As one familiar with God's law, I guess you understand that he made us Male and Female and that he ordained also that conjugal relations between the male and female be fruitful.
Softening up the heteros with the Birth Control most Christian couples these days consider their "right" as part of Planning their families, the State has for generations been obscuring the apparent differences between sex partners desirous (or not) of children and the Father and Mother -- Husband and Wife -- who not only form but obligate themselves to a family.
Why?
For all the useful idiot rant of the Libertarians and others, the fact is that the basic human condition is as Family, not the rabid individualism that informs our culture ... particularly our shrinks and sex therapists.
It is the family (as patterned after the Trinity) on which are based not only our most enduring bonds as human beings but also our sense of equal dignity despite the separate persons and different roles of family members and the notions of nationhood, much less community.
In destroying the family -- particularly the eradication of patriarchal authority in exchange for a Democratized Collective of individuals -- the State accomplishes two things:
(1) they weaken us absolutely, causing most citizens -- single mothers, impoverished, insane, failing, elderly who need Medicare, etc. -- to rely on the State instead of their families in the name of "independence"
(2) they usurp both Family and Faith as the source of all rights and justice. As arbiter and creator of our rights (to housing, to abortion, to assisted suicide, to all manner of perversion and even for-profit Free Speech porn featuring children ... so long as it's faked), they supplant and render meaningless and "private" the notion of the Creator as recognized in our Declaration as the source and guarantor of our human dignity and liberty.
It infuriates me, really, that so many folks get caught up in the sound and fury of gay rights, corporate benefits and taxation and fail to recognize that it's the marriage license which limited the State's ability to redefine marriage.
By restricting the marriage license to only those unions essentially (if not actually) capable of forming families, the integrity and meaning of marriage was preserved.
Marriage is not just a license for sex, self-fulfillment and economic benefit for the parties. It is also about the children born of that relationship. As an institution protected from the State's interference by the parameters of marriage license restrictions -- marriage offered some measure of justice for and recognization of the children naturally a part of the Family born of conjugal union.
Justice must needs be premised on reality ... on True and Enduring things.
-- like "faked" child cyber sex, the manufacture and sales of Designer Children, the harvesting of "Excess" human lives for destructive research and the right to abort the "clump of cells" in one's womb (unless a car accident en route to the Clinic causes one to reconsider and perhaps collect on the pain and suffering which truly accompanies the loss of one's unborn child) --... work to the State's interest. Their interest in opening up marriage to homosexuals, serial polygamists and other pairs and/or groups of purposefully sterile sex partners does as well.
None of their arguments hold up:
Recognition of Everyone's "Right" to the Marriage Union.
Homosexuality is an aberrant perversion of the unitive and procreative sexual union which sustains mankind. There is nothing particularly natural or genetic about it. It is not for the State to proclaim it's the "same" as heterosexual sex just to make gays feel better.
Recognition of Everyone's "Right" to Family Benefits.
Likewise, it's not for the State to decide for the Employer what Extras that employer will provide his employees as part of the State's "Corporate Governance" tack.
Just as I see no reason to pretend that working mothers deliver the same quality (and quantity) of labor and effort as working fathers who support their wives such that their children receive the undivided attention of their Mother, I see no reason to believe that homosexuals contribute to -- and perpetuate and civilize -- society in the same fashion that families do.
(Again, absent the State's specifically granting them the same "right" as infertile couples to "procreate", no amount of anal sex or cunnilingus conceives a child.)
Homosexuals, unlike heterosexuals, do not take the chance in any way shape or form that their union may prove fruitful. Therefore, they do not obligate themselves either to their children or to society in the rearing, civilizing, educating and support of those children.
In fact, regardless how much "love" they have to give a child, they are absolutely intolerant and discriminatory in that they enslave their children to their lifestyle ... their children have no chance to be conceived, born and reared by their natural parents or even to know their natural parents. A "Butch-Femme" relationship -- however satisfactory in the bedroom -- is not at all the same as having a Mother and a Father.
But who cares ... surely the pricetag on the Birth says it all where the Selflessness of Choosing Parenthood is concerned.
(Again, the beauty here being that -- just as with the artificial conception allegedly sanctioned to help out poor infertile couples amid the population explosion crisis -- stupid heteros have paved the way to this Artificial Reality.
They no longer have procreative sex thanks to birth controlThey've adopted the homosexual lifestyle (much less aesthetic) and put off marriage until it's so late and Money's So Important that it's critical they overcome nature's disinclination and ensure a Perfect Baby as is their "right" to do.
They no longer rear, educate, civilize or obligate themselves to their children ... they abort them and usually turn over their care to another anyway so that both parents may work.
The State Taxes Marrieds and Singles Differently
First of all, I see no reason for the grand State scheme of income redistribution in the first place but even if it were constitutional, I would still have no problems taxing Families (even potential families) differently than atomistic singles.
Perhaps if this homosexual marriage thing goes through, I'm hopeful the State will strike while the iron's hot and tax Homosexual Marriages through the roof as they should given the excess of Disposable Income that funds their Lifestyle ... the decor, the refurbished grand homes, the antiques, the drugs, the dinner parties, the coordinated clothing, the hair gel, the White Outfits, the Southern Decadence rig, airfare to Abisa etc. etc. etc.
As gays see fit to obligate themselves to some urchin either purchased from a Breeder or obtained in a more clinical fashion -- like a pedigree dog -- from a Company and incubated for them by some Third Party, then maybe the State could ease up a little in recognition of their actually having obligated themselves on a par with Real Marriages.
Folks like your average hetero couple who can conceive and birth kids without electricity, even, much less a slew of contracts, State Legislation and a phalanx of third, fourth and fifth parties between whom the storks carry bundles of cold, hard cash.
GSA(P)
Interesting. Are you saying it has been, or it should be, or something else? Jesus said no marriage in heaven. Does the same apply to a perfect world?
Prehistorical and historical evidence suggests that people first lived in kin groups (for 200K years), then extended families within tribes(neolithic structures had room for cousins and uncles but also separate sleeping quarters), then (in parts of the world) nuclear families. The Individual fits the trend. Tribal cultures today, who have no separate word for cousin and brother, would scoff at our nuclear families.
Just out of curiousity...
Unless one abdicates, to the State, the Right to define Marriage in the first place -- how exactly does the Marriage License "limit" the State's power to re-define Marriage??
Your argument amounts to a claim that "charter schools limit the State's ability to redefine education". That may be true enough in its case (that is, until the homosexual lobby secures enough votes to require new mandates for the Charters, to continue the analogy)... but only if you have already whored out the Right of Education to the State in the first place.
I mean, sure, if you are going to begin the conversation by assuming that the State has the Right to "define" Marriage, I can see how it could be argued that Marriage Licenses would "limit" the State's power to "re-define" marriage.
But, m'dear.... Why on earth should Christians "render unto Caesar" the Right to "define" Marriage in the first place?!?!
Revenge of the Begged Question.