1. Whether or not a particular African American thinker is offended by the comparison of gay right to civil rights is irrelevant; it has no bearing on whether or not the comparison is valid.

2. Gay couples in domestic partnerships cannot file federal taxes together, are denied many rights offered to married couples through employers, and suffer a variety of other inequities, not to mention the sheer indignity of being relegated to “second-class” pseudo-marriage. How any one cannot see this as harmful and discriminatory is beyond me.

3. The California Supreme Court, whose opinion often guides the rest of the nation’s courts, has decided that denying gay couples marriage is discriminatory and unacceptable. It seems strange that you would deny them the same respect you so blindly and unconditionally give the Supreme Court; it is clear you do so only because the Cali. justices’ opinion happens to differ from your own.

4. Your opinion about what is moral again has no bearing on what rights are guaranteed to gay individuals by the Constitution; our court system was created specifically to protect groups like gays from biased individuals like yourself. Further, every valid scientific study shows that children of gay couples are no more disadvantaged than children of straight couples, so your argument about “the best environment for children” holds no weight whatsoever. Incestuous relationships and the like, however, have been deemed scientifically harmful, and thus the comparison of those to gay relationships is completely off the mark.

5. Marriage is a union between two individuals who have chosen to share their lives together. No “redefinition” is taking place; it’s that simple. Just because you deem homosexual unions to be “wrong” does not mean that marriage between two men is different than marriage of any other kind. Your personal religious beliefs and opinions–even if shared by the majority–have no authority to decide whom I or any citizen can or cannot marry. Again, the courts were created to protect social minorities such as openly gay and lesbian individuals from members of a bigoted majority. Fortunately, the California courts have taken a landmark step towards equality for gays and lesbians–and they have rightfully determined that what closed-minded people like you find “moral” or “right” has no bearing on the rights of others to live their lives as they please.

All of your opinions rest on the inherently religious opinion that gay relationships are immoral. While you are welcome to your opinion, unfortunately for you, such religious beliefs have no place in government.

What exactly do you mean when you say that if Chairm or I disagree with you “for religioius reasons or any other,” we “should not be allowed to make a law limiting my choices”? Do you mean we should be completely disenfranchised? Or that we should be allowed to vote on everything but same-sex marriage? Should we be allowed to vote for legislators who support only man-woman marriage? Should we be allowed to lobby the state legislature or Congress to encourage laws that limit marriage to men and women? If not, what should be the punishment if we do anyway? A fine? How big? Jail time? How long? Should I be allowed to blog in favor of the California Marriage Protection Act? Can I write op-eds in favor of them? If not, do you favor a “prior restraint” or should I be punished only after I commit the crime of writing about things you disagree with? And again, what exact punishment should I face?

I really want to know.

You say it’s “hypocrisy” for traditionalists to “spend millions to amend state constituions to ban SSM while not outlawing single parenting or adultery if one of the main prerogatives of marriage is the stable home for children.” Well, no. It would be hypocrisy for traditionalists to marry a same-sex person while trying to outlaw same-sex marriage. But you don’t get to decide what your opponents’ values or priorities are, your opponents do. I’m pretty sure adultery is already illegal in most states. But my religious, political, and moral belief system doesn’t think single parenting (or gay parenting) should be outlawed. Why should I try to pass a law I think is wrong because you think I’m being inconsistent?

If you’re going to mention the Holocaust to an expert at gay and Jewish history who’s currently writing a book on the Holocaust, please try to get your facts somewhere close to the truth. The vast majority of gay men killed by the Nazis died in German concentration camps, not Polish death camps like Auschwitz. No one knows for sure how many pink triangles were killed at Auschwitz, but it wasn’t thousands (no more than 10,000 pink triangles were killed in the entire Nazi system). Also, I’m pretty sure the official euthanasia program against the retarded had only German victims, and thus there would be no point for them to be killed in Poland. But I may have missed something.

