52 thoughts on “What I fear society is coming to”

1. As for 3 and 4, I can sympathize with those complaints and I would fight to make sure that those never happen in MA.
   I think 5 is largely academic. It’s very likely unfounded given governments can’t even illegalize groups who are overtly hateful like the Klan and Matt Hale’s World Church of the Creator. If those can’t be illegalized, (and I assure you that the call for the elmination of those groups is far stronger than the elimination of evangelical churches), anti-gay groups will never
   For 1 and 2, I’ll tell you what I tell socialists who complain about corporations setting rules they have to live by and complain about pollution affecting their environments: suck it up. People don’t have a right to make people respect they’re way of life. You’re free to disparage and debase gay couples to your hearts content, and they’re free to do likewise. But using the big stick of government to keep them inferior by law is only going to set a very bad precedent for the right of the public to illegalize anything they deem unfashionable.

2. Getting second helpings, I’m going to have to echo Tom’s sentiments.

   As for 1 and 2, you’re talking about a word. Clearly there are many people who only respect marriage as an institution binding a man and a woman together under God’s providence. That won’t change simply because the meaning of the word, as defined legally, has been stretched around other things. Even before the MA Supreme Court decision, that mere word had been stretched farther than you would have liked.

   3&4 are very valid concerns.

   I alluded to this in your last post. I don’t see how #3 can be fixed by anything but the privatization of schools. You have to be careful to break down arguments. The whole argument of #3 comes out of a unified indoctrination of young citizens — that whole concept has always been scary as hell to me anyways. #4 is a possibility to be feared, but is, at least, not institutionally implied, being manageable at the executive policy level.

   #5? My understanding is that the Canadian law disallows direct verbal abuse of homosexual persons. (YOU F’ING SH*TD*CK QUEER, etc.) There exists the risk this could be taken to the extremes you fear, but the present US Congress and the Congress for the foreseeable future seems unlikely to pass any such measures. Despite your cynicism of the Supreme Court, there’s even more Judicial “forcefulness” on the subject of the first amendment than there is on provisions of equality.

3. Thank you for saying what I would’ve said–but much more nicely. :)

4. I meant that you said it more patiently than I would’ve.

5. White people also used to worry about their kids having to interact with the “Colored.”

6. And many still do.

7. I predicted that everyone would try to crap on #1 and #2 as soon as you posted ’em. And this is why I still vote for killing marriage as a governmental institution — if the legal point of being married (hospital visits and tax breaks) was completely separated from the Holy Matrimony that you and Jessi desire, then there would be no complaint about it from people that could previously not access the legal benefits, yet people that don’t want their marriage to become trivialized will not have to worry about that, as it will be the Church’s responsibility to deal with the issue. Also, if everyone was only getting civil unions from the government, you eliminate the “separate but equal” issue.

   The vote to bow down to the liberal tide and “suck it up” makes no sense to me, because this matter seems to be simply a question of which group people want to alienate, and in some ways it could be just as easy to tell the other side to “suck it up”. Again, why I want to kill governmental marriage — neither side needs to suck up anything.

8. Go Taran! I agree: Kill marriage. Everyone who wants to, can be married in the church of their choice. Religiously. Everyone who wants the financial etc. benifits, can get a civil union (or if it needs the word, marriage) from the government. You can be married in the church without the government, and in the government without the church, or both. And even better, those civil unions would be permitted between heterosexuals, homosexuals, relatives, children and (if someone could wade though writing the legalities) polygamous “couples.”

   Imagine the possibilities:
   Hospital: Exuse me ma’am, what do you want?
   Woman 1: I want to see my husband.
   Hospital: Ah, he’s doing fine, go right in. What do *you* want?
   Woman 2: I want to see her husband too.
   Hospital: I’m afraid you are not permitted.
   Woman 2: Oh, he’s my husband too.
   Hospital: Oh, certainly, right this way. And *you*?
   Man 1: Same thing…… Can i see mine and their partner?

9. I fully agree that the government shouldn’t be defining these things for us.

   But the point being made in this instance is that if the government says that “marriage means this,” we shouldn’t take it seriously. The sentiment being relayed here is, “Who gives a damn what the government says the word ‘marriage’ means? Although they shouldn’t do it, it doesn’t change anything, and any whining just blows it out of proportion, so suck it up.” Doesn’t that makes sense, Scott?

10. I bet that some of your own ancestors were among them.

11. Hahah! Personally, I think these various rights should be directly contracted, rather than being tied to marriage. As a convenience, the hospital or town hall could hand out contracts with the appropriate wording.

