Posted on 02/20/2004 11:28:38 AM PST by rightcoast
MIT is a private school.
I heard on the radio yesterday that it was DOA...just as I predicted when it came out. We do, however, need to keep supporting H.R. 3534 (introduced by Rep. Tom Tancredo). Write your Congresscritters.
Well, except Chomsky. But as the world's most brilliant linguist, he might as well be the world's tallest midget.
What an emotional response. :) I'm teasing you a bit there, but the reality is, homosexual unions serve no logical purpose whatsoever. They do not make sense from an evolutionary point of view or a religious point of view. They do not serve in any capacity to strengthen the fabric of society.
Homosexual unions are based solely on the 'iwanna' principle. And just because someone wants to do something doesn't mean it should be legal.
The point is that marriage has not been *inevitably* tied to fertility for at least 70 years or more.
Nor is "natural reproduction" necessarily the default in marriage. Many couples where the wife is over 30 or 35 need artificial means to conceive, which to some people is morally the equivalent of homosexuality anyway.
Alas, even this method of showing a "secular viewpoint"--whether or not it's an affected one--won't convince the hardened leftist moral relativist--or five supreme court justices. They can just say that the author is repeating a thinly-disguised sectarian "natural law" argument. "Is it any coincidence" they'd say, "that a Polish student makes an argument straight out of the Catholic natural law tradition?" Argument dismissed.
The TECH here is obsessed with gay marriage... Today's issue contained a brave letter that superbly twisted this gay obsessed columnists pro-gay marriage article to support the amendment...
That letter in question can be found at http://www-tech.mit.edu/V124/N6/saffordlet.6c.html
Its contents:
THE ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CASE FOR HOMOSEXUAL MARRIAGE
Sean Safford
The Tech, Volume 124, Number 6
Friday, February 20, 2004Adam Kolasinski offers what appears on the surface to be a dispassionate argument against gay marriage based on the legal principle that the protection of a given minority group must further a compelling state interest [The Secular Case Against Gay Marriage, Feb. 17]. In short, his claim is that the state recognizes the marriage of a man and a woman because doing so encourages procreation and that the state has a compelling interest in ensuring that people reproduce. The relationships of gay men and women fall short of marriage according to this logic.
First, its not at all clear that it is in states interest to encourage more children. In our own country, 120,000 children are adopted each year. Worldwide, there are far more children in search of a home than there are adults willing and able to raise them. To be coldly analytical about it, increases in both life expectancy and productivity rates mean that far fewer people are needed to make society run smoothly, not more.
But even if it was in the states interest to encourage procreation, what does marriage have to do with whether or not people decide to have children? Most of us are capable of procreating just fine without the governments help, thank you very much.
Kolasinski recognizes that the states deeper interest is in providing children with a stable, loving environment. Prefacing his remarks with the insightful comment that the differences between men and women go beyond anatomy, he argues that it is essential for a child to be nurtured by parents of both sexes if a child is to learn to function in a society made up of both sexes.
But his comments on the subject conflate the relatively limited evidence on gay parenting with the copious research which shows that having two parents is better than one. A review of the research published in the American Sociological Review indicates clearly that gay parents raise children who are every bit as capable on a wide range of measures as children brought up by straight parents. Indeed, because for most gay parents having a child requires overcoming numerous obstacles, there is evidence to suggest that gay parents are better caregivers.
On the other hand, it is certainly the case that, on average, children with two parents do better in life than children that grow up in single-parent households. Children of single parents, for instance, are 1.7 times more likely to drop out of high school. But the reason has nothing to do with whether those children are adequately prepared to live in a society made of men and women. The empirically verified common wisdom, to borrow a phrase from Kolasinski, is that it has everything to do with growing up in loving and financially stable homes regardless of whether those homes are headed by straight or gay parents.
The fact on the ground is that gay men and women are raising children -- according to research supported by the American Civil Liberties Union, estimates are between six and 14 million children have at least one gay parent. So Kolasinskis arguments regarding the relationship between marriage and childrearing are backwards. It is very much in the states interest to ensure that the children of gay and lesbian parents are raised in families that are as equal as possible to those with straight parents. The far more serious danger is that, in not recognizing gay marriages, the state will enact into legislation that gay families are second-class in status.
