As I described on a previous page, liberals are big on context hijacking. Rather than respecting those that disagree with them by convincing them that they are right in what they believe, they would rather take over words to steal the context, and so pretend they are synonymous. Yet their results are always disastrous for those they claim to help.
Gay marriage is a classic example. They want the general population to respect the relationships of homosexuals, and rather convincing them that they should, they want to slap a label on their relationships that will have the exact opposite impact. Liberals had been slowly gaining the respect and benefits for homosexual couples that heterosexual couples had with marriage through domestic partnership laws, but it just wasn't moving fast enough for them. So now their actions are only accomplishing derision.
I have very little doubt that they will gain their Pyrrhic victory through our liberal judicial system, but with it will be lost any hope of respect. What is really sad is that they don't seem to care. They seem to act as if all that is important is if the government blesses their unions then everything will be all right.
In my life I have had four gay friends and one blind one. One of the differences in the nature of my relationships with all of them, is that I could talk openly with my blind friend that he had a flaw. Not so with my gay friends.
Since I never actually broached this subject with any of my gay friends, I could be wrong, but I do know without any doubt that the gay community would react strongly against any accusation that homosexuality is a flaw. As far as they are concerned, there is no difference between being born gay as there is with being born with blue eyes. In other words, it's not a flaw, it's just a characteristic. Nothing more.
But I have a simple test for determining what is a flaw and what is just a characteristic. If everyone were born with blue eyes, could mankind still survive? Of course. It's only a characteristic. Conversely, if everyone were born homosexual, could mankind survive? Absolutely not. That makes it a flaw.
DA: Of course we could; through in vitro fertilization.
That requires an advanced civilization to pull off; one that we won't have if we continue to dismiss the need for respecting marriage as it as been defined since the dawn of civilization.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. I have more to cover before I can get there.
I see nothing wrong with people having flaws. I have flaws; you have flaws; we're all flawed in some way, so I would never consider disrespecting anyone just because they were gay. But I do disrespect anyone who won't acknowledge their flaws as flaws, which is the core problem that I have with the homosexual community.
Let's put it this way, I don't see any 'blind pride' parades, nor do I see any shame in being blind. Quite frankly, there are many reasons why I would rather be blind than gay, but one of the biggest is so that I won't be associated with people with such revolting behavior – and I'm not talking about what they do in the privacy of their bedrooms.
DA: I guess we get to add homophobic to your long, long, long list of flaws.
I won't deny the length of that list, but I wouldn't add homophobic to it. I've never had a problem being alone with a queer. All of my one-on-one relationships with them have been fine. It's only when you get them together as a group that they behave in deplorable ways. It started before the gay marriage rights issue arose, but it definitely culminated with it, and for good reason.
Whenever you believe you have a right that can't possibly be one (again, anything given to you by the government is a privilege, not a right), it warps your mind in profound ways that forces you to behave in a highly self-destructive manner. If someone is compromising what you believe should be a right, it will make you angry – and rightly so. No one should ever compromise on what they believe is their rights, but you better make sure it really is a right first.
There are many examples of rights that don't exist among the left, but the most profound is gay marriage. Not only do gays have absolutely no right to marry their lovers, I too also have no right to marry my wife. Government sanctioned marriage is a privilege, and whether the government wants to extend benefits to me for my marriage plays no role in the decision about whom I marry. The gay marriage issue has nothing to do with what the government permits or prevents, so it’s absolutely phony to talk about this as being about rights.
People who see marriage as some right, literally have their lives ripped of any meaning when some government bureaucrat is prevented from pronouncing them married, such as after the passage of Proposition 8 in California. Let’s keep in mind that we are talking about a state whose domestic partnership laws already granted gays the benefits that heterosexual married couples have. Also, this proposition was no ban on gay marriage, as the liberals characterize it. With its passage, the government will not burst into churches to break up any marriage ceremonies involving gays. They are free to marry anyone they choose, they just don't get the government’s blessing.
