Sunday, December 9, 2007

Marriage Is For Faggots

Author's Note: All quotes from Zachary are in bold, all others are in italics.

There are instances when cruelty and accuracy amount to synonyms, when their colorful circles overlap into a spiteful Venn diagram. Summarizing Zachary Vallentine's paper on gay marriage-- Ornately tittled, "The Gay Marriage Debate"-- is such an instance. As an opinion piece, it's vague, illogical and poorly sourced: full of ignorant blanket statements and melodramatic slippery slope arguments. As writing, it's a throbbing mass of redundant non sequiturs.

The first two pages made me question if it's author had even encountered homosexuals. The last two had me wondering if he was raised in an Iranian cave where putting pen to paper shares the same legal status as sodomy. Regardless of upbringing and circumstance, Zachary is clearly anti-rainbow. Quote:

"While having an open mind and the ability to look past personal views is a necessity, the changing of laws to allow gay marriage is one situation that Americans need to stand together and protect the holiness of this sacred union."

And later on:

"Nobody should be able to tell anyone who to fall in love, or have a relationship with, but allowing gay marriage opens up so many other issues. Just because love cannot be explained does not justify allowing people of the same sex to consummate their love by being married."

What does that even mean? His 'It's good to have an open mind' platitude leads right into 'gays shouldn't be allowed to marry;' there is no connection. So marriage is sacred; marriage is a holy; and the institution is vulnerable-- an infant teetering over the edge of a shark tank, and must be protected?

Marriage is an abstract concept, governmental and societal, used to join property and people, not some fair-skinned damsel perched atop a conflagrated tower-- screeching for help. Yes, there are religious elements to the modern practice: when not being preformed in drab settings of a judge's office, the union is conferred by a minister of some sort. But whatever the method of attaining it, marriage is a much secular as it is sacred-- as much mundane as metaphysical. Would anyone go off on the safeguarding the "Holiness of tax brackets" or the "Sanctity of census taking?"

Of course I'm being unfair. Having experianced the trauma of my parents divorce at age nine, I'm aware that marriage isn't just some fancy notion reducible to a notarized piece of paper and ritualized cake-eating. It may only be an idea, but are so compassion and tolerance-- and idea or not, marriage has concrete ramifications for family stability and the quality of childhood. Which is why I found it queer to see Zach's paper skirt over divorce so nonchalantly; it's not mentioned once.

My parents didn't end their 20 year plus relationship so my father could run of to Cancun with our pool boy. After Dad moved out, Mom didn't start spelling her gender with a Y and wearing flannel-- they broke up over less tabloid-friendly reasons: money, arguments about money, trust, and my father's dependability. People quit relationships for simplistic reasons. Here's a 2004 survey of UK divorcees by consulting firm Grant Thornton International:

Reasons Given for separation:

* Extramarital affairs - 27%
* Family strains - 18%
* Emotional/physical abuse - 17%
* Mid-life crisis - 13%
* Addictions, e.g. alcoholism and gambling - 6%
* Workaholism - 6%

* Homosexual cabals N/A (question not posed)

The government recognized sundering of family units seems a a far more conspicuous threat to the marriage than some dudes with wedding bands brutally sodomizing one another in the comfort of their impeccably decorated home. So where's is the conservative backed movement to outlaw divorce in this country? Where are the propositions on ballots in the deep south-- the powerbase of the far right-- to outlaw this most immoral of practices?


Quote (from a 1999 study by the National Center for Policy Analysis):

"Aside from the quickie-divorce Mecca of Nevada, no region of the United States has a higher divorce rate than the Bible Belt. Nearly half of all marriages break up, but the divorce rates in these southern states are roughly 50 percent above the national average."

OH WOW I WASN'T EXPECTING THAT.

AND NOW A NOVEMBER 2004 ARTICLE FROM THE JEW YORK TIMES (by Pam Belluck):

"Kentucky, Mississippi and Arkansas, for example, voted overwhelmingly for constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage. But they had three of the highest divorce rates in 2003, based on figures from the Census Bureau and the National Center for Health Statistics.

The lowest divorce rates are largely in the blue states: the Northeast and the upper Midwest. And the state with the lowest divorce rate was Massachusetts, home to John Kerry, the Kennedy's and same-sex marriage
."

It'd be heavy-handed to focus only on divorce in a paper that glosses over it so completely, so I'll cherry pick some of the funniest arguments Zach came up with to battle the advancing specter of legalized gay marriage.

