Gay Marriage in California
The citizens in California had previously decided that same sex marriage was not legal. This is participatory democracy in action. A court in California yesterday overrulled the voters saying that this law prohibiting homosexuals from marrying each other was unconstitutional, regardless of what the citizens of the state wanted. Supporters of this decision re-legalizing gay marriage have been saying, “This is not about religion.”
I consider myself a bit of an expert on marriage since I've done it three times. I've learned a bit in the process.
There are some irrational souls who have absolute “faith” in their religion, even though reason and human rationality suggests that talking snakes and men living inside of big fishes is completely absurd. These same people sometimes take their holy books as 100% literal fact. Some of them feel that their religion does indeed prohibit homosexuality and most certainly prohibits same sex marriage.
I'm not one of these people. The religious approach to this quandary seems odd and a bit perverse to me. My opposition to same sex marriage is more rational.
It is very difficult to stay married to the same person year after year. Raising children is a demanding, expensive, and thankless task. Nowadays when both parents have to work just to get by, it is close to impossible to do as good a job of parenting as one would like. It is well documented that kids turn out best when they have both a mother and a father. Since having kids and then raising them properly is so vital to society, and because it is so difficult, society has decided to grant certain minimum financial subsidies to the two marital partners. Sharing of some social security old age benefits upon the death of one marital partner, etc.
On average two men or two women do not do as good a job of raising children as when there is a male-female partnership doing all it can to provide for and raise the kids as well as possible.
Marriages are easy to get into, but horribly difficult and expensive to terminate. I can see no use for marriage, either same sex or opposite sex, unless children are involved.
I think that much of the desire to get same sex marriage legalized is financial. Queers wanting the same government financial subsidies that straight couples get. There is no justification for financially subsidizing childless marriages. The other reason gays want same sex marriage is to prove that their homosexual relationship is Just As Good As A Straight Marriage!! Well, sorry you homos, but it is not. The relationships which are most valuable to society are those which result in procreation and continuation of the culture and the species.
If gays and lesbians want to derive sexual pleasure from each other, fine, who cares? If they really care deeply about each other and want to live together forever and ever, fine, who cares? Gays are only a very small minority in society. Their little perversions are really quite irrelevant in the larger scope of things. But there is no logical reason why society should subsidize their relationship.
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