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How would legalizing gay marriage affect your marriage?

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Here is a comprehensive backgrounder published in National Review.

It answers the following questions in detail:

  1. Why focus on opposing the recognition of same-sex partnerships as marriages? Aren’t widespread divorce and single parenting the real problems?
  2. Why worry so much about policy?
  3. Why wouldn’t you want to recognize committed, monogamous same-sex relationships?
  4. How would recognizing same-sex relationships as marriages hurt marriage?
  5. Isn’t the fight against redefining marriage a losing battle?
  6. Why limit freedom in the name of sectarian values?

Here’s the detail on number 4:

Recognizing same-sex relationships as marriages requires replacing one basic vision of what marriage is (in our law, and hence in our mores, and hence in practice) with another vision of marriage. The new vision is one that equates marriage with the much broader category of companionship. Companionate bonds have great personal value, but they can’t ground in a principled way the norms that set marriage apart.

To the extent that marriage is misunderstood, it will be harder to see the point of its norms, to live by them, and to encourage their strict observance. And this, besides making any remaining restrictions on marriage arbitrary, will damage the many cultural and political goods that first got the state involved in marriage. Here is a summary of those goods.

Real marital fulfillment. No one acts in a vacuum. We all take cues from cultural norms, many of which are shaped by the law. To form a true marriage, one must freely choose it. And to choose marriage, one must have at least a rough idea of what it is. The revisionist view would harm people (especially future generations) by distorting their idea of what marriage is. It would teach that marriage is essentially about emotional fulfillment and cohabitation, without any inherent connections to bodily union or procreation and family life. As individuals internalized this view, their ability to realize genuine marital union would diminish. This would be bad in itself, since marital union is good in itself. It would be the subtlest but also the primary harm of redefining marriage; other harms include the effects of misconstruing marriage.

Spousal well-being. Marriage tends to make spouses healthier, happier, and wealthier. But what does this is marriage, especially through its distinctive norms of permanence, exclusivity, and orientation to family life. As the state’s redefinition of marriage makes these norms harder to understand, justify, and live by, spouses will enjoy less marital stability and less of the psychological and material advantages that flow from it.

Children’s well-being. If same-sex relationships are recognized, not only will the stabilizing norms of marriage be undermined, but the notion that men and women tend to bring different gifts to parenting will not be reinforced by any civil institution. Redefining marriage would soften the social pressures and lower the incentives — already diminished these past few decades — for husbands to stay with their wives and children and for men and women to marry before having children. All this would harm children’s development into happy, productive, upright adults.

Friendship. Misunderstandings about marriage will speed our society’s drought of deep friendship, with special harm to the unmarried. The state will have defined marriage mainly by degree or intensity — as offering the most of what makes any relationship valuable: shared emotion and experience. It thus will become less acceptable to seek (and harder to find) emotional and spiritual intimacy in nonmarital friendships. Instead of being seen as different from marriage and therefore distinctively appealing, they will be regarded simply as less. Only the conjugal view, which gives marriage a definite orientation to bodily union and family life, preserves a horizon richly populated with many types of association and affection, each with its own scale of depth and specific forms of presence and care.

Religious liberty. As the conjugal view of marriage comes to be seen as irrational (“bigoted”), freedom to express and live by it will be curbed. Several states already have forced Catholic Charities to choose between giving up its adoption services and placing children with same-sex partners, against Catholic principles. Some defenders of marriage have been fired or denied employment or educational and career opportunities for publicizing their views. If marriage is redefined, believing what virtually every human society once believed about marriage — that it is a male-female union — will be seen increasingly as a malicious prejudice, to be driven to the margins of culture. The consequences for observant Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others are becoming apparent.

Limited government. The state is (or should be) a supporting actor in our lives, not a protagonist. It exists to create the conditions under which individuals and our freely formed communities can thrive. The most important free community, on which all others depend, is the marriage-based family; and the conditions for its thriving include the accommodations and pressures that marriage law provides for couples to stay together. Redefining marriage will further erode marital norms, thrusting the state further into leading roles for which it is poorly suited: parent and discipliner to the orphaned, provider to the neglected, and arbiter of disputes over custody, paternity, and visitation. As the family weakens, our welfare and correctional bureaucracies grow.

People on both  sides of this issue should be able to articulate the reasons for each point of view. The article is a good place to find the case for natural marriage.

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Free speech under attack from the secular left in the UK and Canada

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Dina tweeted this article from the UK Telegraph by Christina Odone.

Excerpt: (links removed)

Tomorrow the High Court will decide whether a Christian group that helps gays “overcome” their sexual inclination has the right to advertise its services. You may remember that Stonewall, the gay rights group, was allowed to run the slogan: “Some people are gay. Get over it.” on London buses. But when Core Issues Trust (CIT), a Christian group, decided to counter with a poster that read “Not gay! Post-gay, ex-gay and proud. Get over it!” Mayor Boris Johnson vetoed their campaign.

