thoughtfully and if discussed amongst yourselves, discuss civilly. Through all the conversation, know that right now in California civil partnerships hold all the legal equality (taxes, health-care coverage, hospital visits, etc) to marriage. So the push to have “same-sex marriage” isn’t about “equality,” it’s about ideology.
Also keep in mind that I am not in any way under the impression that a simple conversation like this will undue many years of thinking on a matter/subject. (You or Myself.) I would rather you at the least be introduced to a side of an issue that maybe you haven’t heard of before. This introduction to other arguments may be long and tedious. TAKE YOUR TIME (*caps not yelling but said for impact*). Great theories and coming to positions (spiritual and political) on a matter take time and evolve, sometimes over years. Or at least they should be considered with weightiness and not merely adopted from university or parental influence.
I have no idea either what you may have been introduced to (for instance: Howard Zinn, the self admitted Marxist and historian whose historical viewpoint was born from Marx and Engels writings – on other words, his historical philosophy didn’t exist prior to the Communist Manifesto). This view of history tends to be popular at the university campus. In other words, many of our views are rooted in deeper worldviews and the peripheral views we hold may never change until you look a bit deeper into our worldview.
(What does a worldview entail? Any “coherent worldview must be able to satisfactorily answer four questions: that of origin, meaning, morality, and destiny.” Another writer outs it thusly: “A Worldview is how one views or interprets reality. The German word is Weltanschauung, meaning a ‘world and life view,’ or ‘a paradigm.’ It is a framework through which or by which one makes sense of the data of life. A worldview makes a world of difference in one’s view of God, origins, evil, human nature, values, and destiny.” Raising one’s self-consciousness [awareness] about worldviews is an essential part of intellectual maturity.)
In my mind’s eye we are talking about peripheral positions that would be impacted more by a deeper look into how we view reality… something not often looked into by the general populace today (see my first chapter in my book). So again,
I am more concerned about clarity than agreement in this conversation.
Many positions we hold as fact can be based in fallacious thinking. I will exemplify this by a topic that was brought up the other night, anthropogenic global warming (man caused global warming). History and science come together to disprove this theory. Not only has the “hockey stick” model that gave birth to this giant theory which was popularized by Al Gore [Britain’s courts referenced many lies in his presentation to not show it in public schools] has been torn to shreds science-wise, history shows the complete breakdown of the premise. For instance:
(1) Mars (Uncommon Descent h/t) has had a bout of global warming… last I checked Exxon doesn’t drill there;
(2) In the 8th century AD, the Roman Empire grew grapes used for wine on the slopes of Salisbury Plain (about 80 miles southwest of London) in the United Kingdom;
(3) The Vikingsraiding and traveling the seas was made possible by the now frozen “Greenland”actually living up to its name;
(4) NASA‘s “fact” that 1998 was the warmest year (used by Al Gore) was disproved by an amateur mathematician;
(5) In 1970’s, at the first Earth Day rally, scientists, meteorologists and politicians all pushed a theory that there was Global Cooling (Time magazine for instance). While this theory wasn’t as embedded in popular thinking and scientific literature as is global warming, it was still the dominant theory of that time;
(7) In the 1500’s till the late 1800’s passages that are now iced over allowed for what is termed as the Northwest Passage… Exxon or cars weren’t around then?
“If you are like me and bit foggy on the Northwest Passage, here is a five cent refresher. The British coined the term Northwest Passage for the potential northern oceanic pass that would allow vessels to move between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The earliest explorations for the fabled passage were by Cortes in 1539. The late 1500’s were marked by British explorers, Martin Frobisher, Humphrey Gilbert, and John Davis. Several expeditions followed, all with little success of finding the passage but tempered by the acquisition of new lands. Some attempts lead to deaths of entire crews. Notable of these is the Sir John Franklin expedition in which all of the crew members were lost to starvation, scurvy, cannibalism, and lead poisoning from food sealed in tins. The first to transverse the Northwest Passage was Sir Robert McClure using a combination of both sledge and ship. Ironically this was done during the search for Franklin’s team in which McClure’s own ship became trapped in the ice for three winters. The passage was finally conquered entirely by sea by the Norwegian Amundsen in 1906.”