Many of Evelyn Hooker’s subjects were gay men living in traditional families. That’s actually an argument against same-sex marriage, not in favor of it.

People use shorthand when they speak of marriage and procreation. What is left unsaid, but is very strongly provided for in our laws, is that marriage entails the contingency for responsible procreation.

Not procreation of any and all kinds. Our laws reflect that too.

Responsible procreation is a set of principles and is not limited to the mechanics of conception and childbearing. I think I’ve explained this in an earlier comment in this discussion. Please take a look.

Contingency is compulsory, but procreation is not compulsory. Marriage unites the man and the woman for their sake but *also* and *intrinsically* for the sake of providing this contingency. Some would even say that marriage *is* the contingency. That’s how closely combined it is with sex integration.

Now, this is not an anti-gay thing. It is simply the essence of the social institution we speak about when we refer to marriage.

Granted, it is increasingly clear that SSMers refer to some other thing. Maybe you are different. Is marriage first and foremost a social institution? Is it an instution owned or is it recognized by the government?

It is also a private relationship, sure, but that cannot be severed from the social institution into which people enter when they commit and consent to forming their own marriages.

So either the social institution is both-sexed, and pro-child for the reasons I think should be clear to you now, or it is entirely neutral about man and woman and is pro-child, if it is pro-child, for reasons that point outside of the relationship type. Either toward attainig children via adoption or extramarital procreation.

Marriage laws are supposed to protect both the private aspect the public interest in the social institution. These may appear to overlap, or even to contradict, when a society experiences pervasive nonmarital trends — which in turn reflect increases in sex segregation (divorce being a good example) and procreation that lacks the contingency of which I have spoke.

The SSM-merger would either abolish the boundaries around the essence of marriage or if done via some status like civil union (joined to the hip of marital status) lock-in the false equivalencies whereby sex-segregation is the new sex-integration and where procreation is moved to the sidelines.

For a full answer re non-infidelity, read the materials that have been hyperlinked.

Also, if you can make the time, at least skim through the discussion provided in the exhaustive review of the available documentation on parental discrepancy which places the ratio at about 3.7% and does not lend great credence to the much higher estimates produced by those studies with the severe limitations you just mentioned.

There is a legitimate issue of proportionality.

100% of all-male or all-female scenarios go outside of the relationship and deliberately segregate fatherhood from motherhood. That is the inverse of the marriage presumption of paternity.

Reflect on your questin (quoted above) and ask yourself if all such one-sex scenarios attain children via infidelity.

* * *

Jaroslaw said: “I have a mountain of papers and books here and if you are truly interested I will try to find them and issue a reply with sources cited.”

I doubt that readers here need an exhaustive list of citations but it would be helpful to provide specific sources for some of the specific assertions you have made. Otherwise, an illustrative source or two on the general meaning you intended would be enough. We are in a comment section, afterall, not writing scholarly papers.

* * *

Re the SSM rules of argumentation, your complaint about moving goalposts applies.

You say, no legal requirement to procreate. You say, procreation occurs outside of marriage.

Now, people will use shorthand and that can lead to misunderstandings.

For example, SSMers will equate infertility — which is a disability — with the lack of the other sex. Or equate old age with sexual orientation. Infertility is both-sexed; as is fertility. Old age is the product of the maturation of the human being and thus is variable, not constant like the non-fertility of the one-sex scenario.

On the other hand, it is common parlance to say that this or that individual is fertile. But what is said, silently, is the inescapable understanding that one is fertile *with the other sex*. No lone individual, no same-sex twosome, and no parade of person of the same sex, can be fertile. Not without the other sex. So this is an example of a false equivalency that is the common trade of SSM argumentation — based on the normal practice of using a shorthand descriptor.

I would think it best to give people more credit and generally assume that people understand that fertility, like infertility, is both-sexed. But this sometimes needs to be spelled-out to keep feet on the ground and in reality.