"If homosexuals were allowed to be married nothing would stop pedophiles from using the same excuses to attempt to marry young boys and girls. NAMBLA (North American Man/Boy Love association) is a perfect example of an organization that would try to legalize men marrying young boys. Americans would also have to allow polygamy simply because of love. In short, the simple fact that you might be in love with someone is not the only valid reason to allow marriage that is not socially acceptable. There is too much legal risk."

Comedy gold.

Does Zachary honestly believe it's a fine line between legalizing gay marriage and state-sanctioned pedophilia? That polygamy is at our doorstep the moment we pronounce some (un)lucky couple 'Man and Groom?' Those are entirely unrelated laws-- but if you want to employ a slippery-slope argument, it can just as easily slide the other way. Until doing research for this paper, I hadn't realized that the last law banning interracial marriage in this country had only been overturned a mere 20 years before I was born. Nevermind that amendments are designed to ensure personal freedoms rather than remove them-- The only exception being the ill-fated 18th or 'prohibition' amendment--, passing a ban on gay marriage sets a precedent for the government to regulate our personal lives on a national level.

After presenting us with the grim threat posed by NAMbLA's lobbying juggernaut, Zachary descends into several paragraphs of full blown inaccuracies.

"One reason why marriage brings stability is that couples go into marriage with the intent to have children. Since that is not an easy possibility, or a reason homosexuals' want to be married, it is easy to wonder what other motivations they have."

That's patently untrue. It's a natural human impulse to want kids; to want a family-- gays are not robots or aliens, they have these feelings too.

"Marriage should not be a gateway for homosexuals to receive the same tax breaks, rights, and privileges that heterosexual couples receive. The main reasons why homosexuals want to be married are financially motivated. Another reason they want to be married is to further their acceptance in American society. Marriage is a legally binding contract and should be entered into for the correct reasons."

Here Zachary's bigotry is at it's most naked. Where does he get that figure from? And what correct reasons? At the start of his essay, we needed to defend the "Holiness of this sacred union" and now it's simply a legally binding contract? We also find him ignoring the long, pronounced, and still continuing history of heterosexuals entering into marriage for morally dubious reasons-- but I guess it's okay when they do it.

"Even if raising children is a priority for some homosexual couples, have two moms or two dads is not the ideal situation to be raised in and learn how to properly become a member of society. There are specific things that humans learn from a father and certain things that one would learn from a mother. No matter how you try to duplicate the proper family structure it cannot be done. There are a lot of negative effects of children being raised by only a mother or only the father. How could homosexual couples be any different?"

From wikipedia's page on Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender parenting:

"The American Psychological Association states in its Resolution on Sexual Orientation, Parents, and Children (adopted July 2004):

there is no scientific evidence that parenting effectiveness is related to parental sexual orientation: lesbian and gay parents are as likely as heterosexual parents to provide supportive and healthy environments for their children"; and "research has shown that the adjustment, development, and psychological well-being of children is unrelated to parental sexual orientation and that the children of lesbian and gay parents are as likely as those of heterosexual parents to flourish."

Similarly, Children's Development of Social Competence Across Family Types, a major report prepared by the Department of Justice (Canada) in July 2006 but not released by the government until forced to do so by a request under the Access to Information Act in May 2007, reaches this conclusion: The strongest conclusion that can be drawn from the empirical literature is that the vast majority of studies show that children living with two mothers and children living with a mother and father have the same levels of social competence. A few studies suggest that children with two lesbian mothers may have marginally better social competence than children in traditional nuclear families, even fewer studies show the opposite, and most studies fail to find any differences. The very limited body of research on children with two gay fathers supports this same conclusion
"

I'd like to close with a 2004-era interview with Jon Stewart on Larry King Live:


KING: Will same-sex marriage be an issue in the campaign?

STEWART: Same-sex marriage is a very difficult situation-- and I was freaked out by it too... until I found out that it wasn't mandatory, because I love my wife and I'd hate to have to leave her for a dude... they said, “the gay marriage,” and people got upset, so I figured, well, clearly this means that there's a law being passed that we all now have to be gay... Once it was explained to me that [it was] only [for] gay people, I seem much more comfortable with it; It doesn't seem like such a big deal anymore.


Oh, one last thing:

Countries that impose the death penalty on gays:

Mauritania
Sudan
Iran
Saudi Arabia
Yemen


Countries that allow gay marriage:

Spain
Belgium
The Netherlands
South Africa
Canada


We all know which way our social slide whistle is headed if we choose to ban gay marriage.


Can we be more like Belgium and less like Yemen?


Please?