Saturday, January 3, 2009

I repeat: Civil unions are bad for marriage!


The debate about same-sex marriage is heating up once again like it never has before. Bloggers every where are obsessed with the fallout from the Rev. Rick Warren’s deliverance of the invocation at the inauguration, as well as whether civil unions are equal to marriage or if they undermine marriage.

Sorry for my diversion from my posts regarding the Hawaii 1996 marriage case – I promise to return to them soon – but this stuff is just too delicious to ignore!

A current thread I’m reading began with Andrew Sullivan at the Daily Dish, but that led to a blog at The Confabulum, which in turn lead to a column at the National Review.

I’ll start of with the ridiculous statements Mona Charen makes in her column for the National Review. She’s pulling out the old argument of asking where it will stop if you allow same-sex couples to marry – polygamy and incest is right around the corner – while acknowledging it is an old argument because the gay lobby rightfully labels it as a slippery slope argument. But she waves it about valiantly nonetheless, and offers this particularly ridiculous statement:

“But what about bisexuals? I ask this not to poke fun or to hurt anyone’s feelings, but in all seriousness. How does gay marriage help a bisexual? I assume that if you are bisexual, you believe that you need to have sexual relationships with both men and women.”

This specious argument completely ignores what a marriage is: a legal monogamous union between two people. If a bisexual man marries a woman, by virtue of the marriage he has committed himself to that woman. Any sex outside of that marriage would be adultery. I would expect someone of Charen’s stature to recognize the folly of her argument, unless she is deliberately trying to mislead readers.

Joe Carter at The Confabulum called Charen’s column “excellent and persuasive.” After reading that in the first sentence of his item from Dec. 31, I reluctantly read on (and it is a very long column!). Carter is a supporter of civil unions as a method to protect marriage. He trots out a slew of “gay” writers who routinely opine in favor of open relationships. Why is it that all the gay writers in open relationships get all the ink and we monogamous types are pushed into dim corners?

Carter doesn’t understand that by promoting civil unions, he is actually cheerleading for marriage’s demise. And that leads us to Sullivan’s bit posted today. Sullivan asks some very pointed questions, particularly this one: “Could a straight couple choose to have a civil union rather than a civil marriage and suffer no legal penalty?”

People who argue for civil unions, such as Carter, are failing to realize that civil unions will not protect marriage; rather, civil unions will further weaken marriage. Allowing same-sex couples to marry will strengthen marriage because it allows a group of people to publicly proclaim in a legal forum their relationship that up to now has been barred from that possibility. Expanding marriage makes it stronger because it will eliminate the options that weaken it. Civil unions weaken marriage.

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