12. Inheritance laws and such would need to be updated, but there’s no logical reason for the govermnent to mess with people’s personal lives in any way (as long as they are not infringing on other people’s rights).

13. You also have to realize that Canada, like England, doesn’t have Constitutional rights the way Americans understand them. In the US, the highest incontrovertible law of the land is the US Constitution. In Canada and England, the highest incontrovertible law of the land is the collective works of their respective parliaments. So invoking Canadian law as a potential movement forward in US Law is a dangerously flawed argument.

14. Canada also has a law against publishing false information, they aren’t so big on free speech there. I hardly see the American government ever preventing speech against homosexuality. Maybe insults, but I like to think that you and Jessi are able to respect (for example) me as a person while disagreeing with my lifestyle, so you would respectfully (as you do in these posts) talk about the harm etc. of my lifestyle without targeting me as a whole person.

15. In places where unions between groups other than one man and one woman have been legally recognized (whether or not it is called marriage), children suffer–just like they have suffered from no-fault divorce, which has probably helped lead to the current state of things.
    In Scandinavia and the Netherlands, stable family structure isn’t under attack–it’s virtually gone.
    All the research shows that children do better in stable homes with a mother and father, but for some reason, our courts feel that children are not important and their well-being does not merit protection. So they let parents split up whenever they want, and “marry” whoever they want, and kill their children in the womb if it happens to be inconvenient to have them. If you’re too young to vote or too old or infirm to contribute to society, you will soon have very few rights at all. Of course, none of us are currently children, elderly, permanently disabled, or terminally ill, so we can all vote for Kerry, who will gently sway with the breezes of public opinion.

16. Sorry. that’s really what i meant. contracts. yeah.

17. Agh, too many loaded issues lumped into one sweeping narrative. As an English major, this doesn’t become you at all. Allow me to separate your arguments for you.

    1) Historical examples have shown that legalizing unions (as well as no-fault divorce) has led to the death of the traditional nuclear family.

    I think there’s a confusion of cause and effect, here. I would argue that the changing legal situation stems from a change in culture, not the other way around. Personally, I think laws should be divorced from culture as much as possible so that there’s nary an influence between the two.

    2) All research shows that children with a traditional nuclear family “do better.”

    All the research I’ve seen simply shows me that children simply do better when they are loved and cared for. You’ll need to point me to some convincing independently funded research to convince me otherwise.

    3) This is just another example of marginalized classes of persons being oppressed by the mainstream.

    Jessi, think critically. There are a number of “marginalized” persons, such as yourself, in society who believe in the nuclear family. Do you think the removal of restriction on marriage is going to change the behavior of any of these people? I’m going to have to call baloney on that one. Your only legitimate argument is against the indoctrination of your children (and thus the direct irradication of your culture through state influence).

    4) Bush respects the children, elderly, permanently disabled, and terminally ill, but Kerry doesn’t. Kerry supporters are socially blind and inconsiderate.

    Please put the canned rhetoric back in your conservative periodicals and make real arguments when you’re knocking a widely respected public figure. Thanks.

    -Adam

18. You can be married in the church without the government, and in the government without the church, or both.
    That’s how it’s supposed to be now. That’s why we have justices of the peace (state marriage w/o church), and why you still have to go to the state to get a marriage license even if you have a church ceremony (church marriage w/o state).

19. The vote to bow down to the liberal tide and “suck it up” makes no sense to me, because this matter seems to be simply a question of which group people want to alienate, and in some ways it could be just as easy to tell the other side to “suck it up”.
    When the government is being given control over something, and the discussion is what the government should do with that control (for example, tax policy or national defense), you have a point that the ‘tough luck’ argument is arbitrary. When when the dicussion is about government relinquishing control of something, doesn’t that change things?

20. Yes, i know. I was just emphasising the point that they should remain seperate. People are getting caught up on that a lot.

21. Ugh! So much misinformation in such little space!

    No legitimate scientific organization has found any ill effects inherent in being the child of a gay couple. The American Medical Association, American Psychological Association, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Academy of Pediatrics, all of these organization have consistently disproven any assertion that having heterosexual parents is somehow more beneficial then having homosexual parents.

    I also find it fascinating that the religious right only seems interested in protecting a child before it’s born. When they gain control of a legislature, the eviscerate child services programs, adoption agency budgets, education budgets, minimum wage laws that might actually enable one parent to earn enough to give the other the option of staying home with their children, welfare programs to ensure children are fed, clothed, and sheltered… the religious right really needs to read Matthew 25 if they’re going to start making their faith the basis for public policy.

