I received an email from someone called Kevin accusing me of having refused to state my position on gay marriage. I have never been asked, but am in fact entirely in favour. I think human relationships are essential to human happiness, and I am not in the least concerned about the gender combinations or sexual practices in which people find happiness. Nor am I obsessed with the number two. I have no objection to polyandry or polygamy (or the gay equivalent) either. The key thing is that people enter and leave relationships entirely consensually, once of an age to consent. I do not believe in matters of tax, immigration or any other governmental sphere, any combination of family life should be favored over any other.
My own family life is “conventional” and very happy, but I do not make the mistake of believing one model fits all.
The “God sanctioned” marriage is one level of reference.
In a secular sense some of the practical issues for legally formalising civil unions are:-
Ownership of a home where partners lived and jointly contributed for an extended period.
Ownership o f other types of property ( i.e. non-real estate).
Acquired obligations during the course of the union, such as children.
To mention just a few of the practicalities of not having a clear rule based system for addressing rights of respective partners.
Jimmy as a supposed atheist how can you possibly define an activity between 2 consensual adults as immoral?
As for bringing up children and the morality of being brought up in a standard family unit versus a same sex couple. Well it would be nice and convenient if the question of where and how a child should be raised was so simple.
But in reality since 2 people of the same sex can’t procreate they will be adopting, they will be creating a family for children who have none, straight couples are put in the position where they need to adopt much less frequently due to IVF.
So the comparison is, is it better for a child to live in a family unit with a same sex couple, or in a shelter, or passed from foster family to foster family?
To Clark:
What gets me about “homophobia” is that it’s a recently-coined, wholly ideological word that pre-judges the issues and conclusions of any debate in which it features (other than, as in my comment here, suitably enclosed between quotation marks for objective inspection). I also suggest that we have an indefinite moratorium on the use of the word “bigot” and its close associates.
To Clark (again):
I don’t know whether you’re genuinely mistaking the actual (as distinct from apparent) function of the possessive pronouns when applied to, say, one’s children.
When I speak of “my” bank manager or “my” second cousin, once-removed, I can assure you that I do for one moment believe that I own the individual in question in precisely the same sense that I own my house or car.
“The denial of the term marriage to people on the grounds of gender/sexual orientation seems pretty offensive to me”
Yeah? You’ll appreciate then how offended I am that flagrant ageism and sexism preclude me from joining the Brownies.
Good post.
On another thread, someone said: “where will it end – multi-person marriages”? In fact, I added a +1 for polyamory on this site previously, but got no bites. If the purpose of marriage is to allow people to commit to one another, and optionally also to form a stable environment in which to raise a family, then we should not mind what configurations people choose.
We’ve had this debate here quite recently, as it happens. (Hopefully no-one aside from Jimmy will attempt to confuse gay lifestyles with paedophilia again here – dealt with perfectly well on the other thread).
@Neil Saunders – I believe there is an aggressive homophobic lobby, and NomadUK is right to point that out.
The major source of intolerance, in my view, is the narrowly defined concept of marriage that has shut out 6% of humanity from this institution, for religious reasons. The church – in its various religions and denominations – has always needed scapegoats for social ostracism and future hellfire, and the “Fornicators and Sodomites” have always fitted that bill nicely.
So, I see any counter-reactions to the inevitable move towards sanctioning gay marriage as defending old intolerance.
@MJ
Hehehe.
Michael Stephenson wrote:
Try incest between 2 consenting adults as a test case. Then think about 2 conniving pederasts, who pretend to ‘love’ each other, so that they can become licensed to be foster parents.
I should add, just out of interest, that I was brought up in a pretty homophobic and religious household, and I recall that the sight of two college-age girls holding hands prompted my mother to declare them “disgusting”. As a result of this conditioning, I exhibited classic anti-gay “reservations” until my mid-twenties, at which point I had a solid re-think of all the religious/shame tropes I’d absorbed in my early years.
So, I’ve been on both sides of the fence. Letting go of anti-gay prejudices was the lifting of a great burden, and means I don’t need to quiz people about their sexuality before I can decide whether I wish to associate with them. Sadly, I’m quite sure I’d have been rejected by my mother, if I’d turned out to be gay.
As it happens, I have a Banksy montage in my front room, and it features a panel of two policemen kissing passionately. It’s a splendid defanger of authoritarianism, but I also like to think it says of my house: “Tolerance proudly practiced here”.
How would not instituting gay marriage prevent child abuse, if these “two conniving pederasts” were a man and a woman? Do you propose to ban straight marriage also?
Jon quibbled:
I do not equate paedophilia with anything other than propaganda from the Social Services, the police, and all other agencies that are funded via the breakdown of heterosexual families.
I associate gay lifestyles with the potential of pederasty.
“How would not instituting gay marriage prevent child abuse, if these “two conniving pederasts” were a man and a woman? Do you propose to ban straight marriage also?”
What is ‘straight’ about pederasts ?
Ah, that old trope – gay people are more likely to be attracted to children. Not true, I am glad to say – certainly I am not aware of any reputable evidence for it. Got a link?
I would take the view that sexual abusers of children were sexually abused themselves, or have been through a psychological crisis that has stymied their sexual development. Catholic priests who abuse(d) children were encouraged, in effect, to have an undeveloped and/or confused sense of sexuality, which is why the Church’s proscription on marriage for priests has been so harmful.
Further, as Vronsky insinuated, there is no real gain for gays in gay marriage, whereas there is an increase risk of pederasty being aided and abetted by institutional means.