(8)Acid rain scares of the 1980’s were mostly unfounded and not man-caused;
(9) On the northern side of Mammoth (in California), there are tree-lines that were preserved by a volcanic eruption in A.D. 1350. In this preserved tree-line there were seven species of tree that grew well above the current tree-line in this mountainous range. The Earth would have to be 3.2 degrees warmer (Celsius) in order for these particular trees to grow in this higher altitude.
So one can believe in man caused Global Warming, but the facts speak for themselves. (See my son’s 6th grade debate for Toast Masters for instance.) What would drive this view then? Patrick Moore, who you’ll remember is the co-founder of Green Peace, answers this important query, saying:
“I now find that many environmental groups have drifted into self-serving cliques with narrow vision and rigid ideology…. many environmentalists are showing signs of elitism, left-wingism, and downright eco-fascism. The once politically centrist, science-based vision of environmentalism has been largely replaced with extremist rhetoric. Science and logic have been abandoned and the movement is often used to promote other causes such as class struggle and anti-corporatism. The public is left trying to figure out what is reasonable and what is not.”
MOVING ON.
I almost wrote on the topic we spoke a bit about the other night back in September and wish I had, but instead I switched gears and wrote on the Left’s support for pedophilia (explicit and implicit) in their support of many groups who promote it – here in the united states and abroad (See: The Left / Islamo-Nazis / Homosexuality / Womens Rights / and Contradictions). I would like us to stay on just this topic if we can work though it.
Before getting to the main topic that we left last night about interracial marriage being illegal on the basis of color and homosexuality being equated to that [i.e., race], I wish to post some of what I said last night for record sake. This comes from a question asked of me by one of my son’s friends. He asked “What is your views on gays? Are they bad? Are they going to hell? Are you born this way?” (Question #3 from Q & A Session – PapaG Style) Most of what I talked about last night can be found in this post for clarity [updated a bit]:
….However, there is a “created order,” or, even a natural order (if you do not believe in God). My argument for heterosexual (between a man and a woman) unions is usable both by the atheist (non believer) and the theist (a believer in God – in the Judeo-Christian sense). Here is the crux of the matter in regards to “nature’s order:”
“…take gold as an example, it has inherent in its nature intrinsic qualities that make it expensive: good conductor of electricity, rare, never tarnishes, ease of use (moldability), and the like. The male and female have the potential to become a single biological organism, or single organic unit, or principle. Two essentially becoming one. The male and female, then, have inherent to their nature intrinsic qualities that two mated males or two mated females never actualize in their courtship… nor can they ever. The potential stays just that, potential, never being realized…..
“….Think of a being or animal or even an insect that reproduces, not by mating, but by some act performed by individuals. Imagine that for these same beings, movement and digestion is performed not by individuals, but only by the complementary pairs that unite for this purpose. Would anyone acquainted with such beings have difficulty understanding that in respect to movement and digestion, the organism is a united pair, or an organic unity? They thus become an entirely new organism when joined together — fulfilling what was only ‘potential’ when apart”
So you see, the two heterosexual organisms that join in a sexual union cease being two separate organisms for a short time and become one organism capable of reproduction. This is what the state and the church are sealing in a marriage, this intrinsic union. The homosexual couple can never achieve this union, so “natures order” has endowed the heterosexual union with an intrinsic quality that other relationships do not have or could never attain. Both the atheist and theist can argue from this point, because either we were created this way or we evolved this way. Either way, nature has imposed on the sexual union being discussed.
Also, I do not think it is wholly genetic. I believe choice is involved as well as violence. For instance, take this thought from a pro-choice, lesbian woman, Tammy Bruce:
“ . . . . and now all manner of sexual perversion enjoys the protection and support of once what was a legitimate civil-rights effort for decent people. The real slippery slope has been the one leading into the Left’s moral vacuum. It is a singular attitude that prohibits any judgment about obvious moral decay because of the paranoid belief that judgment of any sort would destroy the gay lifestyle, whatever that is…. I believe this grab for children by the sexually confused adults of the Gay Elite represents the most serious problem facing our culture today. . . . Here come the elephant again: Almost without exception, the gay men I know (and that’s too many to count) have a story of some kind of sexual trauma or abuse in their childhood — molestation by a parent or an authority figure, or seduction as an adolescent at the hands of an adult. The gay community must face the truth and see sexual molestation of an adolescent for the abuse it is, instead of the ‘coming-of-age’ experience many [gays] regard it as being. Until then, the Gay Elite will continue to promote a culture of alcohol and drug abuse, sexual promiscuity, and suicide by AIDS.”
