(no subject)

[dcseain]

In another forum, 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.

Comments

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

You might enjoy these (http://melted-snowball.livejournal.com/145392.html) two (http://melted-snowball.livejournal.com/145427.html) posts (particularly the second one), which was probably the last time I got really pissed off about that.

Oh, and of course, one might note that the Declaration of Independence is full of stirring rhetoric about a lot of things, but that the Constitution, which matters legally talks about securing the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity. If we really want to claim that the point is to protect the children, this feels to me like it wants to protect them all.

[And, finally, we haven't had a great societal collapse here yet, four years into this same-sex marriage experiment. In fact, it seems to have become banal. Which is, to be frank, really great.]