dcseain: Cast shot of me playing my violin in role of minstrel in the Two Gentlemen of Verona (Default)
[personal profile] dcseain
In another forum, [livejournal.com profile] happylion said:
Traditionally, Jewish law says that marriage is about procreation. Therefore, the Pentateuch prohibits a woman from marrying a man whose testes have been damaged or removed. Also, if a couple do not succeed in having children for ten years, they are forcibly divorced and remarried (this happened to distant cousins of mine; they both had children in their second marriage).

American law does not follow the Jewish tradition. Therefore, an American marriage is not simply about procreation, and any arguments based on procreation are meaningless.
in response to this letter to the editor in Monday's Washington Post, page A14:

Richard Cohen made a good point in his column on the question of same- sex marriage ["To Have and to Hold Wrongly," op-ed, July 11]. He stated correctly that the right to "the pursuit of happiness" is a fundamental American one.

However, he failed to mention that our Founding Fathers also clearly stated in that same document -- the Declaration of Independence -- that "all men . . . are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable rights," not by a court or even by a unanimous vote of American society. Therefore these rights are not absolute but curtailed by the laws of nature of that Creator, who clearly designed his creatures to procreate heterosexually, not homosexually. (It just doesn't work any other way.) And the legal recognition and protection of marriage by the state is not about protecting each person's right to find affection but to bring children into the world and to give them a stable unit in which to develop.

Therefore, the state has no need or interest in protecting gays who want to live together and seek happiness. Let them, if they choose to, but do not call it something it can never be: marriage.

LISA M. COYNE

Washington


Discuss.

Date: 2006-07-19 08:21 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] dr-tectonic.livejournal.com
Actually, there's an interesting point buried here.

Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that the institution of marriage did have a traditional and intentionally designed purpose of Making The Children Safe.

So what?

That's still in no way an argument against gay marriage.

You have a group that wants to expand the definition of a social institution to include them, because it would make their lives better. This expansion has basically no impact on our hypothesized purpose. (And it would, in fact, help some kids who have gay parents.) So... why not?

It's not like we aren't allowed to change social institutions when we find that doing so makes our society better. Isn't that what happened with women's suffrage?

Let's suppose that marriage is currently all about procreation, not happiness or whatever else. How would adding a new purpose to it, one not at odds with the procreation aspect, be harmful?

Date: 2006-07-19 12:19 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] vvalkyri.livejournal.com
Aside from that, many family courts have been perfectly happy with gay parents (there was something ni washpost's outlook section a month or two ago, but i have to get out to work) because, essentially, "hey, redundancy! cool. We like two parents better than one parent, and we don't much care about the gender"

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dcseain: Cast shot of me playing my violin in role of minstrel in the Two Gentlemen of Verona (Default)
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