[Ramona_A_Stone]

Shit Mazer, you complain about people hijacking thread topics and then you hand out parachutes and plastic explosives on Wear-A-Turban-Fly-For-Half-Price Day at the airport.

On the topic of topics, I am of the "information should be free" school of thought. I have little to say about the formation of the political forum one way or another, the best thing I can say is that it has focused certain interests and, I think, given some of us an opportunity to get to know each other better... This is no doubt good for some and bad for others.

But I do, predictably, have quite a lot to say about the article.


I'm sorry, but I really can't take anyone seriously who is claiming that homosexual marriages will "kill" heterosexual marriages. Mr. card cites the declining marriage rate and the inclining divorce rate as if this was a dynamic caused by the influence of people outside of the institution of marriage, and I find this absurd: men and women still have ample and uninhibited opportunity, incentive and encouragement to marry in our culture. If there is a zeitgeist of "easy divorce" who can possibly be to "blame" other than the abundance of examples of heterosexual couples who cannot live together and choose divorce?

Certainly there is an increasing disillusion in the institution of marriage, judging from the marriage and gay marriage threads here, and from the overwhelming prevalence of people I know personally who try hard to avoid it (lol). The vast majority of these people are, of course, heterosexuals--people "eligible" in every sense of the word for traditional marriages who have chosen not to pursue it, to avoid it and even mock it, and who take the example of the divorce rate under advisement that it can be and often is a fallible institution and can have legal pitfalls.

While so many heterosexuals are blase and even negative about traditional marriage, isn't it a bit over the top to cite a group of homosexuals who have an enthusiastic desire to engage in this kind of union as contributing to its demise?

I simply can't get my head around this. If Mr. Card feels that marriage is so threatened in our culture that the idea of it needs to be invigorated and "sold" to new generations, lest the human race perish without it, why does he see same sex couples who are fairly aching to do it as more of a negative influence than the millions of heterosexuals who simply feel it isn't the right thing for them? Look to "your own" Mr. Card, I say.

This is like blaming the decline in popularity of country music on fans of rap, or, more aptly, blaming the loss of business for a Mexican restaurant with a history of bad service on the Italian restaurant across town with attentive waiters.

Clearly Mr. Card is not a bigot, but he is a cunning linguist who typifies what's really at the heart of the problem in people accepting the concept of gay marriages: the very word itself is a symbol with dark ties to both the propagation of the species and diffused religious ideas.

Turns out though, the species propagates all too well whether human beings marry or not, and people form families as result of procreating, if they so choose, regardless of certification. They also very obviously do not if that's their choice.

What, if anything, other than heterosexual behavior could be contributing to this kind of heterosexual decision I can't imagine. Happily married gays? I hardly think so, especially in light of the fact that "happily married gays" is something, as a society, we scarcely even admit exists yet.

On the contrary, I feel it's the inferential relationship of marriage to religion which causes the institution to suffer most: I think it's indicative of a broader disillusion or ambivalence with religion in general and especially with those spooky words "in the sight of God" and "'Till death do us part," which simply do not have the same meaning to many people today as they did to our God-fearing grandparents. Young people today are liable to be simply more pragmatic than to believe in the implied charming magic spell, to label it a "charade" due to the prevalence of disintegrating marriages that occur quite in spite of this blessing, and disdain and the accompanying legal tribulations.

I don't care how long and involved your article is, if the suggestion is implicit that Mr. and Mrs. Jones are going to be more likely break up or never even get married in the first place because Mr. and Mr. Smith down the street are enjoying marital bliss, you're just blowing a gas of denial at the real problem.

Regard:

Just because you give legal sanction to a homosexual couple and call their contract a "marriage" does not make it a marriage. It simply removes marriage as a legitimate word for the real thing...

But homosexual "marriage" is an act of intolerance. It is an attempt to eliminate any special preference for marriage in society -- to erase the protected status of marriage in the constant balancing act between civilization and individual reproduction...

Instead they are attempting to strike a death blow against the well-earned protected status of our, and every other, real marriage...

Once this is regarded as settled law, anyone who tries to teach children to aspire to create a child-centered family with a father and a mother will be labeled as a bigot and accused of hate speech...

Homosexual "marriage" won't accomplish what they hope. They will still be just as far outside the reproductive cycle of life. And they will have inflicted real damage on those of us who are inside it...

Poppycock and balderdash. In fact quite frankly this borders on crazy in my opinion. Does Mr. Card actually believe that homosexuals have no cognizance whatsoever of the miracle of human reproduction and its logistics? We get it. I seriously do not believe there is a single living homosexual who would suggest that a family with a loving mother and father and children is anything but a beautiful and perfectly natural thing, that it is desirable and to be aspired to and that it should never be supressed in any conceivable way in any conceivable world. If anyone can show me a website or any given kind of documentary evidence of a gay with such an agenda, I shall personally go to great lengths to berate them unmercifully until I am blue.

But let's calm down and be realistic Mr. Card, trust in your species knowing anyone with contrary opinions would be too insignificant to have any influence on anyone anyway--an agenda of tearing apart the human family, besides having 3 million years plus of mammalian evolution opposing it, would be too patently ridiculous to be supportable.

Gay marriage is simply not a slippery slope into reproductive chaos and sexual anarchy. And if you feel that heterosexuality is on that slope, I'm afraid you're just going to have to use your own heterosexual engines to climb out.

Television programs will start to show homosexual "marriages" as wonderful and happy (even as they continue to show heterosexual marriages as oppressive and conflict-ridden).