22. American studies of American children in current American society show that these children do better in stable homes. Yes, suicide is more common in Scandinavia, but it’s common anywhere where you have people trying to survive polar winters. Scandinavians also have a much lower infant mortality rates than the U.S. and life expectancy is much higher.

    Bush isn’t big on social services. Republican goverments tend not to be. “Yes, we say that you need to have babies, but we don’t care if they starve.”

23. Well the reasom people are getting caught up in it is because people (Adam and Scott come to mind) assume that the separation of church and state vis-a-vis marriage is some sort of unatainable utopian state. Truth is it’s the here and now. That’s how our system was set up and is still set up today! These anti-gay-marriage and anti-mixed-race-marriage issues are cultural abhorrations, nothing more.

24. Boooooooo. Fight the inertia!

    First off, I don’t think it’s unattainable.

    Second, because state “marriage” and interpersonal marriage are intertwined in the public perception, nobody recognizes anything but a state-sanctioned marriage. Thus, the state actually limits who can marry. This is a product of the government defining a word and (taking advantage of common stupidity) imposing that meaning upon the minds of the populace. It puts the French language ministry to shame.

    Of course, it’s just a historical oversight. This was once a non-issue.

25. American studies of American children in current American society show that these children do better in stable homes.

    I phrased that rather poorly. We can’t be sure what’s going to happen when gay people in America start adopting children, but there’s no reason to think that these kids will be subjected to any more instability than kids in traditional families are.

    Contrary to what you’re suggesting, the Scandinavians and the Dutch (and the Canadians) aren’t doing that shabbily.

    An aside:
    Jessi, you’re accusing everyone here of having no real lives and responsibilities (and so we can “afford” to vote for Kerry). Honey, you’ve been married barely a year. You haven’t gone through enough to be able to play the “married” card yet. You don’t know what has happened to all of us in our “carefree” lives–or why.

26. In some ways the government is taking control of something.

27. How about: The government is modifying an atrocity that everyone had gotten used to.

28. So there are alot more people in the category I put you and Scott in than just you two. How does that make me wrong? ;)

29. No, it’s really not. It government asserted it’s right to exclude certain people from state marriages. It lost. So the government is relinquishing control of who can and can’t enter a state marriage.
    The courts really ought not to be looked at as part of the government. They were put in direct opposition to the other two branches. They can’t create law, only strike down laws that currently exist.

30. *laugh* Despite this small difference of opinion, you have my vote.

    I’m averse to any government measure that shepherds the common perception and behavior.

    Examples:
    Tax incentives to have children (tenuous, when it comes to the disposable income argument)
    Defining words
    DARE
    Forcing the dairy industry to pay for public advertising (which recently got ruled unconstitutional — government-compelled speech)

    In my little world, that’s what the separation of church and state clause *should* have been.

31. The courts really ought not to be looked at as part of the government. They were put in direct opposition to the other two branches. They can’t create law, only strike down laws that currently exist.

    I dunno… that seems like functionality that most would attribute to “the government” to me…

32. Second, because state “marriage” and interpersonal marriage are intertwined in the public perception, nobody recognizes anything but a state-sanctioned marriage.

    This here is the issue. While I also think it’s fixable, people’s perceptions are hard to push.

33. Umm… Sorry about this little outburst… ;)

34. Are you calling marriage an atrocity? If so, could you elaborate? If not, what *are* you talking about?

35. I definitely agree that number 3 and 4 are the most valid concerns. However, they’re the ones that are already being implemented in another state. Once the state has officially recognized homosexuality and heterosexuality to be completely equal, what’s going to stop them from happening here?

36. State-institutionalized marriage.

    Marriage is a wonderful thing. It means a different thing to me than to you. To me, it’s a public promise to remain true to another person forever. Not quite as grandiose as the uniting of souls under God, but still beautiful.

37. the best answer I can come up with is that what CA is doing is trying to ensure that future generations will not have the same bigotry against homosexuals as past and present generations do by making them aware such people exist and aren’t inherently bad people. MA is taking a slightly different approach, similar to what happened in the South in the 60s during the desegregation era. Forcing people to confront the issue and hoping that people’s initial gut revoltion gives way to “ehh, who cares?”

    And anyways, MA is actually politically left of CA, so these sorts of laws are actually the defacto rule in public schools. No need to statutize it.

    But I am curious about something. What would you do if you had a daughter and she came home and said “Dad, this is my fiancee Laura.”? I am not proposing this question to aggravate you, rather to try and see if this scenario gives some new insight into these complaints you’ve listed.

