The New Jersey court decision that permitted gay marriage has a political tint. Three Republican-appointed judges issued a deliberately provocative opinion that calls gay union marriage. The idea was to highlight the urgency of the liberal threat to basic values and steer voters to the Republicans.
The court decision contradicts other decisions, such as New Hampshire’s Blanchflower case which ruled that same-sex relations are not even sex. The New Jersey judges ignored a crucial point: just why does society offer benefits and privileges to families? Not because families tend to have sex often—otherwise extra-marital relations would be similarly protected. Not to encourage warm feelings—otherwise the companionship of good old buddies who spend evenings in pubs would be protected too. Societies protect families because God said, Be fruitful and multiply. Societies support families because families produce children who form societies. That’s why single mothers are also supported. Unlike cabbage, same-sex pals do not reproduce and cannot claim subsidies and tax cuts intended for families.
(The failure to understand the reason for subsidizing families has only economic consequences for the US, but political consequences for Israel. In Israel, we don’t want just more children—the habitable part of the country is already densely settled. We want more Jewish children. The politically correct Israeli government subsidizes Arab families which take full advantage of the Jewish checks, breed faster than the Jews, and continuously decrease the proportion of Jews in Israel.)
Gay couples are not oppressed; they do not receive benefits which were not intended for them in the first place. Bereft of children (and gays should be positively prohibited from adopting and debauching children), gay unions produce no personal, inalienable rights. As such, gay unions need no statutory regulation like the institution of marriage; gays who wish to have sex on a regular basis could regulate their committed relationship via contract.
People are neither ethnic- nor culture-blind. Xenophobia is a natural, necessary trait that builds boundaries and cements societies. We dislike people with alien habits— dis-like rather than hate. Can we dislike those who engage in consensual sex with minors? With animals? With same-sex adults?
Non-reproductive incest is a private business. Societies have no reason to prohibit a father having sex with his adult daughter. In the age of contraception, that sex is not likely to produce and thus negatively affect the progeny. Civilized societies do not prohibit sex between mentally challenged people who may produce mentally challenged progeny. By the same token, liberal societies cannot prohibit incestuous marriage. Yet they do.
Societal values are developed through centuries and myriad interactions. Values are neither explicable nor formally provable. One option is to accept them as is, the other is to question them all. When questioned, values always fail.
The Apostle Paul famously struggled with the same problem: having abandoned the Jewish law, Paul was faced with the need to regulate his communities. He eventually developed a web of ad hoc ethical rules, arbitrary and no less restrictive than Jewish law.
The fact that the ethics is indispensable but impossible to formalize opens a way to oppose the leftists. Two millennia ago, the Sophists developed an approach that won them debates with philosophers who, like modern leftists, tried to formalize ethics. The Sophists logically extended their opponents’ views to the apparent absurdity.
If gay marriage is permitted, there is no formal reason to prohibit other non-conventional marriages. Why can’t a father marry his daughter? Why can’t three—or ten, for that matter—people enter into a marriage? Why can’t a person marry his lovely sheep?
The New Jersey court decided that people are equal and so have an equal right to marry. People are equal regardless of sex but then also regardless of number. Ten people are free to marry into one big happy family. A man is free to marry four women, or to heck with the sharia: even ten women! A person who does not find a human soul mate is still equal to everyone else, and society must protect his right to marriage—even to a dog. Homosexuality is ostensibly a natural urge, but so are zoophilia and necrophilia. Hey, we have a world of marriage opportunities!
Bizarre as it may sound, file the papers with your local court to marry your adult daughter, a few female pals, and a dog. Drive the leftist ideas over the edge. Let formal justice face the consequences of its silliness.
Society permits heterosexual couples to marry even if they do not intend to have children or are not able to have children. Conversely, there are same-sex couples who choose to raise children, either through adoption, previous marriages/relationships, or surrogates. If raising children is the sine non qua of marriage, it needs to treat everyone equally. Heterosexual couples who cannot or intend not to reproduce or should not be allowed to be married. Because society has chosen to permit these types of heterosexual couples to marry, there is no justification to prohibit same sex couples from marrying, especially given that some same sex couples will raise children. The argument that allowing gay couples to marry inevitably leads to people marrying animals is a red herring. Given that the couples meet every other legitimate qualification that heterosexual couples meet — age, non-consanguinity, no other existing marriage, there isn't any logical basis on which to deny them the same rights as those similarly situated, which is exactly what the New Jersey Court found. I think it would be fine if society said that only people who can and intend to raise children can marry — but that's not the way the rules are written. You need to enforce the rules that exist for everyone similarly situated.
To Marc: We're receiving many responses; I will compile the main arguments and deliver them to Obadiah to answer. He says, he would write another article on that issue.Perhaps the legislature should indeed re-formulate the marriage as child-bearing institution rather than allow gay unions to be called marriage.
This is a weak topic to me because there are larger issues that need to be faced. the national debt is almost at 9 trillion dollars that we are borrowing from China and Saudi Arabia. The education system is in shambles.
Societies decompose from the basic values up. Abrogation of family values and loss of economic patriotism are two sides of the coin.
That was beautiful.
My reply to this got so long so I think it's better to blog it at http://wiku.blogspot.com/It's under the rebuttal topic.
What does gay marriage in NJ have to do with the political climate in Israel?
Well, the blog is not only about Israel.
American human rights developments tend to enter Israel sooner or later. Witness the gay parades.