And this impressive prophecy if it were fulfilled would indicate... what?

First, if we believed our role models on television were indicative of real human statistics, wouldn't about 85% of us be either murderers on the run or cops giving chase?

Then, if we really conceded that people aspiring to be like television role models was so significant that we should preferentially craft these role models with more care, why in the world would you feel such a need to start with "happily married gays" when the airwaves are full of murderers, rapists, thieves, drug dealers, and a myriad of psychotics and neurotics engaged in antisocial behaviors too numerous to mention. In fact, why start with the "happily married gays" before cutting out all those "unhappily married heterosexuals" you're so concerned about being depicted, and morphing them into happily married couples.

If you want the media to be a homogenous sales campaign for happy heterosexual marriage, you've got way way way more problems than a depiction of a happily married gay couple my friend...

Good luck to you sir.

And the fact remains that at this point, as far as I can tell at least, being of somewhat limited television expertise, a popular television program that depicts a happily married gay couple is entirely mythical, isn't it? Again, I'd bet on Occam's razor that this is probably because as a society we don't admit of the existence of gay marriages... but maybe there are more complicated and obscure reasons... ...(can't think of any...)

I know we've got Will and Grace, which I've watched a few times, enough to know the two gay characters in it are neither married nor even in a relationship with each other and in fact, again with my limited knowledge, apparently never even go on dates or even have discernable actual sex lives at all. Then again, didn't the straight cast of Friends all grow up and get married or something? Didn't the straight cast of Sex in the City all find true love in the end? I watched the final episode, exactly half of the couples ended up married, and the other half just ended up happy couples.

In fact I think it's very curious this guy is troubled by a proliferation of "oppresive and conflict-ridden heterosexual marriages" on television because as I sit here I can't even think of one. I mean I think Frazier was divorced but on good terms with the ex and kid, and then you got your Roseannes and Raymonds and Tool Times and even the aptly named Married With Children, all of which maybe somewhat conflict-ridden for comic effect but all center on the depiction of couples with children who all stay together through thick and thin, not terribly different from Lucy and Ricky or Rob and Laura or Ward and June.

Maybe in this case Mr. Card is just focusing on what personally troubles him, as we all tend to do.

Don't you see the absurd contradiction? A postulated but unproven genetic disposition toward homosexuality is supposed to be embraced and accepted by everyone as "perfectly natural" -- but the far stronger and almost universal genetic disposition toward having children and grandchildren is to be suppressed, kept to yourself, treated as a mental illness.

Dude, if it ever comes to that I would so be in your fucking protest rally, but I simply cannot choose another word for this but "delusional.". Sorry. All due respect. Never going to fucking happen.

I don't want to uneccessarily frighten this guy any more than he already is, but in the strange little world wherein this could ever happen he would have so many problems that worrying about gay people getting married would be even less significant than worrying about a nose hair two seconds before impact with a speeding Mack truck.

This can't be taken seriously.

The dark secret of homosexual society -- the one that dares not speak its name -- is how many homosexuals first entered into that world through a disturbing seduction or rape or molestation or abuse, and how many of them yearn to get out of the homosexual community and live normally.

That's not a fact but a mere conjecture and an insult to all parties, not the least of which are the victims of abuse. Show me a single study that says the rates of abuse divided into heterosexual and homosexual categories is anything but purely relative and equitable, and then ask how many heterosexuals first entered into their world through a disturbing seduction or rape or molestation or abuse, and stagger at the numbers. A cursory glance at such studies shows that victims of homosexual abuse are not more likely to "turn out" one way or the other any more than victims of heterosexual abuse are. In fact, some show that the highest "conversion rate" is among women who are more likely to become lesbians "as a result of" heterosexual abuse, but these are somewhat controversial. The larger conclusion is that not one single straight line has ever been drawn than can plot predictable developmental sexuality types with types of abuse. It's a myth. Get over it.

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master -- that's all."

It's kind of ironic that he used this. Being a huge fan of Lewis Carroll, I have to say I interpreted this passage very differently from Mr. Card, but it also points up something I've realized about how gay politics should approach this issue. VWguy touches on it (very unhomophobically) and even pisser hit upon this in his crude and offensive way in his "Gay Farriage" thread: for the dialogue to continue I think perhaps the word marriage should simply be avoided in the language of gay petitions as much as possible.

The word "marriage" is the prized political and religious football of Mr Card's philosophical team. In the Humpty Dumpty vernacular, this word is their master; it can no longer mean what they say it means if it means something else as well.

As long as gays insist on using that word, they're going to think we're trying to take their balls. They don't realize we can have our own balls, and our own playing fields. (pun not intended, but effective.)

Instead of fighting for "marriage," gays should be fighting for simple "civil unions" that satisfy every one of the 1049 rights that marriage does, for the same basic filing cost and with the same requisite consents. Period. To walk into the county clerk's office and pay a small fee to legally bestow upon one other person in your life all those joint rights is enough. Then, if you belong to a church willing to "sanctify" this union in a religious sense and ceremony, no one can stop you. You can have rice and everything.

There's no need to alter the word of law concerning marriage. No need to alter the language which defines marriage as "between a man and a woman" one iota, as long as these civil unions can effectively "mimic" them between people of the same gender.

This would be a case of problem solved I'm certain, except that we do have an administration attempting to preclude it, and we do have a lot of people with this strange irrational concern Mr. Card so eloquently elucidates.

The Humpty-Dumpty moral is that a word can master many, or, in time, have many masters.