Tag Archives: Gay Marriage

News

Married gay couple face charges of raping their adopted children

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The NY Daily News reports on the case, and links to CBS News and the Hartford Courant. (H/T Robert Stacy McCain)

Excerpt:

The case of a same-sex Connecticut couple accused of repeatedly raping and abusing two of their nine adopted boys is headed for trial.

Married couple George Harasz and Douglas Wirth of Glastonbury were supposed to be sentenced Friday in Hartford Superior Court under a plea deal, but instead withdrew from their agreement with prosecutors. The men had already pleaded no contest in January to one felony count each of risk of injury to a minor — a reduction from even more serious charges related to sexual assault.

[…]Harasz and Wirth adopted nine children — three sets of male siblings — beginning in 2000, and ran a home-based dog breeding business called The Puppy Guy.

The couple was arrested in November 2011 following a police and state investigation of sex-abuse allegations. The children were removed from the home.

Police said two boys, ages 5 and 15, accused Harasz of sexually assaulting them. Harasz was initially facing first-degree sexual assault and other charges, while Wirth had been charged with third-degree sexual assault of the 15-year-old boy.

Their arrest warrants claimed the couple not only sexually and physically abused the children, but also forced them to sleep in closets.

[…]One of the victims who spoke during the court hearing said sexual assault began when he was 6.

“They took turns raping me over and over,” he said.

Now, a lot of these rape accusations turn out to be false, so we don’t really know if anyone is guilty until the trial concludes. But I’ve posted before about other trials that did conclude, so that you know that these things are in fact happening. In fact this case is very similar to the case where the Duke University official was offering his 5-year-old adopted son for sex on the Internet.

News

Is it still safe to defend marriage using your real name?

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A Facebook friend is in hot water from his left-leaning classmates for a short essay that he wrote defending marriage. It was published in his college newspaper. In it, he makes a case that society has an interest in promoting marriage because the state has an interest in the development of children.

He writes (in part):

Marriage is a comprehensive union with a special link to children. It is a private union with a public purpose.

Private in that comprehensive union exemplifies the love of the spouses. Public in that their comprehensive union is intrinsically directed toward a purpose beyond the love of the spouses: children.

The state regulates marriage because it has an interest in children. Marriage produces and cultivates the development of future citizens within a family unit held together by norms of fidelity, monogamy, exclusivity, and permanence. The state incentivizes marriage both because it recognizes child-rearing to be a difficult task and because it wants to encourage men and women to form family units. Not all marriages have children; some are infertile. Nevertheless, all marriages between men and women are still capable of engaging in the kind of unitive act that is intrinsically directed toward children.

The essay is a 500-word version of a longer essay that he posted before.

Scary comments

I wanted to bring this up because if you read some of the comments on his post, you will find that most of them seem to be unable to even understand the case that he was trying to make in his small, short 500-word version of the longer essay. Yet, even though these people could not understand what he was saying, they nevertheless went ahead and insulted him personally, over and over and over again.

Take a look at some of these comments, and ask yourself – are they trying to engage with his arguments? Are they bringing new research to bear on the problem? Or are they just offering personal attacks and emotional outbursts?

Look:

The argument in the letter has been debunked time and time again. Ultimately, it implies gay couples aren’t human. At the very least, it implies that gay people aren’t already parents, which is false. I’m absolutely disgusted at your discretion in publishing this trash. You have stooped to an unbelievable low this time. As a side note, I’m embarrassed for [the academic department you belong to].

If it’s been debunked so many times, then we can’t he explain what’s wrong with it instead of becoming insulting?

Here’s another from that same person, right after the first one:

You don’t like gay people. How original. As a side note, I did offer arguments against the ridiculous fallacies in logic that you presented. But it’s not like you’re here to have a discussion. I’m sure you’ve made up your mind re: profile pictures and such.

Um, he never did post any arguments. He just posted about his feelings “disgusted” “embarassed”. That’s not an argument.

And here’s the same person again:

Your article is an insult to anyone who’s LGBT– yes, even your “friends.” It’s an affront to humanity. See Perry v. Schwarzenegger for an obliteration of your argument. I can’t even bother when the facts are all there in Supreme Court records for your easy consumption.