If the High Court ruling goes against CIT – as I fear it will – the judgement will prove a setback for free speech, as well as religious freedom. As Philip Johnston writes in today’s Telegraph, “Just as gays are entitled to extol their own sexual identity, so people who take another view, on whatever grounds, should be allowed to say so, shouldn’t they?”

The problem, as Johnston notes, is that “you might think it is right to muzzle such people because, in reality, they just don’t like gays and are hiding their disapproval behind a spurious religiosity… In some cases that may be true, but it is not the issue here: this is about free speech.”

Our newfound intolerance worries me – and I write more on this on my own website, Freefaith.com. All Britons, and not just those of faith, will be scared of speaking against the prevailing culture.  We’ll watch our words and our backs, terrified of breaking the unwritten code upheld by the guardians of our illiberal establishment. The punishment is not just derision and verbal abuse; in some quarters expressing the wrong sentiment will mean I’ll get a criminal record or a fine. I might even have a minister call for my boss to fire me, as happened to Julie Burchill when she wrote something recently that offended the transgender lobby.

That used to happen, on a regular basis, to journalists living in Stalin’s USSR. Any expression of subversive tendency (ie one that did not tally with the regime’s own viewpoint) could end a hack’s career forever. Or land her in Siberia. Even Lynne Featherstone cannot dispatch her victims in this way, yet. But if tomorrow’s court hearing about the Christian advertising campaign goes against them, I will feel the cold winds of Siberia blowing.

It’s not just in the UK, but Canada, too. The Supreme Court just decided a case where a foolish Christian (the kind I am constantly deriding on this blog) decided to push Christian moral views with Bible verses and vulgar insults in public. The Supreme Court decided that his free speech was criminal. (H/T Keith)

Excerpt:

In an unanimous decision today in the case of Saskatchewan (Human Rights Commission) v. Whatcott, the Supreme Court of Canada struck a blow against freedom of speech.

[…]CCF Executive Director and lawyer Chris Schafer said, “The Supreme Court missed an excellent opportunity to rein in the power of various human rights commissions and tribunals to censor the expression of unpopular beliefs and opinions”. Schafer added, “While the Canadian Constitution Foundation does not take any position on the content of the materials distributed by Mr. Whatcott, it believes that it is the right of every Canadian to freely and peacefully express themselves without fear of censorship or persecution by the state. Free expression is the lifeblood of democracies and all forms of expression, especially the offensive kind, needs to be protected. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court disagrees.”

I think this Canadian story shows the importance of Christians being intelligent about how they argue against things they oppose. Quoting Bible verses on placards and being insulting is not the same as doing a PhD and then publishing quality arguments and evidence for your point of view. All this offensive person achieved was handing the left the perfect case for them to restrict free speech for everyone. Christians need to be smarter than that, and to know that being persuasive means being articulate and intelligent. Only a complete idiot would quote Bible verses to people who do not accept the Bible, instead of using academic books and academic research. And yet our pious pastors frequently prepare lay Christians to do nothing but quote the Bible to non-Christians, so it is understandable. We need to get better at making cases.

Note that these anti-free-speech laws were passed by the Labor Party in the UK and by the Liberal Party in Canada. It’s the secular left that restricts speech, not the religious right.

News

Obama suffers the most disastrous week of his Presidency

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A must-read re-cap from the Washington Times.

Excerpt:

Consider:

• Last Friday, Mr. Obama wandered into the killing of Trayvon Martin. Aided by his ignorance of the situation, knee-jerk prejudices and tendency toward racial profiling, Mr. Obama played a heavy hand in elevating a tragic situation in which a teenager was killed into a full-blown hot race fight.

Americans, he admonished, need to do some “soul-searching.” And then, utterly inexplicably, he veered off into this bizarre tangent about how he and the poor dead kid look so much alike they could be father and son. It was election-year race-pandering gone horribly wrong.

• By the start of this week, Mr. Obama had fled town and was racing to the other side of the planet just as the Supreme Court was taking up the potentially-embarrassing matter of Obamacare. While in South Korea he was caught on a hidden mic negotiating with the president of our longest-standing rival on how to sell America and her allies down the river once he gets past the next election.

• Meanwhile, back at home, the Supreme Court took up the single most important achievement of Mr. Obama’s presidency and, boy, was it embarrassing. The great constitutional law professor, it turns out, may not quite be the wizard he told us he was.

By most accounts, Mr. Obama and his stuttering lawyers were all but laughed out of the courthouse. They were even stumbling over softball questions lobbed by Mr. Obama’s own hand-picked justices.

• Mr. Obama closed his week pulling off a nearly unimaginable feat: He managed to totally and completely unify the nastily-fighting Democrats and Republicans in Congress. Late Wednesday night, they unanimously voted — 414 to zip — to reject the budget Mr. Obama had presented, leaving him not even a thin lily’s blade to hide behind.

So, in one week, Mr. Obama got caught whispering promises to our enemy, incited a race war, raised serious questions about his understanding of the Constitution, and then got smacked down over his proposed budget that was so wildly reckless that even Democrats in Congress could not support it.

It’s important the Obama’s secular leftism be put on display.