Topic: Gay marriage
Quote: Hello all. I am new here.\nI\'ve been lurking a bit and wondered why homosexuality is even an issue for heteros? Is it because it\'s been hated or "taboo" for so long (a learned reaction perhaps)? As a heterosexual, how has homosexuality hurt or affected your life in any way? As a heterosexual, what gives you the right to dictate how homosexual people live?\nWhat if you have a non-christian living here in America (that would be me)...do you require them to live their lives the Christian way? Please explain.\nThanks,\nLadywolf
Response: Well Ladywolf, that is really more of an argument than it is an honest question. If marriage was truly a private affair that impacted nobody outside the couple themselves, then, yes, that question would be valid. But that is a very shallow understanding and a very uninformed understanding of the nature of marriage, because marriage is just as much \xe2\x80\x94 if not more so \xe2\x80\x94 about the community as it is about the couple themselves. \nBut it\'s not the community that gets married.\nNo, it\'s not the community that gets married, but it\'s the community that enforces marriage and develops marriage. We need to understand that marriage is just as much a social norm \xe2\x80\x94 a social ideal \xe2\x80\x94 of the kind of behavior that we expect and need for a healthy vibrant society; as much as it is about the emotional commitment of two people.\nOne of the biggest issues is the social role of marriage. Marriage domesticates men. Men who are not attached permanently to a woman are men that will practice and engage in socially unhealthy behaviors at a much higher level. \nHow will same-sex marriage effect the concept of "marriage"? Marriage becomes reduced down to nothing, because the moral argument for same-sex marriage is the same moral argument for group marriage, for polygamy, and it is going to be impossible to deny polygamous groups \xe2\x80\x94 and group marriage people \xe2\x80\x94 who come forth in all sincerity and say, "If you can\'t restrict marriage to only couples of opposite sex, then you can\'t restrict marriage to only two people." They are all very much interwoven.\nThe three things that you lose are: 1) the domesticating influence of marriage on men; 2) the protective influence of marriage upon women from being victimized and objectified by men; and 3) it provides mothers and fathers for children. \nWhen monogamy is lost as an ideal, the idea that a man should commit himself and forego all other sexual relationships but (the one with) his wife, then women become commodities to be used and collected by men. When committing yourself to a woman and subjugating your sexual desires for the sake of that woman \xe2\x80\x94 when that becomes just one lifestyle choice among many, it is devastating to a culture.\nSame-sex "marriage" also denies every child it touches access to either a mother or father. It is never compassionate to intentionally deny a child either a mother or father.
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