When gay marriage activists sold the idea of same-sex marriage, their key points (other than the “if you disagree you are teh bigot!” that most of the lower-information supporters prattled endlessly) were:
- The idea that marriage is purely about raising children is obsolete – people who don’t intend to, or can’t, have children, are married all the time, even in churches.
- With the idea of procreation left out of the equation, why, really, shouldn’t two people who love each other be able to be married?
This, of course, introduced some new questions; if, indeed, “love” is the basis for marriage, why can’t three or more people love each other enough to get married, by that same token?
There was one other case I’ve been wondering about for the past few years; what kind of “love” do we mean, here?
Who Wrote The Book Of Love?: There are different kinds of love; the Bible breaks “love” down into three categories:
- “Eros” – physical attraction
- “Philos” – “brotherly” love, or deep friendship
- “Agape” (pronounced: “ogg-OPP-ay”): unconditional love – usually associated with divinity, sometimes also of the “Greater love hath nobody that they lay down their life…” variety.
The Vapours: With that in mind, gay groups in New Zealand are up in arms over a couple of guys – Travis McIntosh and Matt McCormick, who happen to be longtime utterly heterosexual pals – who got married as part of a radio station promotion.
They are not amused:
Otago University Students’ Association Queer Support co-ordinator Neill Ballantyne, of Dunedin, said the wedding was an”insult” because marriage equality was a”hard fought” battle for gay people.
“Something like this trivialises what we fought for.” The competition promoted the marriage of two men as something negative,”as something outrageous that you’d never consider”, Mr Ballantyne said.
LegaliseLove Aotearoa Wellington co-chairman Joseph Habgood said the competition attacked the legitimacy of same-sex marriages.
“The point of this competition is that men marrying each other is still something they think is worth having a laugh at …
Both of these gentlemen bring up two responses:
Yuk It Up: In a free society, marriage – no matter who is doing it – is always worth having a laugh at. There is no right not to be offended.
More seriously?: Mr. Habgood’s organization’s name, “LegalizeLove”, should give you a hint here.
Gay activists convinced a plurality of representatives that “marriageable love” didn’t just involve people who practiced “Eros” in the heteronormative manner.
So why must marriageable love include “Eros” (to say nothing of “Eros” between just two people) at all? By the standard we’ve been convinced/forced to accept, all love is equal. Why not “Philos?”
(And if the “Deep brotherly love” is only “love of Rugby”, as indeed seems to be the case? Love is love, dammit!)
Cue The Outrage Industry: Perhaps it’s time for “Philos” activists to take to the streets to fight for Pal Marriage. To combat the “Homonormative” hatred that is denying rights to other people whose love for each other is no less valid than that of any gay couple.
NoH8!
Last month I accidently stopped on radio station KDWB for a minute (honest, I didn’t realize that was the station as a commercial was on). Then they did a promo for the station. One of their on-air talent has….whatever it is you need….to perform marriages. So they were running a contest. He was going to marry a couple at the State Fair.
But he would only do it for homosexuals. Straight people were banned. So is that any different than if he would have banned interracial couples from his marrage ceramony?
The absurdity of it all! This civilization is doomed!
Does this mean i can finally marry my turtle?
In the arena of marriage and government policy, I wonder why people would ever think to consider love, whatever form it takes.
Should I, someone who does not know you (much less care about you in more than a “hey, we’re both humans” way), reward you because you love someone?
No. My policy would be, if I decide to reward any behavior at all, to reward behavior that benefited everyone.
Like traditional marriage: getting two potential breeders together who vow to stay together, potentially creating a family, potentially fulfilling their vows and creating good examples for their offspring to follow.
Sure, that’s a bunch of potential, but at least the potential is there.
When I heard about this last week, I was laughing at it.
The gay rights lobby was sounding like the most extreme pro-traditional marriage voices a few years back. With this, I’m not sure why “The Onion” stays in business. Life is absurd.
Seriously though, you reap what you sow. And this was a question of when it would happen, not if it would happen.
If sports talk stations like KFAN had 1) A sense of humor; and 2) weren’t so mindnumbingly politically correct; this could be happening here. A couple of committed ViKings or ViQueens (bro’s or broads) who while not homosexual yet having a deep commitment to the team and/or one another could be joined in usual wacky DJ style to add some humor to the todays dreadful state of football.