As for the significance of the lack of legal requriements: there is no sexual attraction requirement and can and does attraction occur outside of marriage. Minus that, what’s the basis for claiming an equivalency between marriage and SSM?

Likewise with “love” (what kind of love anyway?) and with same-sex sexual behavior (what would apply to the all-male and the all-female at the same time?) and with any other feature that SSMers claim would be definitive.

So there is much lacking on the SSM side when it comes to legal requirements. But we do have legal requirements in the defence of man-woman marriage. I’ve discussed here just two which are obvious and vigorously enforced; these are clearly definitive of the social institution across time, geography, religions and cultures.

Can you tell us what you think are the essentials of the type of relationship you have in mind when you use the word, marriage? I suspect you must depend on very recent and novel innovations and not on legal requirements. Certainly not on some general rule that would withstand the pro-SSM rules of argumentation.

Gay people are medically ill, then morally ill, then psychologically ill. At the turn of the last century we could be jailed, lose our jobs, put in mental institutions against our will, experimented on (and yes I realize we were not the only ones). Thousands of us were exterminated at Oswieciem by the Nazis - not just Jews. Gypsies and the retarded too.

Everyone on this blog keeps saying how the traditional family is best etc. Then how come Evelyn Hooker’s studies of men in the 60’s couldn’t distinguish any differences between the straight men and Gay men?

As for hypocrisy -again, poorly worded incomplete thought - how can “traditionalists” spend millions to amend state constituions to ban SSM while not outlawing single parenting or adultery if one of the main prerogatives of marriage is the stable home for children?

And as an aside, it is not that you or David or anyone here who may disagree with some or all of what I say is not aware of the lies, but I can’t help but think a lifetime of exposure to negative thoughts tarnishes the starting point of hopefully objective thought.

The question here that Gay activists (and I shouldn’t use that term as if all Gay activists are on the same page - some don’t want marriage at all) - raise is not that the hypocrisy issue taints all marriages or that marriage isn’t desirable for the raising of children - it is the fact that conservatives claim to be championing children and the family while seeming to say Same Sex marriage threatens the family but adultery (or any number of other factors) doesn’t.

Really now, if 95% of the USA is heterosexual - and 4% of the births of billions (or would it only be millions since we have 35% of births to single mothers now) of married unions would seem to pose a much greater threat to the family than a few thousand SSM’s and even most of those will probably not have children. THAT is the hypocrisy that I’m talking about.

“More, that “paternity discrepancy” in the both-sex relationship of marriage is the equivalent of discrepancy in the all-male or all-female relationship types”

What are you trying to say above?

Then you go on to say paternity discrepancy was “mistakenly asserted by me” to be the result of infidelity. Well, if the child doesn’t belong to the husband, then are we talking immaculate conception?

As to the book I cited, well, I was trying to indicate I read a lot of things and to show I wasn’t only reading “Gay friendly” sources or “Gay authors.” I have a mountain of papers and books here and if you are truly interested I will try to find them and issue a reply with sources cited.

I keep saying I don’t understand what you find absurd about procreation as a marriage requirement and that you referenced it previously. Or how “my rule” invalidates the claims of SSM advocates. Perhaps I’m just stupid on this point but I don’t get it. I won’t put words in your mouth, but I hear people say marriage is for children constantly in debates.

Finally, I know you know this, but it keeps getting shoved aside in the quest to “prove” your arguments and I’m guilty too - but

Can we agree that marriage has changed a LOT over the centuries? Do you think for example that rape can occur in marriage? Do you think women should have the right to vote? Should women be the property of their husbands? That these things have changed is I hope absolutely indisputable. Would these things have changed if people solely relied on the absolutely true facts that “marital rape” has never been abolished anywhere else at any time? Women have never voted at any time in any other culture so we can’t change ours? That the “studies” which would have been done at that time proved changing these norms was impossible or “against the prevailing consensus?”