What she is basically saying is that there are emotional reasons, usually trauma, or circumstances that push these young boys into the choices they make in regards to their sexuality. For instance, one of my co-workers is a homosexual man. He is a wonderful guy; I would invite him to my wedding if I could go back in time. He is very open about his past, he was “initiated” into the homosexual lifestyle by a grown black man when he was 14. In other words, he was raped. Whether he feels at this point in time that he consented is of no value to the conversation. He was not old enough to consent neither would this act by a family member, friend, or complete stranger be anything but rape. And this rape, at an age where boys are having surges of hormones and confused about a lot of things is what Tammy Bruce was speaking to. It is a psychological trauma that if not dealt with has negatively reverberating results in one’s life. To ignore the traumatic effects on a person’s life that an event like this has simply by “rubber stamping” the lifestyle that all too often is a consequence of violence does more harm (trauma) to the individual than simply asking society to stay within the classic definition of marriage.
This “trauma” sometimes works its way into sexual matters. There are many homosexual people, Al Rantel, to name a more popular one, that believe marriage should be kept between a man and a woman. Tammy Bruce wants it, but she, like most Republicans, want the states to decide, and not the Supreme Court.
Also, in 1993, the biggest march by the “gay” community (much thanks to a reader leaving a link to this article!) on Washington was held, and they had this as part of their platform:
The implications of homosexual, bisexual, and transgendered curriculum at all levels of education.
Custody, adoption, and foster-care rights for homosexuals, lesbians, and transgendered people.
the redefinition of the family to include the full diversity of all family structures.
The access to all programs of the Boy Scouts of America.
Affirmative action for homosexuals.
The inclusion of sex-change operations under a universal health-care plan.
Obviously the Elite gay community Tammy Bruce spoke of knows which age is best for “recruiting,” e.g., traumatizing.
I will post three quotes from Tammy Bruce (a pro-choice lesbian):
Even if one does not necessarily accept the institutional structure of “organized religion,” the “Judeo-Christian ethic and the personal standards it encourages do not impinge on the quality of life, but enhance it. They also give one a basic moral template that is not relative,” which is why the legal positivists of the Left are so threatened by the Natural Law aspect of the Judeo-Christian ethic. (Tammy Bruce, The Death of Right and Wrong: Exposing the Left’s Assault on Our Culture and Values [Roseville: Prima, 2003], 35.)
…these problems don’t remain personal and private. The drive, especially since this issue is associated with the word “gay rights,” is to make sure your worldview reflects theirs. To counter this effort, we must demand that the medical and psychiatric community take off their PC blinders and treat these people responsibly. If we don’t, the next thing you know, your child will be taking a “tolerance” class explaining how “transexuality” is just another “lifestyle choice”…. After all, it is the only way malignant narcissists will ever feel normal, healthy, and acceptable: by remaking society – children – in their image (Ibid., 92, 206)
… and now all manner of sexual perversion enjoys the protection and support of once what was a legitimate civil-rights effort for decent people. The real slippery slope has been the one leading into the Left’s moral vacuum. It is a singular attitude that prohibits any judgment about obvious moral decay because of the paranoid belief that judgment of any sort would destroy the gay lifestyle, whatever that is…. I believe this grab for children by the sexually confused adults of the Gay Elite represents the most serious problem facing our culture today…. Here come the elephant again: Almost without exception, the gay men I know (and that’s too many to count) have a story of some kind of sexual trauma or abuse in their childhood — molestation by a parent or an authority figure, or seduction as an adolescent at the hands of an adult. The gay community must face the truth and see sexual molestation of an adolescent for the abuse it is, instead of the ‘coming-of-age’ experience many [gays] regard it as being. Until then, the Gay Elite will continue to promote a culture of alcohol and drug abuse, sexual promiscuity, and suicide by AIDS. (Ibid., 90. 99)
Many homosexuals stand against same-sex marriage. I document some in-depth views by a couple of politically astute gay persons reasons on why they stand against same-sex marriage (so it isn’t homophobia [#1], and [#2] it isn’t about a lack of “rights,” because these homosexual writers believe they are equal now). I also quote a well-known Canadian homosexual psychologist and sociologist on this topic:
Paul Nathanson, a sociologist, a scholar, and a homosexual writes that there are at least five functions that marriage serves–things that every culture must do in order to survive and thrive. They are (source):
Foster the bonding between men and women
Foster the birth and rearing of children
Foster the bonding between men and children
Foster some form of healthy masculine identity
Foster the transformation of adolescents into sexually responsible adults
Note that Nathanson considers these points critical to the continued survival of any culture. He continues “Because heterosexuality is directly related to both reproduction and survival, … every human societ[y] has had to promote it actively . … Heterosexuality is always fostered by a cultural norm “that limits marriage to unions of men and women.” He adds that people “are wrong in assuming that any society can do without it.”
