Tag Archives: Gay Marriage

Polemics

Ryan T. Anderson and Robert P. George reflect on the legalization of same-sex marriage

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Gay activist vandalizes pro-marriage sign
Gay activist vandalizes pro-marriage sign

Same-sex “marriage” has been the law of the land for 10 years, now. As with the first redefinition of marriage – no-fault divorce – many unexpected problems have arisen. I found an article by two famous social conservative professors in USA Today, where they explain.

Excerpt:

[I]n 2013, [the Supreme Court] struck down the federal definition of marriage as a male-female union in a 5-4 ruling.

[…]Same-sex marriage advocates told the public that they sought only the “freedom to marry.” Same-sex couples were already free to live as they chose, but legal recognition was about the definition of marriage for all of society. It was about affirmation — by the government and everyone else.

It’s unsurprising that once a campaign that used to cry “live and let live” prevailed, it began working to shut down Catholic adoption agencies and harass evangelical bakers and florists. This shows it was never really about “live and let live” — that was a merely tactical stance.

[…]While these were the early effects of redefinition, the more profound consequences will be to marriage itself. Law shapes culture; culture shapes beliefs; beliefs shape action. The law now effectively teaches that mothers and fathers are replaceable, that marriage is simply about consenting adult relationships, of whatever formation the parties happen to prefer. This undermines the truth that children deserve a mother and a father — one of each.

Traditional marriage had the notions of exclusivity and permanence embedded into it. These were seen as necessary to safeguard vulnerable children, who are the natural outcome of natural marriage. But what if you take out the complementary genders, and make marriage about the romantic feelings of adults?

It also undercuts any reasonable justification for marital norms. After all, if marriage is about romantic connection, why require monogamy? There’s nothing magical about the number two, as defenders of “polyamory” point out. If marriage isn’t a conjugal union uniting a man and a woman as one flesh, why should it involve or imply sexual exclusivity? If it isn’t a comprehensive union inherently ordered to childbearing and rearing, why should it be pledged to permanence?

[…]But same-sex marriage is a catalyst for further erosion. Already, we see respectable opinion-makers mainstreaming “throuples,” “ethical nonmonogamy” and “open relationships.”

The progressive elites got rid of natural marriage without even thinking about why marriage was there in the first place. Marriage was traditionally seen as being an exclusive, permanent commitment – and that commitment provided the stability needed for children. Marriage required you to look for a partner who was good at self-control (exclusivity) and commitment (permanence). But when judges decided that marriage was just about two people having romantic feelings, it opened up the door to all of these other “lifestyles”.

I’m just thinking right now about how to stop this. I know that social conservatives are trying to highlight the damage that is being caused by focusing relationships on adult happiness instead of children’s needs and rights. But I still don’t hear any sort of thoughtful presentation of marriage as a commitment enterprise, where two adults suppress their own selfishness in order to make a promise to love and care for this other person. Does anyone see relationships as being a self-sacrificial commitment to another person, and to any children who result? Or are we locked into this view that the goal of relationships is to make my spouse, my children, and everyone else make me feel good and look good?

News

Let’s check in on Britain’s first married gay couple and see how they’re doing

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Gay activist vandalizes pro-marriage sign
Gay activist vandalizes pro-marriage sign

A long time ago in 2011, I wrote a long article looking at the research about same-sex relationships. The research said that sexual relationships between men were more likely to be unstable, promiscuous, and involve domestic violence. Also, it said that same-sex relationships harm children, not just because of the instability but because of the loss of relationships with biological parents.

So let’s take a look at one famous very wealthy gay couple from the UK, and see if we find any evidence of this in their story.

This article is from the UK Daily Mail:

Britain’s first gay fathers have ended their 32-year relationship after one of them fell ‘head over heels’ in love with their daughter’s boyfriend.

Barrie Drewitt-Barlow, 50, is now living with the husband he is currently divorcing as well as their five children and his new boyfriend, 25-year-old Scott Hutchison.

