Back when legalizing same-sex marriage started gaining traction, I noted that its supporters – at least, many of its most vocal ones – seemed to have a pollyannish view of same-sex couples. Because their love was (officially) denied, it was so much more real than unions of straight people. “I wish I had gay parents; they’d be better than my parents!”, said not a few overpraised teenagers, to the barking-seal-like praise of camera-toting activists who, I suspect mostly, had never raised teenagers, and know they would say the same thing about satanist, Nazi or Yankee fan parents, if that would piss their real, boring, imperfect hetero parents off enough.
In the heady days when same-sex marriage was all about activism, gay couples were perfect couples, in the public imagination.
I wondered, out loud (figuratively and literally), what would happen when it turned out that gay couples are only human? And (admittedly, somewhat cynically) that the real beneficiaries would be divorce lawyers?
Because as it turns out, they are.
The whole piece is worth a read, by the way. I have friends and colleagues who are in same sex marriages, and I certainly don’t wish them any of the misery divorce brings.
And I have to wonder – how many couples got married for the same reasons those teenagers up above threw their parents under the bus – to flip a bird at all the squares?
There are lots of dumb reasons to get married, no matter who you’re marrying. That’s one of them.
I really don’t care about divorce rates for make believe “marriages”. What I want to know about is what is happening to the kids these self-serving perverts are bringing into their shack-ups.
Homos and their enabling, leftist reprobates cite sketchy “studies” that support the notion that sexual deviants make great parents. Pardon me, but I think that is bullshit, and I think it’s time to have a look under the hood. You cannot tell me this is a model of responsible parents.
In addition to investigating home life, what are the effects of the government schools teaching children as young as 9, everything there is to know about the ins and outs of homosexual life?
I’d also like to see a American Lung Association style campaign on the threat to public health buggery poses. How much does AIDS cost? What has subsidized medicine done to the spread of AIDS and how much does it cost us to keep the Charlie Sheen’s out there #winning? What about second hand AIDS?
Trump has said he loves teh gayz; maybe he does. Personally, given his penchant for robust heterosexual activities and smoking hot women, I have my doubts. But even if he does, he seems the sort of fellow that might be amicable to putting in some effort into reigning in Big Gay.
Mitch, can you close my hyperlink?
MBerg: Do you have plans for a post re: Dayton retirement pool?
My cousin and his husband are working through the surrogacy process. They are both well adjusted guys with solid jobs that are gay. They’ll do great as parents.
My brother in law and his husband are both gay business owners and activists (one was a 1st time DFL delegate for Bernie). I’m glad that they have no interest in having children.
To me, the deciding factor is how I view “gay” as a description. Is it a defining adjective or an after thought to that couple’s identity.
(OTOH, that’s probably just my hetero-privilege talking.)
It will be interesting to see what happens. For 4,000 years, we had mom, dad, kids. And the kids are produced by mom and dad. The only common exception was adopted kids raised by a mom and dad.
Then 50 years ago, divorce and single parenthood started to become common (but that’s another story).
Then 40 years ago, someone thought of gay marriage. Then 10 – 15 years ago it was started to be implemented. What will the affect, if any, be? Instead of people being produced and raised by mom and dad, we have all these methods for gay couples. Will they turn out different?
One of my parents was adopted (but I know the heritage). The other…..I can trace my family back to Norway, Germany and Prussia in the mid-1800s.
How different would I be if two of my grandparents were men. Or were women you ordered a designer baby?
Only 15 years into the gay marriage experiment we don’t know.
OK, same sex marriage was mandated in a haphazard fashion, and so we find that same sex divorce will be problematic. This surprises people….why?
Article leaves me really with more questions than answers–gonna leave it at that for now. There are certain questions for which I’d love to see a few good, peer reviewed studies with good methodology. If activists on either side of the issue stand against performing such research, well, that just might be all the more reason to perform them.
About the article Mitch linked to:
Color me surprised that a marriage entered into as a political statement crashed and burned.
That’s without even touching on everything in her paragraph about a “gender fluid marriage” and “turning friends into lovers…”
Sexual monogamy is an expectation in less than half of male-male same sex marriages. For F-F same sex marriages, the expectation of monogamy is higher than that of M-M same sex marriages, but nowhere close to the expectation of sexual monogamy in traditional marriage.
SSM advocates, as usual, said that this was the fault of a bigoted heteronormative society.
What’s the emoji for rolling your eyes?
The state ought to get out of the marriage business. You want to get married do it any way you want. You want your spouse to have the same rights to your property as they do now…write up a contract. Give the rights over with open eyes. Marriage will get stranger and stranger till it means nothing. Let’s just cut to the chase now, get ride of the institution as a function of the state. Let the churches do their thing and non-churched do their thing. Then there is no fight over what the government decides marriage is. Give it back to the church.
It’s the only way to save marriage is to get the government out of it.
Passout, I dare suggest that the window of opportunity to get the government out of family law altogether is closed for now–we’ve got too much of a culture of “love ’em and leave ’em”, and hence we have a choice; some regulation of family life, especially when a child is involved, or chaos. Great opportunities for improving the system, but I don’t see ending it anytime soon.