It is always interesting and enlightening when your opponent tips his hand or reveals his next play. Even if it shows something you had already guessed, there is a satisfaction that comes from knowing that your guess is right.
For instance, when Planned Parenthood is
caught repeatedly lying to and deceiving women, they have tipped their hand. It becomes clear that what we guessed—that they do not care about the wellbeing of women and are
only in it for the money—is true. Similarly, yesterday's decision in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, and the arguments surrounding it, tip the hand and show their motivations.
In this case, what tips the hand is not just what is said, but also what is not said: I still have not heard from any gay "marriage" advocate why a government ought to grant special recognition to gay relationships. Instead, the argument seems to be, "well, heterosexuals get marriage licenses, so we should to." This is an argument with the maturity of a two year old.
Lest we forget, remember that gays are not banned from getting married. Any two men could go to Vegas and profess their undying love for eternity—or at least the next seven to 15 years—in front of their friends, family, or loved ones. This isn't merely about marriage as a social institution. This is about marriage as a government-sanctioned relationship. And that's the case that I've never heard made.
To me, gay "marriage" seems kind of like a male tampon. What's the point? If the point of marriage is to encourage through law the just and proper use of the sexual facilities so that children grow up with their parents and women are not abandoned by deadbeat dads, why do those whose sexual acts cannot result in children need these same legal encouragements? But I suppose our society has drifted away from that notion of marriage. Marriage is just something you do to make you feel good. And feeling good is so important that now, apparently, we have a
fundamental unenumerated right to a marriage license.
The usual arguments for why government ought to recognize gay "marriage" tend to invoke things such as hospital visitation rights or power of attorney. These arguments fall flat once you realize that all 50 states
already grant hospital visitation rights with a simple legal document. And power of attorney can be granted to anyone, not just a spouse, again with a legal document. In fact, the state of California already grants gay couples all the same benefits as married heterosexual couples. They already have everything except the title.
Which is what tips the hand. Gay "marriage" isn't about
equality, it's about
approval.
Despite common social prejudices, homosexuals are in every way legally equal to heterosexuals, and enjoy all the same rights and benefits. They can't be fired for being gay, they are not taxed more, they don't have separate drinking fountains, or have to give up their seats when a straight person gets on the bus. They even have all the same rights and restrictions regarding marriage as does a heterosexual: a straight man cannot marry another man either. Despite claims that they're "second-class citizens", they clearly are not, at least from a legal perspective, and to call them such is an insult to those who really were second-class. Some may say, "but what about the military!" Even they don't ban homosexuals. Only homosexual acts, which is a different thing entirely, unless you maintain that a person and his actions are equivalent.
No, the real second-class citizens are those in the womb. They are the ones to whom basic human rights are denied. I wonder how the gay-rights lobby would react if it could be demonstrated that an unborn baby was gay. Would he suddenly start having rights? Perhaps we should jump on the phony "gay gene" bandwagon.
But the gay "marriage" advocates aren't interested in mere equality of persons; they want gay relationships to be considered equivalent, and that's the approval they got in this decision. "Rather than being different, same-sex and opposite-sex unions are, for all purposes relevant to California law, exactly the same," says Judge Walker, an H.W. Bush appointee, reassuring us that Souter was not the only judicial activist Bush appointed.
Of course, from my side of the sexual revolution, and as a father, I wonder if Judge Walker has ever held a baby, or understands the difference between sexual unions that might produce offspring and those that can't. But then again, things that are obvious from my perspective on this side of the revolution, seem to baffle those on the other side. I mean, don't we already have ways of preventing sexually transmitted disease and unwanted pregnancy? It's called "consider the consequences of your actions." What's the fuss about?
And in the end, that's what this all boils down to: furthering the agenda of the sexual revolution. The sexual revolution was one aspect brought about by a changing social philosophy; that of self-gratification as the highest good. Of course, self-gratification comes with a price. There are consequences to deal with.
Take food for example. "Hungry? Why wait?" The Snicker's slogan perfectly summarizes this philosophy. I want what I want now. But wait! There are consequences to our actions! If we eat whatever we want whenever we want, we'll get fat. It should come as absolutely no surprise that the nation's biggest health risk is obesity and the most frequently performed medical procedure is abortion. Those are related. Of course, we want to forestall those consequences, but we don't want to work at it. The gym is hard work, as is chastity. We prefer our consequence alleviations in pill form. Introducing birth control pills and diet pills. Those, too, are related.
The easiest way to deal with consequences is pretend they aren't consequences. They just happen to unlucky people. Pregnancy becomes and accident. Poor young girls who didn't do anything wrong are, in our president's words, punished with a baby. But if babies aren't a consequence of sex, then there really is no difference between heterosex and homosex. But then if there's no difference, the only possible reason for opposing it is bigotry. So it's easy to understand why that term is bandied about so often in the debate. (I propose a corollary to Godwin's Law: as the length of conversation with a liberal increases, the probability of being called a racist, sexist, homophobe, or bigot approaches 1.)
But simply denying the consequences for yourself is not enough. We require approval for our actions. What a sinner likes the least is to be called out for his sin. It is little wonder that the heterosexual revolutionaries are on the homosexual bandwagon. Legal approval for gay "marriage" gives further approval for fornication.
For this reason, I often feel sorry for the homosexuals who have been caught in the fight for chastity, used as both a human shield and a weapon by the revolutionaries. The real fight is not about whether homosexuals should be granted the rights of heterosexuals. It's over the fundamental nature of sex, and the proper attitude towards it.
A society that embraces gay "marriage" is one that is doomed to suffer unwanted pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, divorce, broken families, and abortion. Of course, homosexuality can only propagate one of these things, so one may ask how the others are related. Gay "marriage" is not the cause but rather the symptom. While the pro-matrimony camp likes to make the argument that homosexual unions will weaken marriage, I suspect that the damage has already been done. The fact that we are at the point where we are having fierce debates over the legalization of gay "marriage" indicates that already the notions of chastity have fallen by the wayside. Governmentally-sanctioned homosexual unions can't make things that much worse, but they certainly can keep them from getting better.
I simply cannot imagine a society that encourages homosexuals to fornicate freely, and even grants approvals and blessings to them for doing so, and at the same time demands that heterosexuals take complete responsibility for their actions and treat sex as the awesome and terrifying power that it is. No, sex is either completely free for all, or is completely sacred to all. And if its as cheap as a Snicker's, people, particularly women, will get fat.
This is, of course, related to the abstinence education debate. Abstinence education is only as effective as society permits it. If children have 30 minutes in school being taught that refraining from sex is the only sure way to avoid pregnancy and STIs, and the rest of their waking lives is spent in a culture that drenches them with sex, sexual imagery, and the idea—furthered by permitting gay "marriage"—that sex need not have consequences, what message are they going to learn? Of course they will have sex. But then we have those nasty consequences to deal with! Unwanted pregnancy and STIs abound! The "solution", then, is to hand out condoms like they're candy. But of course, this only furthers the idea that sex is free. More sex and, when the condoms inevitably fail, more pregnancy and disease.
From my side of the revolution the solution is clear: chastity. But then I am called a bigot who promotes inequality for daring to suggest such a thing.
So the choice is between chastity and fornication, homosexual unions and matrimony, happiness or sorrow. Gay "marriage" represent such a tiny part of it. The damage, if any, done by one gay couple fornicating is negligible. The damage done to the society that encourages it is immense.