These are considerations often not addressed by the Left. But all this is not the main point I want to deal with, which is, race and sexual orientation.
Dennis Prager mentions the power of this argument with one of his few refutations of it:
The most effective of all morality-based arguments for same-sex marriage, the one that persuades more people than any other argument, is the one that equates opposition to same-sex marriage with the old opposition to interracial marriage.
The argument, repeated so often that it sounds incontestable, is this: Just as parts of American society once had immoral laws that forbade whites and blacks from marrying, so, today, society continues to have immoral laws forbidding men from marrying men and women from marrying women. And just as decent people overthrew the former, decent people must overthrow the latter.
Thanks in large part to widespread higher education — the higher the educational level, the more one is likely to hold this view — vast numbers of Americans believe in this equation of sex (gender) and race.
But the equation is false.
First, there is no comparison between sex and race.
There are enormous differences between men and women, but there are no differences between people of different races. Men and women are inherently different, but blacks and whites (and yellows and browns) are inherently the same. Therefore, any imposed separation by race can never be moral or even rational;
on the other hand, separation by sex can be both morally desirable and rational. Separate bathrooms for men and women is moral and rational; separate bathrooms for blacks and whites is not….
(In the audio to the right, this first caller should be listened to, below is the visual of the discussion.)
That first reason is why almost all the black civil rights leaders that marched with Martin Luther King Jr. do not support this comparison. For instance,
In a New York Times article entitled, “Blacks Rejecting Gay Rights As a Battle Equal to Theirs,” we find some interesting supposed parallels made by the Left taken to task. For instance, Vernetta Adams, A balck 24-year-old woman and history major at the University of the District of Columbia said this, “I can’t go in a closet and hang up my race when it’s convenient…. Gays hid in the closet when they wanted to advance. Now they’re out and demanding rights and yelling ‘discrimination.'” The The Rev. Lou Sheldon intimates the reasons he thinks many in the gay community are making this parallel:
“The reason gays are making parallels,” Mr. Sheldon said, “is that it may bring empathy from white men like me, who feel a collective sense of guilt about the way blacks have been treated. The fact remains that this is not a civil rights issue but a moral issue.”
This is the point that separates race from gender. That is, homosexuals have not been discriminated against:
Another argument for gay rights laws depends upon an analogy between homosexuals today and blacks before the civil rights movement. It claims that homosexuals similarly constitute a distinct and oppressed minority and that, although they do enjoy many civil liberties, they are nonetheless second-class citizens because people scorn and reject them out of prejudice. Hence, gay rights laws, modeled on civil rights statutes for blacks, should be enacted to correct this.
Yet the analogy is not sound. Homosexuals are not an oppressed minority in the way that blacks were. They have not suffered from imposed segregation, systematic economic deprivation, or denial of educational opportunities. Furthermore, they do not suffer from an inherited pattern of deprivation, since the homosexual condition is not passed from generation to generation like race or ethnicity. Rather, it has been well documented that homosexuals have, on average, incomes much higher than the national norm and that, on average, they receive several years more formal schooling than the typical American. They occupy thousands of positions of prestige and influence in business, academia, the professions, and the media. It cannot plausibly be maintained that they are an oppressed minority.
