Let's cut to the quick and identify the underlying issues.
Okay. Here are some of mine.
On the basis of a long history of human experience and wisdom, and on the basis of contemporary research, I am persuaded that society is best served when the race propagates itself through the traditional nuclear family.
(Yes, Karen, I'm aware of your view that the pendulum has shifted from that, but pendulums have a way of shifting back. The sexual "revolution" of the 60s has been replaced by a much more conservative sexual environment. Many of the people getting divorced today are the cohort which grew up or were young adults during the 60s and adopted that looser moral environment. As today's more sexually conservative young adult cohort grows into adulthood we may well see a return to more traditional family values. The horse may indeed be captured and returned to the barn. That's how pendula work.)
If one accepts that theory, then any deviation from it is not in the best interests of the society. It is not only reasonable but desirable that society both give special recognition to and privileges to those who are entering into those nuclear family relationships. Those individuals are acting in the best interests of the health and continuation of society.
This does not make those who make other choices bad per se, though some of them are (those, for example, who choose to get their sexual gratification through extra-marital promiscuity, through rape, through pederasty, or in other ways.) But those who make other choices are, it is arguable, placing their personal desires and convenience ahead of the best interests of society.
I recognize that contemporary American society has become very much "me" centered. But that, again, is, I believe, a short-term aberation, and the pendulum in that, also, will return to a point where society values those who see responsibility to the society as a whole as being a cardinal virtue, and who see personal self sacrifice for the good of the larger whole as being noble, not stupid.
But in order for the pendulum to return, we have to keep in place the social structures which make its return both possible and as effortless as possible. If we make what in my opinion is the major mistake of elevating homosexual relationships to the same level of societal respect, honor, and privilege as we provide to heterosexual relationships, we place a significant barrier to the return to what I view as societal health.
That's a very cursory and off-the-cuff idenfification of some of the underlying issues. It has holes I would fill in if I had the time (and, frankly, if this were a forum where the benefit of doing so was worth the time and effort it would require), but I hope it establishes at least for those intersted in serious discussion (X and Solon being conspicuously absent from the list of those persons, since both of them are clearly more interested in disputation than dialectic) that there are reasons to oppose homosexual marriage which have nothing to do with bigotry or prejudice. |