Mr Huchison, who has always been openly bisexual, has previously dated Mr Drewitt-Barlow’s 19-year-old daughter, Saffron.

Mr. Drewitt-Barlow’s current “husband” is named Tony, and he is 55 years old.

The family, originally from Essex, now live in Florida. The children refer to Tony as ‘Dad’, Mr Drewitt-Barlow as ‘Daddy’ and Mr Hutchison as ‘stepdad’.

The shocking move comes two years after Saffron and Mr Hutchison reportedly planned to have their own twins using a surrogate. The pair claim their relationship was never sexual.

[…]Mr Drewitt-Barlow and his husband Tony became the UK’s first gay fathers in 1999 when a surrogate gave birth to twins Saffron and Aspen.

[…]Twins Saffron and Aspen will be 20 next month and were conceived using donor eggs from Tracie McCune before being carried in surrogate Rosalind Bellamy.

Each husband is father to one of the twins, so although they were born at the same time they are in fact half-siblings.

However, Aspen does have an identical twin, 16-year-old Orlando.

The embryo which Aspen came from split in two while it was in the lab and Orlando was frozen for four years before being put into the womb of another surrogate, Donna.

Donna acted as surrogate again for the couple’s second set of twins – who were born nine years ago.

The eggs were from a Brazilian model that Mr Drewitt-Barlow spotted on a catwalk and paid £35,000.

[…]The pair, who are now worth £40million, went on to have five children using other surrogates and egg donors.

They fought in court for their right to be on their children’s birth certificates as father and father and became the first gay couple allowed to do so.

In 2006 they became civil partners and got married as soon as it was legal in the UK in 2014.

Although they don’t seem to be doing very well at commitment, fidelity, children’s needs before adult selfishness department, they nevertheless wanted to move forward from re-defining marriage to eliminate complementary sexes to eliminating religious liberty:

The couple, who previously challenged churches’ right to opt out of gay weddings, also caused controversy by supporting gender selection and hand-picking beautiful egg donors.

My original 2011 article mentioned how expanding gay rights in other countries had let to the elimination of real rights, like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association, and so on. And I cited a lot of articles from countries that were showing these problems.

Right now, we are seeing how aspects of marriage which used to be seen as central to the marriage enterprise (chastity, permanent commitment, sexual exclusivity, parenting by biological mother and father, etc.) are disappearing as society accepts that happiness-focused marriage as practiced by gay activists is the same as the old commitment-fidelity-children’s-rights marriage. When you lump what gay activists are doing in marriage in with what used to be considered marriage before no-fault divorce and before same-sex marriage, you understand that what marriage means is changing to include behaviors that were viewed as different from natural marriage.

Christians used to believe that marriage was a life-long commitment to self-sacrificially love their spouse, no matter what troubles were encountered, and no matter how they felt. Marriage was not seen as an engine for producing feelings of happiness. Marriage was about being a disciple of Christ, pursuing holiness, and fighting the world to deliver your spouse to Jesus, with a life demonstrated effective allegiance to Christ. Even non-Christians were aware of this vision of marriage, and it influenced how they approached marriage.

But what is it about now? Happiness:

The couple began to drift apart as their sex life dwindled and Mr Drewitt-Barlow’s snoring forced the pair into separate beds.

Husband Tony also suffered from cancer in 2006 and suffered bad health for the last three years because of treatment related to it.

While his is now in remission, it was his hospital admission for osteoradionecrosis in his jaw that sent Mr Drewitt-Barlow into the arms of Scott – who had been his PA for seven years.

Happiness is the goal for marriage once marriage has drifted away from the example of Christ’s self-sacrificial love for his bride, the church. And happiness does not last. Commitment does.

Here are some sample wedding vows from back when Christianity was taken seriously as something that had authority over feelings. Take a look at what marriage vows used to say about marriage. It was all about commitment, and gender-specific obligations tailored to the particular needs of the man and the woman.