Had you not considered that Catholicism is matriarchal, and its terms of heterosexual ‘celibacy’ for priests and nuns, would have attracted many homosexuals to their ranks, due to their social ostracism in the past. Hence they could engage in same sex communism.
I don’t say this as a mere quibble, since I think it ties in with the comments of Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who pointed out that most of those involved in perpetrating the ‘paedophilia’ scandal within the Catholic Church, were homosexuals. This is why I think we should get into the habit [in a non-sartorial sense] of calling it ‘pederasty’.
Indeed, it would be a telling exercise for those who have the statistics, to compare the populations of Catholics to homosexual child abusers, and make a definitive deduction of which group is more prone to this activity. My suspicion is that Tarcisio Bertone is right, and that it was Catholics turning a blind eye to homosexuals that led to that particular Trojan nightmare.
“NomadUK” and others can say what they like about the Daily Mail, but today’s paper carries a two-page spread under the headline “Was Mossad Behind the Alps Murders?” I can’t see many other newspapers running that.
Ah, interesting! Catholicism as the natural, welcoming home to gay and lesbian people the world over. Except that bit about the church doing its best to perpetuate homophobia, and to let the 6% know that their naturally-occurring minority sexuality is “sinful in the eyes of God” (etc ad nauseum).
I’m not au fait with the details of child abuse in the Church, but where boys have been abused, I would regard that as I indicated above: a priest whose sexual development has been deliberately stunted by the brainwashing of the church does not have a sexuality per se – he is just seeking base gratification from wherever he can get it. Perhaps, in any case, priests have been more likely to encounter boys than girls? (Not a Catholic, so don’t know the gender rules on choirs).
In many of these cases, most of those priests wishing to marry would have married a woman, since most people are heterosexual.
Absent the statistics you would like to find to support your theory, I stand my ground. If a wild claim linking consenting gay relationships to child abuse is made, the onus is on the speaker to prove it.
Stand up Tarcisio Bertone, and prove it!
Alas he was shouted down by the politically corrected world press.
Clark: God’s evenings are probably discrete (assuming He labels time in the same way we do) but I should think His evenings involving a DVD are probably discreet too! 😉
Well, Jimmy – you could always prove it. Surely there must be one publicly available thesis on the internet that supports your theory? I would expect you would already have it bookmarked, since this does appear to be rather important to you.
Jon, I am not at all “anti-gay”, but I do not support gay marriage in a church or adoption of children by gay couples. Interestingly, a friend of mine who is gay doesn’t support these either. I see you’ve set yourself up on the moral high-ground by lumping together people like me with the genuinely anti-gay types who believe in hellfire and damnation for homosexuals and who probably would disown a son who turned out gay. This being the way you tend to operate, it enables you to position yourself as the nice, compassionate good guy while everyone opposing you is nasty, irrational and full of hatred. It must make you feel terribly pleased with yourself.
Btw Jon, I’d lose the Banksy montage in the front room if I were you. Aside from ssounding serioiulsy naff, it’s only rebellious or anti-establishment in a phony middle-class sense, much like wearing a Che t-shirt.
Jon hoped:
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/9548/
And remember Jon, you were the one who started by claiming that the priest scandal was a result of religious confusion, and claimed that 6% is the fraction of gay folk, yet where are your links?
My thanks to Jimmy for reacting to my question, but it’s a reaction rather than an answer. I’ll repeat: what privileges are conferred by marriage that gays should be concerned if they are denied them?
I think that there are many ways of being gravely unlucky in life, and being born with an attraction to the same sex is one of them, just as being born very poor, handicapped or not good looking. That justifies compassion towards such people, but not, in my view, redefining sexual morality to suit everyone. As one sympathetic to Catholic teaching, as I see it, homosexual activity is wrong, and therefore so-called gay marriage should not be approved by the state.
Vronsky wrote:
None, unless they wished to use the automatic right of fostering of other peoples children.
Jon: The first google result for “scientific papers on same sex adoption” is actually against same sex adoption. It doesn’t seem focussed on “pederasty” but does just go to show how lazy Jimmy has been in attempting to inform his own opinion and back it up with evidence.
Not lazy, just moderated by the pinkos as per usual.
@JimmyGiro
You mean ‘other people’ who can no longer look after their children for whatever reason. Or do not wish to.
Any my understanding is that there is no ‘automatic’ about any fostering process anywhere in the world.
So what are you on about?
About fostering by gay couples.
Firstly there’s an assumption that a single parent isn’t enough to look after children.
But leaving that issue aside, it’s evident that a couple’s gender, sexuality, religion and so on do not determine whether they are likely to be good foster parents. If they do not determine this likelihood, they are irrelevant. Other factors matter instead. A foster service examines precisely these factors. And if these factors are unconnected to gender and sexuality, then there are no logical or reasonable grounds for excluding people, single, a couple, three or more, from this process on the basis of their gender and sexuality.
The only factor that can be said to be problematic for gay couples wanting to foster is, guess what? social prejudice against them (and thus the child and children) as a gay couple. But in a society committed to civil rights, intolerance from others cannot be used as a justification for denying a person’s equal rights, or those of a couple, or a family, whatever its makeup. This is essentially what we are talking about.
David wrote:
The ‘reason’ is the Social Services’ requirement of quota filling. Too many kids are falling into care homes thanks to mercenary bureaucracies.
And how many Social Service groups do you know, which are not headed by lesbians or gays?
The Shoesmith woman of Haringey Social Services, is a lesbian, and when she was sacked over baby Peter, the BBC came to rescue her name. Now there’s a kiss of death if ever there was.