That is not only a civil rights argument; it is an economic one, too. Like all economic institutions, marriage can be seen simply as a means of reducing transaction costs. Marriage would save gay and lesbian families -- and therefore society -- the cost of hiring a lawyer to draw up 50 separate contracts covering everything from whether they are automatically granted power of attorney in the event a loved one is hospitalized to the right to securing domestic partnership benefits at work.
How efficient -- economically speaking -- is it to have to run home, open the safe, and run back to the hospital to present evidence of ones contractual rights when life and death decisions about ones child need to be made? Whose interest does that serve (other than attorneys)? From a pure efficiency standpoint, it is much more efficient simply to include gay and lesbian couples within the broader institution of marriage.
But casting the argument in terms of pure efficiency misses the point of the debate happening across the river. Kolasinski would have us believe that people get married because the government wants us to do so. The truth is quite the opposite: people of all sexualities have been hitching up for time immemorial. What has changed is the fact that more and more gay men and lesbians are doing it openly and with the blessing of their friends, families, and neighbors. The danger is that the state will lose touch with the society it is supposed to reflect. In doing so, it risks losing the legitimacy on which its claims to regulate society are based, and that is in no ones interest.
Sean Safford is a doctoral candidate in the Sloan School of Management.
The reply is that even marriages between people who don't intend to have children allow for the possibility of the production of children accidentally, so that such marriages still serve a public purpose.
In addition, marriage to cousins or polygamous marriages all allow for children, therefore, using these principles would require us to legalize those marriages.
Those cases are handled with other objections. Polyandry, for example, is rarely if ever carried forward successfully among the men involved, unless there is a separate strong rank-order bond among them. Tibetan polyandrists are usually brothers, and their birth-order ranking keeps the dissatisfied junior brothers in line, by pitting them against all their seniors, with the additional liability of legitmacy accruing to their elders.
Polygyny is more workable, but the Congress required the Mormons to put it aside before they would admit Utah to the Union. The moral conflict was clear and unambiguous, and the Mormon elders, with statehood glittering before them, blinked.
Incest is a different case and is handled by public-health arguments about the undesirability of intensifying even minor genetic weaknesses.
Adam Kolasinski offers what appears on the surface to be a dispassionate argument against gay marriage based on the legal principle that the protection of a given minority group must further a compelling state interest [The Secular Case Against Gay Marriage, Feb. 17]. In short, his claim is that the state recognizes the marriage of a man and a woman because doing so encourages procreation and that the state has a compelling interest in ensuring that people reproduce. The relationships of gay men and women fall short of marriage according to this logic.
Safford misrepresents Kolasinki's central argument. The core of Kolasinki's case is this:
Homosexual relationships do nothing to serve the state interest of propagating society, so there is no reason for the state to grant them the costly benefits of marriage, unless they serve some other state interest. The burden of proof, therefore, is on the advocates of gay marriage to show what state interest these marriages serve. Thus far, this burden has not been met.
[Emphasis added.]
Safford, besides insinuating the homosexual "rights" case with language like "the protection of a given minority group", which is propagandistic and beside the point, except insofar as the advocates of institutional change are a tiny minority, tries to shift the burden of proof to the majoritarians, which in the continuing homosexual attack on America has become a standard, and knowingly fallacious, tactic. It is not on society to defend its institutions, and it need not yield even on being shown a point of argument, but rather, should yield only if satisfied in its own conscience that the minority have the better argument for doing things their way, or for claiming some right, relief, or redress.
Secondarily, Safford's distortion of Kolasinki's statement becomes obvious with a little condensation: "the protection ....must further a compelling state interest...." (emphasis supplied) suggests that the state will not protect the civil rights of homosexuals or other minorities unless the observance of those rights is in the state interest, and this is an invidious and untrue statement to impute to Kolasinski. Kolasinski is not talking about civil rights; he's talking about a marriage license.
The key here is that society owes nothing beyond a hearing to the proponents of radical change, who bear the burden of making their point to the satisfaction of the majority, and not just of making their point to their own solipsistic satisfaction.
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