38. I think even you would agree that state-institutionalized education makes the “fiancee Laura” scenario more likely, even if you believe that homosexuality is genetic.

    There’s no getting around it, you can’t make a State-institutionalized curriculum without having State-indoctrination of children! Peter has a legitimate complaint, even if the nature of his complaint irks both of us.

39. Actually I vehemently disagree. Because we haven’t had this “indoctrination” in MA up until now, and we have some of the most popular gay men’s hotspots (P-Town) and lesbian hotspots (Northampton) in this quadrant of the country. I went to public schools and didn’t fully understand the concept of homosexuality until late into my high school era. The link just isn’t there. If it were, you would think 5000 years of punishing it severely (with the exception of the Classical Greek era) would have gotten rid of it by now.
    And while I’m at it, I also disagree that portraying same-sex couples in books and other lessons is in some way advocating it. That’s akin to arguing that reading books like “Crime and Punishment” and “Mutiny on the Bounty” advocates violence. And anecdotally, having grown up with cousins who were raised in fundamentalist households, I, in my (relatively) hedonistic household came out the most straight and narrow of them all. (well the jury’s still out on those 12 and under)

40. If we had a daughter that did that, I would still love and support her, and gently try to help her see the error of her ways. I’d like to think that I can still love people that I disagree with (such as, for instance, all of you :).

    And my complaints I think can be summarized as that since I can’t completely shelter my children from the entire world and society around them (since that, I definitely agree, would be a Bad Idea), I’d like them to live in a slightly more moral society than the one we have, instead of a slightly less moral society. (For some definition of “more” and “less”, and my definition of “moral”.) I suspect that this is likely a common theme among people who are parents, or like us eventually want to be parents. The only thing that changes is what different people consider moral :).

41. You: Demonstrating and explaining all elements of culture and many varied ways of reasoning does not constitute indoctrination.

    Fundamentalist: Information of a social nature (as opposed to mathematics) is not sanitary. Every method of conveying information demonstrates the approach of the narrator. Every book written without God’s plan and purpose in mind is a demonstration of the secular worldview. How can you not call subjecting a child to worldly approaches 95% of the time indoctrination? It can only serve to confuse and mislead their developing minds. Children are very malleable at that age, and such things can quell a child’s innocence and innate inclination to God.

    I sympathize with your perspective Tom, but the Fundamentalist perspective is rational (even if we both think it’s bullshit). Parents should be able to choose the education of their children.

    Societal attitudes are changing. Granted, more of this is due to television than anything else, but you can’t possibly argue that schools have no effect at all. In addition, forcibly lumping everyone from a town together results in a propogation of secular ideas to young Christian minds at an early age. At least parents have a choice as to whether to allow their children to watch television.

    You can argue that the Fundamentalist concerns are stupid, but I don’t think you should claim that they are irrational or fully addressed by the present system.

    I thought you’d be jumping all over the privatization bandwagon. :)

42. *wince* Damn it, Pete. I’m trying to work with you here, but that’s the worst position you could have taken.

    You could have focused on preserving your Christian culture, keeping your daughter steeped in it as she grows mature so that she isn’t unduly influenced by greater society until she’s ready. You could believe in keeping Christian culture alive by enticing people to accept it. But nooooo, you had to go and argue that you want to impose at least some part of your culture upon greater society so it won’t be quite as tainted when your daughter gets thrust into it.

    That’s it, I wash my hands of you. ;-)

43. Yeah, I suppose that it’s not the best argument one could make. And I *would* like to do those first things as well, I just didn’t think of mentioning them in that way. And doing so may be difficult if Heather has Two Mommies is a first-grade reading book.

    But, I’m a part of greater society, too. Shouldn’t I have some say in how it gets run? It’d be one thing if there was a public vote to change our culture in this way, but here there were just 4 people on the court that decided, BOOM, society should change. That seems a little odd to me, that’s all. I *would* like culture to shift in my direction, just as others want it to shift towards theirs (such as the what the homosexual movement has done). Everyone’s trying to push “society” towards what they want it to be, and I’m just not being an exception here.

44. I wish I could declare this a truism, and let the world flow and shape itself around it. Ready for it? Here it is…

    In as much as possible, government and societal culture should be linearly independent.

    Just like government shouldn’t be able to swoop down and make your daughter read Heather Has Two Mommies, it shouldn’t be able to swoop down and say, “Marriage is defined by us, not by God, not by your Church, not by your Bible, and not by Barney Frank. You simply can’t marry.”