Michael Pakaluk, “Homosexuality and the Principle of Nondiscrimination,” 77-78, found in Christopher Wolfe, ed., Same-Sex Matters: The Challenge of Homosexuality [Dallas, TX: Spence Publishing, 2000].
Some discussion of the 3/5ths Clause in the Constitution came up as well. Frederick Douglas in his early years thought that this proved a “race bias” embedded in our country. Until that is, he read the Constitution and those writings of the authors of these sections and the debates (history) on such clauses:
A liberal society might, then, find it prudent to ignore homosexuality. It might well deem it unwise to peer into private bedrooms. However, this is not the issue before us. Today the demand is that homosexuality be endorsed and promoted with the full power of the law. This would require us to abandon the standard of nature, the one standard that can teach us the difference between freedom and slavery, between right and wrong.
What is the “issue before us?” I will let professor Robert George talk about it further:
….Lawyers challenging traditional marriage laws liken their cause to Loving v. Virginia (which invalidated laws against interracial marriages), insinuating that conjugal-marriage supporters are bigots. This is ludicrous and offensive, and no one should hesitate to say so.
The definition of marriage was not at stake in Loving. Everyone agreed that interracial marriages were marriages. Racists just wanted to ban them as part of the evil regime of white supremacy that the equal protection clause was designed to destroy.
Opponents of racist laws in Loving did not question the idea, deeply embodied in our law and its shaping philosophical tradition, of marriage as a union that takes its distinctive character from being founded, unlike other friendships, on bodily unity of the kind that sometimes generates new life. This unity is why marriage, in our legal tradition, is consummated only by acts that are generative in kind. Such acts unite husband and wife at the most fundamental level and thus legally consummate marriage whether or not they are generative in effect, and even when conception is not sought.
Of course, marital intercourse often does produce babies, and marriage is the form of relationship that is uniquely apt for child-rearing (which is why, unlike baptisms and bar mitzvahs, it is a matter of vital public concern). But as a comprehensive sharing of life—an emotional and biological union—marriage has value in itself and not merely as a means to procreation. This explains why our law has historically permitted annulment of marriage for non-consummation, but not for infertility; and why acts of sodomy, even between legally wed spouses, have never been recognized as consummating marriages.
Only this understanding makes sense of all the norms—annulability for non-consummation, the pledge of permanence, monogamy, sexual exclusivity—that shape marriage as we know it and that our law reflects. And only this view can explain why the state should regulate marriage (as opposed to ordinary friendships) at all—to make it more likely that, wherever possible, children are reared in the context of the bond between the parents whose sexual union gave them life.
If marriage is redefined, its connection to organic bodily union—and thus to procreation—will be undermined. It will increasingly be understood as an emotional union for the sake of adult satisfaction that is served by mutually agreeable sexual play. But there is no reason that primarily emotional unions like friendships should be permanent, exclusive, limited to two, or legally regulated at all. Thus, there will remain no principled basis for upholding marital norms like monogamy….