All of the bleating, and crying, and blood-curdling screams of injustice are just pathetic, because it’s over a phony and contrived right. If the recognition of the friends and family around them is not good enough, then nothing the government can do can ever make it right. When you declare that you need the government’s approval on anything for you to feel right with your life, you are declaring yourself a willing slave of the government; and that’s the point.
These gays claim they want the respect that comes with the name marriage placed on their relationships, but because they see it as a right, their response to the rejection of it is in complete contradiction to their desires. They either whine like little babies about what great victims they are, or they engage in acts of intimidation that only prove how weak their claim for respect really is. Do you think painting swastikas on churches that supported Prop 8 gained them any respect? Their cries of victimhood and threats of violence may indeed get them the empty recognition they so desire, if for no other reason than to just shut them up, but don't count on it gaining them any respect.
And I wouldn't look too closely at those polls that say there are more Americans now in favor of gay marriage, because you may not like the reasons behind them. Respect is something that is earned. It can never be demanded. I have seen many spoiled brats get their way, but none of them have ever been respected for it.
DA: Let me get this straight. You're against gays getting married simply because it's not a right. Why do you hate gays so?
For crying out load! I am not – repeat – not against gays doing whatever they please. They should live well and happy with their lovers. What I am against is what they want from me. And what they seek is for me to agree that marriage is meaningless.
DA: Where on Earth did that come from? We want no such thing.
Not directly, but indirectly you do. I'm aware that the goal that liberals are conscious of is to gain respect for gay relationships, but they aren't thinking this through. What they want is to change the definition of marriage so that marriage becomes nothing more than about who you love and who you have sex with. Well, the government can know nothing of the former, and should know nothing of the latter.
With this new definition of marriage, the government is being asked to hand out marriage licences to anyone who asks for one. Can you imagine if licenses to practice medicine were handed out on the same basis? Would any such license have any meaning? Of course not, and neither would a marriage license if gay marriage was accepted.
DA: So what's the big deal? Why not let gays get married? If it makes them happy, what's the harm? How does gay marriage hurt your marriage?
I've never said it harms my marriage. My marriage is between me and my wife. In a way, I don't believe it harms marriage at all. It is simply a symptom of a problem, and not a cause of it. I have no doubt that every single person who believes there is nothing wrong with gay marriage – and thus it should be permitted – is someone that has already dismissed marriage as an institution that benefits our society. As one comic I heard put it, 'Of course I'm for gay marriage. Why should they be able to get out of that misery.'
Gay marriage doesn't – by itself – make marriage meaningless, but it does cement it in stone. Our society was already on a probable course to oblivion any way. Gay marriage only makes it more certain.
DA: Sorry. You're not going to get away with that hyperbole. Explain yourself.
OK. Do you think we have a world population problem? – that there are too many people?
DA: And you don't?
Of course not. Do the math. There are currently 6.6 billion people in the world. Divide that by 5 and you will end up with the number of families (assuming that you want a sustainable family size) of 1.3 billion. There are over 172 million acres in Texas, which would leave more than a tenth of an acre per family, which is less dense than most major metropolitan cities.
The problems we have had with our world populations have never been about quantity, and have always been about quality. I remember growing up in the Los Angeles area, and nearly hacking up a lung after high school football practice. Now, with vastly more people living in that area, the air pollution has been greatly reduced. Our planet could sustain many times more people than what it currently does, but not as long as we continue to consider our selves as having a quantity problem with our population, and not a problem of quality. We could cut our population in half, but with the attitudes that still hold sway today, we would still be screwed.
DA: What on Earth does over population have to do with gay marriage?
Because it's all related. The attitude that brings people to the conclusion that there is nothing wrong with gay marriage, is the same one that leads people to see over population as a problem in this world. The attitude I speak of is the fundamental driving force behind socialism. Whenever you get it into your head that you have to provide for someone, then you have to view them as a burden, instead of what they should be seen as, which is a resource.