It would not be the first time a radio station had a wacky contest where two people who barely knew each other were married. Hell, there is a TV show dedicated to discerning and marrying a mate in the course of 18 weekly 44 minute episodes. Not my problem that marriage has been reduced to something people do like getting a fishing license or filing to run for Mayor of Minneapolis as the nominee from the Pirate Party. And I’m not blaming the homosexual / gay-marriage rights community for this – but rather the state and the wedding industry for turning marriage into nothing more than an expensive party with only short term implications when the reality is much different.
PS: Swiftee – If you marry your turtle, South Carolina will have to amend their motto to “South Carolina: 1st in Fireworks (and Human-Turtle Marriages), 48th in education”.
Does this mean i can finally marry my turtle?
If turtles have standing to sign contracts under appliable laws…
It is the Nietzschean will to power again. Marriage will not be redefined to make it fairer or more equal, it will be redefined to make it whatever they want it to be. The same will be done with every other social institution if they have their way. Women will not be mothers, men will not be fathers. Dirt will be food, love will be hate, peace will be war, lies will be truth.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the goal of Big Brother was arbitrary power, unrestrained by dependency on anything, even reason.
Tolkien’s Sauron wanted the same thing. The themes of Nineteen Eighty-Four and the Lord of the Rings are more similar than many people know. Neither could have been written before the 1930s.
“What can men do in the face of such reckless hate?”
“If turtles have standing to sign contracts under appliable laws…”
Oh yeah. At one time, African-Americans didn’t have standing to sign contracts. So if you oppose Human-Turtle marriages, you are just like a Jim Crow racist!
Nightwriter-
If Orwell was right, there is nothing you can do. I think that there is a decent chance that if Orwell had lived another 20 years he might have found religion, probably Catholicism. Well, if another two decades served to rid him of his very middle-class English anti-Catholic bigotry.
If Tolkien was right, to win you endure and do your job. Man is a dependent creation, and we cannot be otherwise (even when we are depicted as hobbits).
One thing that Jackson did well in the films was show the character of the Elves. They were immortal but they weren’t going to endure. They were leaving Middle Earth. Giving Galadriel the Ring of Adamant was surely intended to be an irony. Galadriel was the least hopeful of all the Elves, and she left Middle Earth with the other Elves, never to return.
I still want to know why the State is involved. In the olden days, the State asserted authority to prevent birth defects (can’t marry your cousin, had to have a blood test) and to prevent ill-considered unions (had to post the banns and wait out the cooling off period) because marriage was easy to get into but hard to get out of.
Nowadays, what is the point of a marriage license? Solely as a ticket to government benefits that are granted by reason of marriage? That’s a hell of a poor reason to license people’s activities. Get rid of the government benefits that depend on marriage and get the state out of the marriage licensing business altogether.
In Olden Times, marriage was parish business, recognized by the state. Then people started moving around a lot. It became harder to manage marriage within parishes. Blame Napolean and Bismarck when you see the State taking over traditional, extra-state authority.
On the other hand, I sometimes tell my Libertarian friends that you cannot find in all the world a political state that did not feel that part of its job was to encourage traditional sexual morality and sexual roles. The Greeks would have been driven into gales of laughter at the idea of homosexual marriage.
I am with Joe Doakes on this. Get the state out of providing marriage benefits and licensing.
I’m not quite with Joe here, but I see his point. If the state originally got into family law to protect the vulnerable–especially mothers and children–then we seem to have forgotten with this new law what the original purpose was. Might as well let Swiftee marry his turtle.
I am struck as well to remember that those opposed to the amendment banning same-sex mirages assured us that since we already had a law, the amendment wasn’t necessary. And then their legislative allies promptly passed a law allowing same sex mirage when they had the power to do so.
That ought to teach people to trust a Democrat, no matter what they believe otherwise, politically speaking.
The federal DOMA supposedly made a constitutional amendment protecting marriage at the state level unnecessary. The liberals said this, again and again, and then used the federal courts to undermine DOMA.
Mingo, Ive often said when the FDA issues a minimum daily reqirement for sand, Ill recognize homo marriage as legit.
What was I thinking?