While the following may be a bit graduate level, it is worth reading and digesting, as it makes similar points to the above comments by Robert George in the article he wrote, but it looks at the health of society. Like I said, you should take your time, follow through on some of the links, which would be equivalent to a small book being read. The following is taken from the chapter of my book entitled, Roman Epicurean’ism – Natural Law and Homosexuality (this section starts on page 14 if you wish to follow the references):
“Civil” Wars
The very heart of natural law is the family, for the distinction of male and female is at the very origin of our divinely ordained (e.g., created) social nature.[85] “Deviation from the ordained goal of heterosexual intercourse within marriage therefore strikes at the very heart of natural law.”[86] Civil marriage, then, exists merely to recognize a pre-existing social institution presupposing a created order vis-à-vis natural law tradition. “The state does not create marriage – it merely recognizes it. Marriage, in its truest sense, is neither a civil institution nor a religious one, but a natural institution. The complimentarity of male and female is an essential part of its nature.”[87] You see, the state has a vested interest in the family unit. If people could not have children, then the state would not be involved in the legal aspect of such a private contract. Michael Pakaluk, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Clark University, uses Justice John Harlan’s[88] dissention in the Poe v. Ullman to point out that “society… has traditionally concerned itself with the moral soundness of its people.”[89] He continues:
The laws regarding marriage which provide both when the sexual powers may be used and the legal and societal context in which children are born and brought up, as well as laws forbidding adultery, fornication, and homosexual practices which express the negative of the proposition, confining sexuality to lawful marriage, form a pattern so deeply pressed into the substance of our social life that any Constitutional doctrine in this area must build upon that basis.[90]
Professor Pakaluk builds on theme of societal interest in the moral framework of the family structure and why it matters to a healthy society. He gives three areas of concern that said healthy society should be involved:
1. the state has an interest in promoting the family because the family is the only reliable source of good citizens—of men and women with civic virtues, goodwill towards others, peaceable habits of association, and virtues of thrift and hard work. It therefore has an interest in discouraging sexual activity that is harmful to family life.
2. the state needs to insure that the rights of all of its citizens are protected, especially those of children, but children have a right to be raised within an intact family (or, strictly speaking, being deprived of an intact family without grave reason). It follows that the state has an interest in regulating sexual activity so that children are conceived and raised within stable families.
3. the state has an interest in encouraging its citizens to master their sexual desires. This is an obvious and important point, but strangely it is frequently overlooked today. Inordinate sexual desire is clearly as capable of dominating and enslaving people as are greed, power, alcohol, and drugs. Desire not infrequently drives people to neglect their responsibilities, to use power illicitly, to abuse the rights of others, to betray others, to lie, even to commit murder. Disordered sexual desire is often directly linked to depression, listlessness, and rage. Clearly, a tranquil civic order can be established only among citizens who have achieved a good degree of sexual self-control, and the state clearly has an interest in promoting this.[91]
This interest for a healthy society was born out of how pagan societies crumbled under the weight of licentiousness and the view of women as second-class citizen’s. Harold Berman makes this point when he writes that,
In pagan cultures in which polygamy, arranged marriages, and oppression of women predominated, the church promoted the idea of monogamous marriage by free consent of both spouses. In the West this idea had to do battle with deeply rooted tribal, village, and feudal customs. By the tenth century ecclesiastical synods were promulgating decrees concerning the matrimonial bond, adultery, legitimacy of children, and related matters; nevertheless, children continued to be married in the cradle and family relations continued to be dominated by the traditional folkways and mores of the Germanic, Celtic, and other peoples of western Europe. In the folklaw of the European peoples, as in the classical Roman law, marriage between persons of different classes (for example, free and slave, citizens and foreigners) was prohibited. Also divorce was at the will of either spouse—which usually meant, in practice, at the will of the husband. There were not even any formal requirements for divorce. Paternal consent was required for a marriage to be valid. Few obligations between the spouses were conceived in legal terms.[92]
So there was a progression from Pagan rights for women, which were basically none, to a protection and equalization under a more Christianized system. It is this system that is being undermined in redefining marriage. What is meant by this is that marriage between a man and woman is not an institution created by the state. As philosopher Michael Pakaluk argues, “[it] is an objective reality prior to the state.” If it is merely an institution created by the state, the case used by same-sex advocates (Loving v. Virginia) to equate homosexual marriage to race falls apart:
There are several implications that follow from this. For example, Pakaluk points out that “parental authority must stand or fall with marriage.” For “if the bond of husband and wife is not by nature, then neither is the government of those who share in that bond over any children that might result.” Consequently, “laws recognizing gay marriage imply, similarly, that parents have no objective and natural authority over their children, prior to the state.”6 This would mean that parents would have no natural right, no actual moral grounds, to object to the public schools teaching their children lessons about human sexuality that are contrary to the lessons taught in church and home. The state, of course, may grant an exception to these “backward” parents, but not because they have a prelegal obligation to care for and nurture their children in shaping their character and directing their moral compass. Rather, the state may consider it politically wise to tolerate these families and their religious traditions. But it would not be as a matter of principle based on the order and nature of things.