I admire your wish that all children have a loving home, with a mother and father - maybe that is the norm for most people. But configurations other than that, from the limited research we have do not threaten it. Many things do as I already said - drugs, unemployment from jobs moving overseas, companies closing, lack of health insurance etc. But SSM does not.

And finally even if you disagree with me for religioius reasons or any other - you should not be allowed to make a law limiting my choices. I don’t decide for you, extend the same courtesy to me.

You cited a specific book even as you shrugged off my request for your source.

Jaroslaw said: “Who is suggesting abolishing m/f marriage?”

That’s not what I said in my comment. You advocate the abolition of the man-woman criterion of marriage.

Would you have society treat all unions of husband and wife as if they lacked either husbands or wives? For that is the meaning of gender-neutralizing the relationship type that would be called “marriage” after a merger with SSM.

* * *

As for adoption, the facts are available. But here you might simply explain your own understanding of the assertion you made.

When you said that foster children are not wanted, did you mean a profile of children who, as a category, are unwanted by people other than gays and lesbians?

Attitude surveys, and actually practice, demonstrate that there are more married couples prepared to adopt children than there are children in the fostercare system across the country. The hindrances for “special needs children” are resolvable without depending on exagerated claims about gay adoptors or prospective adoptors.

* * *

Jaroslaw said: “Procreation is not required for marriage - no state asks if people are going to have kids or tests to see if they are even capable of it.”

That illustrates the absurdity of the SSM rules which I described in an earlier comment.

The contingency for responsible procreation is not about a government which intrudes on each and every marriage to force people to procreate. The government does not unilaterally dissolve valid marriages or put newlyweds on probationary status. To do so, as your comment suggests we would do if only procreation was at the heart of marriage, would be to undermine the marriage idea itself.

Contingency. Responsible. Procreation. The contingency for responsible procreation is combined with sex integration and this combination makes of marriage a coherent whole — that’s what a social institution is.

Is love a requriement? Nope. Is same-sex sexual behavior a requirement for SSM anyplace wher eit has been imposed? Nope. So your rule destroys the claims of SSMers when they try to equate such requirements with the basis for marital status.

From the WebMD Health News:
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/510514

New British research is rattling the roots of the family tree, citing paternity “discrepancy” in perhaps 4% of fathers studied. [...] Bellis and colleagues checked studies from the 1950s through 2002 that mentioned paternal discrepancy. The studies came from the U.K., U.S., Europe, Russia, Canada, South Africa, South America, New Zealand, and Mexico.

Over the years, few studies directly tackled the topic. For instance, some researchers set out to screen for multiple sclerosis or cystic fibrosis, noting paternal discrepancies along the way.

Some studies were large; others included a handful of people. Paternal-discrepancy estimates varied wildly, from less than 1% to more than 30%.

But those numbers don’t tell the whole story.

Some research centered on paternity disputes. Daddy discrepancies were probably overrepresented in those studies, writes Bellis.

Setting those studies aside, the remaining research showed an average paternal discrepancy of 3.7%, or a little less than one in 25 dads, write the researchers.

[...]

Because the researchers extrapolated some information from studies involving topics other than paternity, they say that the percentage is not a true indication of paternal discrepancies in the general population. However, “it does suggest the widely used (but unsubstantiated) figure of 10% paternal discrepancy may be an overestimate for most populations,” write the researchers.

In other words, paternal discrepancy might be rarer than commonly thought.

[Cited source: SOURCES: Bellis, M. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, Sept. 2005; vol 59: pp 749-754. News release, BMJ.]

* * *

Also reported at Fox News:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,165356,00.html

* * *

And the British Broadcasting Corporation:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4137506.stm

The current level in the UK is somewhere between 8,900 and 20,000 tests per year.

About 5,000 of these tests are instigated at the demand of the Child Support Agency to resolve who should be paying child maintenance.

Others are done to investigate inherited health disorders and others for social reasons.

