From Don Feder’s latest column over at WorldNetDaily:
Memo to conservative defeatists: Surrender on gay marriage is surrender on marriage – which is surrender on the family and, ultimately, surrender on civilization...
Offering competing models, socially sanctioned, undermines heterosexual marriage. Two men engaged in what used to be described as unnatural acts, become the legal/moral equivalent of a man and woman (husband and wife), joined by faith and tradition, doing society's essential work of childbearing and child-rearing.
Schools will teach that any living arrangement is as good as any other. Employers will be forced to provide "family benefits" to same-sex couples, regardless of religious scruples.
The state will be required to place children with gay couples for adoption, – depriving them of the father/mother role models necessary for successful adjustment. In Massachusetts, Catholic Charities ended its adoption program (the largest in the state), rather than submitting to placing children with homosexuals, as required in the nation's first gay-marriage state.
Ultimately, gay marriage will put churches and Bible-believers in the crosshairs – including Beck's LDS Church, which was viciously attacked for supporting Prop. 8.
Homosexual activists (among the most driven ideologues on the planet) will insist that all churches perform same-sex ceremonies – and push for withdrawal of charitable tax status of those that refuse. Hate-crime laws will be applied to the ministers and priests who preach Leviticus or Romans 1:26-27. In Europe and Canada, clerics have been hauled before human-rights tribunals for defending their faith from the pulpit. . . .
How can you have a strong economy without strong families? As economist Ludwig Von Mises noted, deferred consumption is necessary for capitalism to work. That means individuals willing to sacrifice for the future – and that means families.
Without the family, it doesn't matter how many times we defeat socialism (nationalized health care, government takeover of business, soaring deficits, redistributionism), in the end, we lose – which is why the left has made same-sex marriage its priority, and why it is less tolerant of dissent here than anywhere else.
Conservatives who don't understand this understand nothing.
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Memo to conservative alarmists: surrender on adulterous marriage was surrender on marriage.
A hundred years ago, it was considered reasonable for the state to refuse to sanction the marriage of affair partners. Social pressures also kept people from choosing this alternative lifestyle.
Not only have we done away with the laws that kept such couples from marrying, we have pretty much stopped ostracizing them, too.
Conservatives have been no different than liberals in this regard.
If we are going to allow affair partners to divorce their respective spouses to marry each other, it should come as no surprise that a significant portion of the population sees no problem with allowing two men or two women to marry each other.
This is just as specious an argument as comparing interracial marriage to SSM. That scenario would be a better rationale for legalizing bigamy and/or polygamy. Nevertheless, marriage was still maintained as a man/woman institution, so I fail to see the connection.
Essentially we ARE a polygamous society: several spouses spread over a lifetime.
Specious? Here's Francis Fukuyama:
Prior to the Great Disruption, all Western societies had in place a complex series of formal and informal laws, rules, norms, and obligations to protect mothers and children by limiting the freedom of fathers to simply ditch one family and start another. Today many people have come to think of marriage as a kind of public celebration of a sexual and emotional union between two adults, which is why gay marriage has become a possibility in the United States and other developed countries.
"Today many people have come to think of marriage as a kind of public celebration of a sexual and emotional union between two adults, which is why gay marriage has become a possibility in the United States and other developed countries."
That's exactly the problem, Pete. The wants and desires of adults have taken precedence over the needs of children as society has become more and more self absorbed. That is why NOM has its work cut out for them.
"Essentially we ARE a polygamous society: several spouses spread over a lifetime."
Kevin, please consult a dictionary. Polygamy: the practice or condition of having more than one spouse, esp. wife, at one time. As opposed to monogamy: marriage with only one person at a time.