Ironically, if this view of marriage were dominant in our legal culture when the Supreme Court rejected the prohibition of interracial marriage in the case of Loving v. Virginia (1967), the moral grounds for its opinion would have been lost.7 That is, in order for the Court to have concluded that forbidding interracial marriage is wrong, it would have to know what marriage is. But if marriage is merely a social construction and not a natural institution, the state of Virginia could have argued, like contemporary same-sex marriage proponents, that marriage is merely a social construction subject to our will and nothing more. It is only because the Court knew that marriage is between a man and a woman that it could say that race, like height, geography, or place of residence, is not a relevant characteristic for two people to marry.
Francis Beckwith, “Legal Neutrality and Same-Sex Marriage,” Philosophia Christi [vol. 7, no. 1]: Downloadable PDF
This “right to love” (which is separate from marriage) is discussed further by Dennis Prager and others. Before ending with some audio, another issue that may be embedded in your mind is that Christianity has enslaved women more than freed them. This misconception – common on the university campus – is another historical misconception. You may see this on pages 12-18 of my chapter entitled Gnostic Feminism – Empowered to Fail. A very important read to understand the protections that came from the Judeo-Christian worldview ultimately afforded to women almost from the conception of the Christian faith and later embedded in Western legal tradition. It is this tradition being undermined and the human rights homosexual persons and women have fought so hard for forcenturies. If one rejects this American experiment founded in the rights of their Creator, then one rejects the rights found in this same document. Reverting back to the same positions that treated women and homosexuals in a less than demeaning manner is self-destructive and well, if you will forgive me, juvenile. Juvenile not in a negative way, but needing more input that is outside you normative “sounding board.”
Some important audio. Again, this topic is one I expect you to set aside some time for. Maybe a year even? I will politely keep you on track. The reason for this is that the typical position is reached on the Left some say merely by feeling. I am challenging you to leave the world of feelings and to put your feelings up against reasoned positions. Some of this will be religious in nature, but not in legal terms. What do I mean by this? Theologian Wayne Grudem explains the often mischaracterized cross-pollination of the religious with legal:
1. It fails to distinguish the reasons for a law from the content of the law
Such “exclude religion” arguments are wrong because marriage is not a religion! When voters define marriage, they are not establishing a religion. In the First Amendment, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” the word “religion” refers to the church that people attend and support. “Religion” means being a Baptist or Catholic or Presbyterian or Jew. It does not mean being married. These arguments try to make the word “religion” in the Constitution mean something different from what it has always meant.
These arguments also make the logical mistake of failing to distinguish the reasons for a law from the content of the law. There were religious reasons behind many of our laws, but these laws do not “establish” a religion. All major religions have teachings against stealing, but laws against stealing do not “establish a religion.” All religions have laws against murder, but laws against murder do not “establish a religion.” The campaign to abolish slavery in the United States and England was led by many Christians, based on their religious convictions, but laws abolishing slavery do not “establish a religion.” The campaign to end racial discrimination and segregation was led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist pastor, who preached against racial injustice from the Bible. But laws against discrimination and segregation do not “establish a religion.”
If these “exclude religion” arguments succeed in court, they could soon be applied against evangelicals and Catholics who make “religious” arguments against abortion. Majority votes to protect unborn children could then be invalidated by saying these voters are “establishing a religion.” And, by such reasoning, all the votes of religious citizens for almost any issue could be found invalid by court decree! This would be the direct opposite of the kind of country the Founding Fathers established, and the direct opposite of what they meant by “free exercise” of religion in the First Amendment.
(Wayne Grudem, Politics According to the Bible [Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2010],31.)
In other words, one needs to make some “subject” “object” distinctions herein. Knowing that just because one’s view is religious or secular does not necessarily exclude her of his view from the panoply of legal tradition. A quick note about another small topic that cropped up. If you are unaware of the horrible consequences of polygamy, I have some books and DVD documentaries that you are more than welcome to borrow that can increase your understanding of the psychological and positional destruction of children and women in these cultures:
Across California today, in mass public weddings and in small, private services, gay and lesbian couples will exchange official vows of undying love and wedlock. With the sanction of the state Supreme Court, these couples stand together as full citizens at last.
