I've been watching today's Senate proceedings and found myself very mindful of how this episode will play out in the history of our country. I know now, definitively, how the activists in the Abolitionist Movement must have felt as the proponents of slavery roared and blustered in trying to justify their crimes against humanity. Like a dinosaur flailing as it sinks finally into the bog, Rick Santorum and his cohorts have made monkeys of us all today.
Marriage is a loving commitment between people who choose to build a life together. Whether they raise children or not has no bearing on the definition. We do not prevent barren individuals from marrying. We do not penalize those who choose not to procreate. Marriage is a bond of love, period.
Santorum brought charts and graphs and wailed about how "children need a mother and a father". His examples and descriptions of male and female roles were so old, so outmoded as to take on the appearance of satire. If only I could find this funny. The caveman scenario of "Me hunter, you gatherer" is not even born out in sociology, psychology or archaeology, but somehow I suspect he isn't up on the current research. He cannot see beyond his narrow vision of the "proper" roles in society for men and women. I agree that marriage is important, and that children are better off in loving stable homes with a loving parental relationship. I just don't happen to agree that the parents must be a male and a female. Children with two happy parents thrive, without regard to gender. Parenting is a skill, not an innate gift enhanced or limited by the presence of ovaries or testicles. You don't need one set of each to form a commitment. Wake up Senator- times have changed. As Ann Richards recently told Larry King "We need more loving families, not less." If a homosexual couples' marital bliss threatens your own union, that union must not have been so strong to begin with. The love of one couple does not diminish another. Frank Lautenberg (D- NJ) said it best - this is just gay bashing, and political posturing.
I'm also tired of hearing about the "5,000 year tradition of marriage". What you call tradition, I call 5.000 years of an unnatural social order, imposed by violence and maintained with draconian laws that have "traditionally" relegated women and children to the status of chattels. The same patriarchal, Old Testament laws these Christian Supremacists are so fond of are the source of the world's misery, women's poverty, children's undoing. Our American Taliban wants to keep women in America barefoot and pregnant with no control of their sexual destiny. This same Senate was informed this week that the slave trade is alive and well in America. Tens of thousands of human beings, mostly women and children, all poor, all desperate, are being smuggled into this country and sold on the blackest market ever conceived. They'd like you to believe that these subjects are unrelated, and will wail and moan at the implication that their cannon is of less than divine origin. Don't you believe it.
Article comments
1 - RedTard
The senate is a little behind the times. Marriage has already been redefined from a lifelong commitment into a 1-5 year contract to save on rent while we look for someone better. People are more relustant to get married in the first place and, absent the social stigma, more couples are living married but seperated. Constitutional amendment or not marriage is on it's way out.
Instead of blaming "no fault divorce" and gay rights for the issue which has been presented by a changing culture we should look to how to solve the auxillary problems such as how to care for all the children. As much as eighty percent of the welfare burden in some areas is caused as the result of divorce.
2 - boomcrashbaby
This is an excellent post, I don't know why I didn't see it earlier. Thank you for writing it.
Gay people currently cannot get married, yet millions of children are being raised by gay couples. So whenever a Senator says that the amendment must be passed to ensure that children have a mother and a father, you know they are on the wrong track. Gay people are not suddenly going to say 'oh, we can't get married, so we can't have kids'. We will have kids anyway. So will heterosexuals. Single heterosexual parents adopt and others have children out of wedlock all the time. Saying that marriage is between a man and a woman in no way relates to which families children are born into. It's a fear tactic trying to bring children into the mix. I'm always glad to read/hear when someone doesn't fall for it!