The Liverpool team found that rates of cases where a father was not the biological father of his child ranged from 1% in some studies to as much as 30%.

Experts have generally agreed that the rate is below 10%, with a 4% rate meaning that about one in 25 could be affected.

However, increasing use of genetic testing is likely to boost the rates of paternal discrepancy, say the authors.

[...]

Professor Bellis said the consequences of a man finding out that he is not the biological father of a child could be devastating.

It can lead to relationship breakdown, mental health problems for both partners and even domestic violence, while the children involved can experience low self-esteem and anxiety.

[...]

The NSPCC said fathers who find out they have been raising another man’s child should remember that however angry they feel, they should not take this out on the child in any way.

“The child will still regard the parent as their father. Rejection could be a devastating double blow for the child, ” said a spokeswoman.

* * *

Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health
http://jech.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/59/9/749

* * *

Note that the marriage presumption of paternity protects the particular marriage (and its children) as well as the social institution of marriage.

David said: “I have no idea what percentage of children do not belong to their father biologically. I don’t really care. One of the benefits of marriage is it provides a father to all children born in wedlock, no matter who they belong to biologically.”

There is a legitimate issue of proportionality since the presumption is based on a sexual relationship type and this points to the core of marriage.

As your comment indicated, the presumption is strong — one of our strongest legal provisions in our legal system — and society should be very reluctant to intrude into the particulars of a couple’s conjugal relations. Because, for the far greater part, such intrusion is superfluous and is not needed to ensure procreative justice. The presumption is very useful because it teaches and informs the culture as well as guiding the application of Law. It protects children as the study above indicates; it protects the marriages; it protects the social institution and its special status in society.

In instances where the presumption is rebutted, the integration of fatherhood with motherhood is protected via a sort of overflow effect from the usefulness of the presumption. Married couples have consented to what marriage actually is and this entails the unity of man and woman. Without this families would be disturbed by intrusions outside of the marriages, not all of them based on a legitimate dispute of “biological paternity”.

Still, in applying the law we don’t say the government “knows” with 100% certainty, but upwards of 97% makes the presumption very, very, effective. If we did the opposite, and presume non-paternity until proven, then, there would be increased chaos in the lives of children.

The precise measure of the ratio is not really the underlying point, but the question was raised by Jaroslaw, and is raised by SSM argumentation, to yet again claim that apparent exceptions should dictate the rule.

More, that “paternity discrepancy” in the both-sex relationship of marriage is the equivalent of discrepancy in the all-male or all-female relationship types. And, yes more, as Jaroslaw asserted (mistakenly), the discrepancy among husbands and wives is usually, or mostly, about sexual infidelity between married couples. This then is used to suggest hypocrisy among defenders of marriage — that the monogamous basis for marriage is highly suspect — even as SSMers claim not to attack the binary nature of marriage.

Likewise with procreation — most married women, by far, will have babies, and most, by far, will do so with their husbands. Even in the relatively small proportion of children born of IVF/ARTs, more than 92% of the mothers use the sperm and eggs of their spouses. Proportionality is a legitimate issue especially when 100% of all-male or all-female users of such medical interventions depend on the sperm and/or eggs of third parties. This is the virtual inverse of the marriage presumption of paternity.

Where the presumption is pre-emptively rebutted — as in the use of 3rd party procreation by married people — the husband’s express agreement is usually required — and paternity can be challenged if that agreement is merely implied or is withdrawn.

Clearly this can not reasonably apply to the all-male or the all-female scenario. There is no applicable presumption of paternity based on the one-sex relationship type — sexualized or not. Nothing to rebut.

However, express agreement may be a point of contention that could be pre-emptively cleared away through a requirement that the non-parent adopt the child. This still means that parental relinquishment is a pre-requisite and depends on definitive intrusions by the government.

Individually, and as a whole, these things point away from the core of marriage and, at the same time, are not definitive of the relationship type that SSMers seem to have in mind when they promote a merger of nonmarriage and marriage.