Their long odyssey to reach this day serves to remind us why people marry at all, especially in an era of casual relationships. As any married person can attest, marriage is significant precisely because it is difficult. True, it confers certain public protections, but even more, it requires personal sacrifices. If mutual affection and appreciation were enough to sustain relationships across the years, there would be no need for solemn vows of fidelity. Those vows protect many a marriage through many a rough patch; when two people agree to enter into such a union, it by rights should carry the name and honor of marriage, whether it’s between people of opposite sex or between a man and a man, or a woman and a woman.
Opponents of same-sex marriage often deplore this expansion of the meaning of marriage because they view it as threatening to traditional unions. As they use this day as a rallying point for a proposed amendment to the state Constitution to ban such marriages, it’s time to ask them directly: How does marriage of one type threaten others? Why do many heterosexuals feel that the beauty of their own marriage vows is in no way changed by today’s weddings, while others feel theirs have somehow been diminished?
Perhaps the next few months will ease these fears, as same-sex couples begin their married lives together. Those couples will settle into communities without disorder or threat; they will bring legal protection to their bonds of love. Those bonds can only be good for society — children gain from being raised by married parents, and communities are stronger when residents are legally committed to one another. As more and more Californians marry, society will grow stronger, not weaker.
That’s no doubt why opponents sought a stay of the court’s ruling until after the election. They know that as same-sex marriages become commonplace, the fears about them will fade, and eventually we will wonder what all the fuss was about. In the meantime, opponents will resort to hyperbole and fear. Take this missive last week from the Alliance for Marriage, issued in response to the announcement that the state of New York would recognize the unions performed in California:
“The governor of New York state will declare hundreds of years of marriage law in New York to be null and void. … The governor of New York state will force California-style ‘gay marriage’ on all the families and children of his own state.”
It’s a fairly reliable indicator of a bad argument when its proponent is forced to overstate the case in order to make it. The above surely qualifies. Same-sex couples are not upending the institution of marriage; nor are their supporters. Rather, they are engaged in a profoundly conservative act: They ask not to abolish marriage but to uphold it.
Some religious organizations won’t perform these marriages or recognize these unions — that’s their constitutional right. But the government, which has obligations of equity, may not engage in the discrimination that religions are allowed. As long as it bestows the privileges of marriage on some couples, it must bestow them on all.
In California, the initiative process allows voters to amend the state Constitution directly, and unfortunately, a measure on the November ballot will give them the chance. The question won’t be whether same-sex marriage is right or wrong — that’s a matter of personal conviction — but whether those who believe it is wrong should have the power to deny marriage to those who seek its protections.
Put another way: Many Californians undoubtedly object to unwed couples who have and raise children together, but no constitutional amendment prevents that, whatever the moral calculus.
To those who insist that an unevolving morality undergirds our state and federal constitutions, we remind them that not so long ago, many Americans believed with passionate conviction that it was a sin, a threat to families and a violation of the law for people of different races to marry.
The 1959 ruling of a Virginia state court judge to deny this right to a black woman and a white man aptly summarized the fervor with which opponents of miscegenation drew on tradition and religion to support their views:
“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents,” trial judge Leon Bazile wrote. “And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”
The U.S. Supreme Court struck down that ruling in 1967; on that happy day, 16 states were forced to abandon their laws banning interracial marriage. Today, interracial couples go about their lives without legal threat; some no doubt still feel the sting of disapproval. But those who would look askance on those lawfully wedded couples do so without the state to reinforce their bigotry. Our courts, certainly our supreme courts, exist not to assess God’s will but to enforce the precepts of our constitutions, including the insistence that all Americans — black or white, male or female, straight or gay — are entitled to equal protection and the due process of our laws.
The California Supreme Court affirmed that principle last month and delivered the eloquent basis for today’s ceremonies. As the state’s voters watch the celebrations in the coming months, they should enjoy the sight of fellow citizens availing themselves of a public institution, that of marriage. These celebrations allow us to share in the newlyweds’ happiness, to join in acknowledging a milestone of joy and lifelong commitment. And they prompt at least one more question for those who disapprove: How can the state’s blessing on these acts of love in any way diminish us?