    The government isn’t God, Pete. It doesn’t sanction marriages. If you believe the line, “By the power vested in me” with a religious interpretation it is sanctioned by God and mediated through your pastor. What does the government have to do with it? Sensibly, records of that marriage should be held by the church. And you know what? The same should be true for the Episcopal church, even if you don’t think God is really working through its priest.

    Ultimately, other individuals in society will decide whether a marriage license registered at your church has any real value or meaning to them. Just like you would be free to disregard a gay marriage registered at an Episcopal church.

    In places where congress was pea-brained and did not make societal culture and government orthogonal, the court has an obligation to, under the equal protections amendment, make sure government influence does not favor one cultural choice over another.

45. Like Tom said, if your point is valid, we’d have to do away with reading everything from Hamlet to Roots in schools (they deal with very serious problems, and the problems aren’t resolved in a manner a fundamentalist of any stripe would consider satisfactory). I think you’re underestimating kids’ ability to reason (which often surpasses that of their guardians/parents).

46. Not in all schools. Just at Fundamentalist schools, and only those grades in which the school’s directors consider the student not mature enough to read them without being unduly influenced by them.

    I’m not necessarily asking for wholesale privatization. There may be a state approach that leaves subcultures to manage their own curriculum… and certainly some culture-agnostic regulation will be necessary.

47. Oh, OK… Do you think I care what fundamentalists teach in their schools?

48. I mostly agree with you. However, I’m not completely free as a citizen to ignore marriage licenses given to other people.

    Suppose I ran a wedding invitation store. If a gay couple came to me and wanted to buy wedding invitations, I couldn’t say, “No, I don’t recognize your marriage. I refuse to take your order.” If I did, I would be sued for discrimination. (It’s happened.)

    For a closer-to-home example, if I refused to help make OutVite.com since I didn’t believe in Gay Marriage, I might need to go looking for another job. While I certainly have the option of doing so, it would be a hassle and I have a strong incentive to not do so. (This is somewhat a tangential point, but I think it’s related.)

    So, the government declaring something to be a marriage can and does affect others, even those who would want to refuse to recognize certain marriages.

49. That’s the whole point. Allow cultures to normalize themselves so that they don’t interfere with each other.

50. I’m entering unfamiliar territory here. Help me, Tom.

    Mensa is a club that accepts people above a certain IQ level, which is an acceptable form of discrimination. Now, if I went to Mensa and waved an Internet receipt that said IQTEST.COM scored me at 260 points, they could reject me. Why? Because they’re not discriminating against my race or preferences, they’re discriminating against IQTEST.COM. In the same way, if marriage licenses are “privatized,” perhaps you can discriminate on the basis of where the marriage license came from.

    I know there are some fundamental differences there, but I hope they don’t matter.

    (Personally, I think privately held businesses should have a few more rights in deciding who they service — but my perspective on that isn’t as simple as allowing any and all discrimination. It gets into a concept I’ve come to term ‘Modecracy’, which I’ll be happy to relate at some other time.)

    As for your OutVite concerns, well —

    If left unprosecuted by law and allowed to flourish in its own self-selected cultural “vat,” as it were, I think Christian culture would change. Unable to feel persecuted by the left, people like Rush Limbaugh would be out of a job. Christianity would no longer be radicalized by attacks from external forces. It would develop a supportive culture for its own; Christian-friendly jobs would flourish. People would develop a respect for difference and cultural sensitivity. Perhaps even “secular” businesses such as Checkerboard would be less likely to ask you to do things there were morally offensive to you (Lord knows you have enough other work to do *G*).

    But in the mean time, you’re right — your only recourse is the free market and compromise, with its cold “sanitary” attitudes towards different cultures. Hopefully it’s not too bad.

    For now I would settle for “Heritage Baptist Wedding Shop” not being forced to serve gays.

51. Certain institutions need to stay neutral (and, yes, secular). Lots of people would be left with nowhere to turn.

52. I think privately held businesses should have a few more rights in deciding who they service.

    Again, not everyone has the option to go to, say, a different pharmacy. In some places, pharmacies are few and far between. Additionally, not every pharmacy will accept your insurance. Your choice is limited.

    Christians persecuted? Haha! More “Christians” in America commit atrocities against other groups (e.g., Blacks, Jews, Muslims) than have atrocities committed against them. Yes, other “Christians” will deny that the first “Christians” are “true” “Christians,” but that doesn’t change the fact that it is much easier to live in America as a “Christian” of any sort (except for being Catholic in certain areas of the South and Midwest; Catholics are sometimes discriminated against there) than it is to be any other religion.

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