Posted on 04/01/2015 11:14:02 AM PDT by C19fan
Good points. But the states with gay marriage had lower marriage rates before gay marriage went in (they also tended to have lower divorce rates, later marriages, and older populations). It would take a while to sort out just what the effects of gay marriage are and how things have been in those states for some time.
He can eff off as far as I’m concerned. And really, that needs to be the reaction. Just call them out as liberal shills and tell them to go eff themselves. Loudly.
The fundamental logic of gay marriage is in conflict with and devalues traditional Christian marriage and its emphasis on monogamy, lifetime commitment, and child-rearing. These have already been devalued by contraception and abortion, with gay marriage now redefining marriage to be essentially transactional instead of uniquely between men and women as the sole morally approved means of intimacy between them.
The new practice makes marriage optional, with long term cohabitation on the rise in its place, but with the laws and obligations of child-rearing making marriage in such instances usually advisable but not necessary. For a great many young heterosexual couples, living together is now acceptable and marriage most plausible if and when children are expressly contemplated or already on the way.
It seems that gay marriage does much to codify this pattern by devaluing marriage as the point of a responsible romantic attachment between adults. When marriage becomes a gay thing, then why should heteros bother with it?
The long-term effects of the decline of traditional marriage seem to me dismal for children and for their formation into responsible and happy adults. The rich and affluent may live reasonably well in a material sense, but the poor and those who fall into poverty will be further burdened.
Without the general populace quite realizing it or the implications, over the last fifty years, the US and Europe have gradually but rapidly abandoned two fundamental moral propositions that date from the Victorian era: first, that society at large and all responsible adults were obliged to organize themselves so as to protect children and advance their material well-being and happiness; and second, that the responsible and striving poor should be encouraged and conditions created conducive to their advance.
The term "Dickensian" as meaning desperate and degenerate poverty provides a clue as to what the rising middle class of the Victorian era wanted to remedy through responsibility, moral improvement, and work. Similarly, Dickens' emphasis on family and its supportive cocoon of mutual love, care, and sentiment advocated for the family as the foundation of human well-being and happiness.
The great scholars Gertrude Himmelfarb and Midge Decter did much to demonstrate that the family values often derided as Victorian were at the heart of much of the moral and material progress of the last century and a half. Similarly, researchers have shown that there is a relatively simple and clear formula for getting out of and for avoiding poverty: get an education, at least through high school; get employed and stay employed; get married and stay married; and do not violate the law or otherwise risk getting caught up in the criminal justice system.
The problem of course is that those who are not raised by their parents in stable long-term marriages have a great risk of missing that advice or being unable or unwilling to follow it. In abandoning the traditional -- yes, even Victorian concept of marriage -- we have embarked on an experiment that will not end well. People can be mercurial, but human nature endures.
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