What should be completely unnecessary for me to explain to anyone is that you need people to create wealth. The more people you have, the better opportunity there is to create wealth. Yet the best way to kill that opportunity begins by viewing them as a burden by believing you need to provide for them. The entire liberal tax and spend policy takes money from the productive, which more than anything else, insures the productive will be less capable to providing opportunities for others to also be productive. And the less opportunity there is for others, the more you will believe you need to provide for them. It's nothing but a vicious cycle.
Once you have it in your head that a population is a burden, then there is no desire on your part to insure we produce more people. This is the prevailing attitude in European countries who are facing a serious population crash. The predominate family tree is one that is completely upside down, where four grandparents share two children and one grandchild.
The very best example is China and their mandatory one child policy. With their massive population advantage, they should be able to dominate the world economy, but they never will. While they have recently opened up to some capitalistic ideals, they still view the free markets with distrust, so they'll never break their cycle of taking from the rich, which limits what they can do to create opportunities for others.
This differing view of our population as either a resource or a burden is a fundamental difference between conservatives and liberals. Quite frankly, I believe that without first changing a liberals view on people concerning this, there is no hope at all at converting them to being a conservative.
I firmly believe that if liberals really did understand that people are a resource, they wouldn't be doing their darndest to destroy families, and gay marriage is a symptom of that.
DA: No we are not. We're strengthening families by defining them more broadly.
Defining anything more broadly does not strengthen it. "Defining broadly' is a euphemism for watering it down, and nothing that is watered down is ever strong.
DA: Not everyone can have a mother and a father.
I know. I also know that a driving force for liberals is that anything that everyone cannot have must not be considered as essential, and should not even be a goal in life. This is what motivates them to water down health care so that everyone can have the same. For them, it's just not fair that wealthier people can have better care. The same is true for their view of families. We all can't have a mother and father, so no one should really need them.
DA: I personally know several wonderful, well-adjusted children of gay parents. How can you say that a child needs both?
I don't believe there is a single adversity that the human spirit can't overcome, but key to doing so requires that you recognize it as an adversity.
Long before the gay marriage debate, I remember then Vice-President Dan Quail criticizing popular cultural figures for dismissing the need of fathers in our children's lives, and he particularly pointed out the television show Murphy Brown as an example.
This was a very eye-opening experience for me about how popular culture worked, because my first thought at the time was that while I agreed with his criticism, I was also critical of people like him who just complain about what they don't like. Why, I thought at the time, didn't he create his own show that advocated what he wanted exemplified. But as time went on, a strange thing occurred. In many avenues of mainstream media, liberals ridiculed him as if he thought Murphy Brown was a real person and not a television character. In no way would they engage him on the points he was making.
As a divorced father, I was very sensitive to what I saw in our society. I saw a great deal of effort put into ensuring fathers paid child support, but very little effort in seeing that the father was in his child's life. It was at this point that I caught on to our culture's path to destruction, and the liberal media's enabling of it. Mark my words, any society that considers what's found in a father's wallet more important than what is found in his heart, is a society that's doomed.
But all hope is not lost. As Proposition 8 in California points out, people realize that having a mother and father is important. It's passage was the people of that state telling the liberals that they want men and women to get together to raise children. Keep in mind, this is the only type of union that produces them.
Don't misunderstand me. I'm well aware that gay marriage 'blessed' by the government is inevitable, if for no other reason than the cowards in our legislation will have their judges do their biding by brining it about. But the government is not the people, and its the people that matter. Gay marriage will never be seen as equal to heterosexual marriage, and the liberal desire to see gays get married will only separate them further from the population.
DA: You do realize that all of the most recent studies show that children of gay couples do better than children raised by straight couples.
That depends on what you define as better – assuming you can even trust studies that are meant to prove a point. Also, comparing a highly self-selecting group like gay parents with a group that often finds themselves as parents without trying is highly dubious.
DA: What do you mean by that?
In order for gay couples to become parents, they have to go to extraordinary measures. A group like this is going to be highly motivated to do a good job. Many straight couples often find themselves as parents with little effort at all. This kind of group, where there is not a lot of thought put into becoming a parent, is naturally not going to do as well.