And the funny thing is – people keep clicking like on his comments. Why is that? Why do they think that he has said anything of value?

My advice

And here is the point I want to make about this. I do not recommend to people, and especially to students, that you write about social issues under your real name. I also recommend that even if you use an alias, that you do not make it widely known what your real name is to people who you meet casually online. You do not want to be in a situation where someone can just do a web search for your name before a job interview or a school admission. People who are on the left on these issues are not exposed to other points of view, so they do not tolerate other points of view. Often, they are coming from a position where they already have made lifestyle choices (I mean straight people, too) where they cannot allow themselves to consider the possibility that they would have to regulate their sexuality for the good of children or society.

Polemics

Should government get out of the marriage business?

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Dina sent me three articles by Jennifer Roback Morse, post on The Public Discourse. The articles answer the charge from social liberals and libertarians that we should “get the government out of marriage”.

Here’s the first article which talks about how government will still be involved in marriage, even if we get rid of the traditional definition of marriage, because of the need for dispute resolution in private marriage contracts. She uses no-fault divorce as an example showing how it was sold as a way to get government out of the divorce business. But by making divorce easier by making it require no reason, it increased the number of disputes and the need for more government to resolve these disputes.

Here’s the second article which talks about how the government will have to expand to resolve conflicts over decisions about who counts as a parent and who gets parental rights. With traditional marriage, identifying who the parents are is easy. But with private marriage contracts where the parties are not the biological parents, there is a need for the state to step in and assign parental rights.

Here’s the third article which talks about how marriage is necessary in order to defend the needs and rights of the child at a time when they cannot enter into contracts and be parties to legal disputes.

The third article was my favorite, so here is an excerpt from it:

The fact of childhood dependence raises a whole series of questions. How do we get from a position of helpless dependence and complete self-centeredness, to a position of independence and respect for others? Are our views of the child somehow related to the foundations of a free society? And, to ask a question that may sound like heresy to libertarian ears: Do the needs of children place legitimate demands and limitations on the behavior of adults?

I came to the conclusion that a free society needs adults who can control themselves, and who have consciences. A free society needs people who can use their freedom, without bothering other people too much. We need to respect the rights of others, keep our promises, and restrain ourselves from taking advantage of others.

We learn to do these things inside the family, by being in a relationship with our parents. We can see this by looking at attachment- disordered children and failure-to-thrive children from orphanages and foster care. These children have their material needs met, for food, clothing, and medical care. But they are not held, or loved, or looked at. They simply do not develop properly, without mothers and fathers taking personal care of them. Some of them never develop consciences. But a child without a conscience becomes a real problem: this is exactly the type of child who does whatever he can get away with. A free society can’t handle very many people like that, and still function.

In other words I asked, “Do the needs of society place constraints on how we treat children?” But even this analysis still views the child from society’s perspective. It is about time we look at it from the child’s point of view, and ask a different kind of question. What is owed to the child?

Children are entitled to a relationship with both of their parents. They are entitled to know who they are and where they came from. Therefore children have a legitimate interest in the stability of their parents’ union, since that is ordinarily how kids have relationships with both parents. If Mom and Dad are quarreling, or if they live on opposite sides of the country, the child’s connection with one or both of them is seriously impaired.

But children cannot defend their rights themselves. Nor is it adequate to intervene after the fact, after harm already has been done. Children’s relational and identity rights must be protected proactively.

Marriage is society’s institutional structure for protecting these legitimate rights and interests of children.

I recommend taking a look at all three articles and becoming familiar with the arguments in case you have to explain why marriage matters and why we should not change it. I think it is important to read these articles and to be clear that to be a libertarian doctrine does not protect the right of a child to have a relationship with both his or her parents.  Nor does libertarianism promote the idea that parents ought to stick together for their children.

The purpose of marriage is to make adults make careful commitments, and restrain their desires and feelings, so that children will have a stable environment with their biological parents. We do make exceptions, but we should not celebrate exceptions and we should not subsidize exceptions. It’s not fair to children to have to grow up without a mother or father just so that they adults can make poor, emotional decisions and have fun.