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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (133107)	3/23/2001 2:09:06 PM
From: Johannes Pilch	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

Not a "bad" thing. Not at all. I'm totally in favor of people honoring their contracts. Rather, I think lobbying for traditional marriage is a strategy doomed to failure. They're howling at the moon. Those social conservatives who would rather fix things than go down in a blaze of glory need to recognize that holding the line is not possible and they'd better start thinking outside the box. Well, this "box" outside of which you claim social conservatives must think is the box of human biology, and until that changes they will have no alternative but to lobby for permanent monogamous marriage. Humans simply do not alter their genetic makeup to one day be comprised of Father A and Mother B, the next day being comprised of Father A and Mother C. I make no claims about knowing the answer. I've only just started thinking about this myself. A couple of vague ideas have been mentioned on this thread. Someone, I don't recall who, mentioned abandoning civil marriage in favor of religious marriages. That person mentioned this because he saw that civil marriage is increasingly a corruption of real marriage. Little Joe, I think, offered a notion about childbirth triggering automatic marriage. I mentioned an possibility regarding turning birth certificates into contracts. A good idea, but why stop here? Truly, sex itself is the real contract. Maybe none of those ideas would lead to anything suitable for implementation, but I think they would be worth discussing. Civil marriage is a charade now. I don't see any harm in considering alternatives. Again, marriage is defined by human biology. All alternatives to it will by necessity be a corruption of biological identity. As someone who has practiced serial monogamy, I can assure you that it's not at all brutish, at least in the mid-term format, and can be quite rich and rewarding. Well, as someone who has practiced true monogamy, I can assure you that it reflects my very human nature. I explore my wife as I explore myself because of the trust she has in my faithfulness and the trust I have in hers. She is vulnerable to me because she knows I will always remain true to us. And as the years flow, her trust deepens and so does her vulnerability. I then find new dimensions to explore within her. The thing has now become mystical. Today, it sometimes seems my brain is hers and hers is mine. You cannot get such a one flesh experience within serial monogamy. It takes a lifetime of exploration, sacrifice, suffering and trust. I literally cannot conceive myself coupling with anyone else. But I didn't have any children. We have seven glorious friends all of whom came from us. Even my adopted son is inexplicably bound to us as if he had come from our bodies. I agree that serial monogamy and child rearing are not compatible in most cases. I don't think serial monogamy and humanity are compatible -- period. IMO, society has to find a way to steer those who want children into the kind of marriage you're talking about and those who don't have the temperament or are disinclined toward permanent marriages into not having children. I am trying very hard to take your view of marriage, but I am failing every time. I just cannot look upon my wife in the half baked manner your view implies. The idea that she could leave me to join herself to another man (!) is as unfathomable to me as... well I just can't see it. I don't mean to sound superior, but this thing you keep implying by your words is simply not marriage in my view. I think this is the disconnect between you and I (and between me and many liberals). You are willing to seek alternatives to something that in my view is not broken in the least and indeed mirrors the very nature of humankind.