Marriage

[Lemur]

I'm not saying that gay couples are bad or that they will cause the downfall of family values. I do object to the inclusion of homosexuals in the institution of marriage.

Fair enough, but the reason you gave for objecting was that marriages should produce children. By which logic, infertile people should not marry. I don't think marriage can be so narrowly defined. What about couples who chose not to have any kids? Is their marriage invalid?

If two people want to take a shot at having the rest of their lives together, I say let 'em. I'm gonna get rich by being first to market with Gay Divorce Court TV.

This focus on marriage still irks me. Surely what people actually mean is that it's better for children to have two parents? I whole-heartedly agree with that, but it doesn't follow that the parents have to be married.

Yup, it's demonstrably better for kids to have two parents. More parents = division of labor = efficiencies = better odds for the kindelein. Certainly the parents don't have to be married, but marriage helps people stay together. There are more real consequences to walking out on your wife than there are on leaving your roommate with benefits. People generally think harder and more carefully about committing to marriage than they do when asking a sex buddy to move in.

When it comes to providing the most stable foundation possible for kids, marriage gives the best odds. Which is not to say that the individual can't give lie to the statistic.

It's interesting that you refer to the focus as "long-standing." By some measures it is, perhaps, yet I remember hearing many Focus on the Family radio broadcasts as a child that never mentioned the issue even once. IIRC they focused on more mundane, every-day family issues.

You're quite right, Focus on the Family used to be a very different organization, and it was built up by offering practical help with family issues. How it got changed into the political creature that it is now, I really don't know.

And you're also right that the reaction to the gay marriage movement was just that, a reaction. But it really has taken on a life of its own in the last ten years or so. By "longstanding," I meant a decade, which is not long in geological terms, but an eternity in politics and insect lives.

Which reminds me, I used an age calculator and found out I am the equivalent of a five-year-old dog. Woof.

[Del Arroyo]

What about couples who chose not to have any kids? Is their marriage invalid?

In many traditional cultures, yes. But I would not go so far. As I said before, if a couple would be biologically capable of producing children under ideal conditions, then their partnership in marriage is a reasonable proposition. For in a reasonable society, there is much which must be left to personal choice and to the will of God. We cannot make black and white out of a grey world.