We don’t have that any more, because a bunch of feelings-driven people in the church decided that it was more important for Christians to feel good and look good to non-Christians, than to study how to defend the truth-claims of the Bible on controversial issues like sex and marriage.

News

Are gay relationships more stable than straight ones?

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Sherlock Holmes and John Watson are going to take a look at the data
Sherlock Holmes and John Watson are going to take a look at the data

Let’s look at this post from The Public Discourse and see if gay relationships are as stable, or even more stable, than straight ones.

Excerpt:

The [NFSS] study found that the children who were raised by a gay or lesbian parent as little as 15 years ago were usually conceived within a heterosexual marriage, which then underwent divorce or separation, leaving the child with a single parent. That parent then had at least one same-sex romantic relationship, sometimes outside of the child’s home, sometimes within it. To be more specific, among the respondents who said their mother had a same-sex romantic relationship, a minority, 23%, said they had spent at least three years living in the same household with both their mother and her romantic partner. Only 2 out of the 15,000 screened spent a span of 18 years with the same two mothers. Among those who said their father had had a same-sex relationship, 1.1% of children reported spending at least three years together with both men.

This strongly suggests that the parents’ same-sex relationships were often short-lived, a finding consistent with the broader research on elevated levels of instability among same-sex romantic partners. For example, a recent 2012 study of same-sex couples in Great Britain finds that gay and lesbian cohabiting couples are more likely to separate than heterosexual couples.[3] A 2006 study of same sex marriages in Norway and Sweden found that “divorce risk levels are considerably higher in same-sex marriages”[4] such that Swedish lesbian couples are more than three times as likely to divorce as heterosexual couples, and Swedish gay couples are 1.35 times more likely to divorce (net of controls). Timothy Biblarz and Judith Stacey, two of the most outspoken advocates for same-sex marriage in the U.S. academy, acknowledge that there is more instability among lesbian parents.[5]

This paper from the Family Research Council makes the same point:

The 2003-2004 Gay/Lesbian Consumer Online Census surveyed the lifestyles of 7,862 homosexuals. Of those involved in a “current relationship,” only 15 percent describe their current relationship as having lasted twelve years or longer, with five percent lasting more than twenty years.[4] While this “snapshot in time” is not an absolute predictor of the length of homosexual relationships, it does indicate that few homosexual relationships achieve the longevity common in marriages.

In The Sexual Organization of the City, University of Chicago sociologist Edward Laumann argues that “typical gay city inhabitants spend most of their adult lives in ‘transactional’ relationships, or short-term commitments of less than six months.”[5]

A study of homosexual men in the Netherlands published in the journal AIDS found that the “duration of steady partnerships” was 1.5 years.[6]

In his study of male homosexuality in Western Sexuality: Practice and Precept in Past and Present Times, Pollak found that “few homosexual relationships last longer than two years, with many men reporting hundreds of lifetime partners.”[7]

In Male and Female Homosexuality, Saghir and Robins found that the average male homosexual live-in relationship lasts between two and three years.[8]

It’s a Grindr lifestyle. And it’s not a good environment for meeting the needs of children. (Example)

There is one study (Rosenfeld, 2014) that tries to argue against the conclusion of all these other studies, and the problems with it are discussed in this post.

The right way to think about gay marriage is to think about it as an extension of no-fault divorce. The same feminists and leftists who pushed for the legalization of no-fault divorce told us back then that the children would be fine, that children are resilient. No-fault divorce was a change in the definition of marriage. The leftists said that divorce would never become widespread, and that it would not harm children in any way. It was all a pack of lies. If the practices of the gay lifestyle become conflated with marriage, then marriage will come to denote relationships engaged in for “love” not children, such that unchastity, infidelity, increased domestic violence and frequent break-ups are incorporated back into the definition of marriage. Marriage is about permanence, exclusivity and building an environment that can welcome children and supply for their needs. It’s not about government giving people respect for their romantic feelings. Those are volatile. What government ought to be rewarding is lifelong commitment.