These are the so-called scientific studies that liberals use to prove their points that always leads me to suspect any conclusions drawn from them. In no way do these studies address whether it is important for a child to have a mother and father in their lives. Their only purpose is to dismiss these concerns, not to address them. Just because they do well with gay parents, does not mean they would not have done better with a mother and father in their lives.
Quite frankly, I am far more concerned with the liberal ideals these children will be indoctrinated in, and not that they have gay parents. It's the liberal concepts that lead to gay marriage being so damaging. In the countries that have gay marriage, fewer people are getting married and they are having fewer children. They aren't doing this because of fears of over-population. They are having fewer children because they view them as a burden. As I stated previously, gay marriage is not a problem, it's a symptom of a problem.
I find it very telling that the people who consider there to be nothing wrong with gay marriage or abortion are the ones breeding themselves out of existence. It's almost – dare I say – Darwinian. The Muslim take over of Europe is inevitable, not because of force, but because of a simple numbers game.
DA: So I guess you expect the gays to not try and be parents?
No I don't. In fact, I would prefer gay couples adopting orphans over leaving them in foster care, or even adoption by single heterosexuals. Having two people committed to the life of the child is very important over no commitment or just one person with no biological attachment.
But just as I would object to a blind couple adopting a child with the intent of teaching the child that being blind is nothing but a lifestyle choice, I would object to a gay couple that would teach their adopted child that being gay is not a flaw.
This is what really irks me about the whole gay marriage issue. There are some serious issues that need to be resolved, and there are children who could use some real guidance in their lives, but we're stuck on arguing stupid stuff, because gays are petulant little babies trying to redefine what a word means. In most states, they all ready have all the same legal protections as married couples do.
DA: No they don't. In no state can gay couples pass on their social security benefits to their partner.
This is exactly the nonsense that I'm talking about. Social Security is a pitiful excuse of a retirement plan. Rather than pitching a hissy fit over not being able to partake in a Ponzi scheme – whose only purpose is to rob from the next generation – why not show some real respect for your partner and get a decent private retirement plan that you can pass on to whomever you please.
As I stated earlier, most people who are for gay marriage are people who have already dismissed marriage as anything important to society, and this attitude is what should concern everyone. Yet we can't begin promoting marriage with a piece of fiction that the relationship between two men or two women is the same as a relationship between a man and a woman. You would think that homosexuals would understand that there is a difference, or else why would they consider it so important that their partners be the same sex as them? Obviously, there is a difference between men and women, and we must recognize this.
I don't believe we have any problems with relationships among men that have anything to do with them being men, nor relationships among women that have anything to do with them being women. Yet we do have a big problem with relationships between men and women specifically because of their differences. It is these differences and our inability to deal with them without blaming the other side that has soured so many people with marriage.
So do we really need a societal effort to improve relationships among gay couples? No, we don't. They get along with each other just fine. It's their relationships outside of theirs that they are having a problem with, and like every other liberal endeavor, their actions are counter-productive to resolving them. What we do need is a societal effort on promoting relationships between men and women.
So I'm not interested in retaining the status quo in terms of marriage. The entire reason why we are having to battle off gay marriage is because far too many people see no real value in traditional marriage. What I propose is the concept of pro-life marriage in order to differentiate it from marriage as it is seen now. It will highlight why everyone knows gay marriage is wrong, even if they can't verbalize it properly.
Being pro-life is more than just an opinion on abortion. It is about promoting life, and you can't promote something you think of as a burden. Life, or more specifically, new life, has to be seen as something we need more of, or regardless of your opinion on abortion, there is no point in promoting it. It is from this perspective that linking pro-life and marriage becomes very important. Without marriage being pro-life, we may as well have gay marriage.
Let's begin with what a pro-life marriage isn't. It most certainly is not about who you love or you want to spend the rest of your life with. That's just your lover, not your spouse. And anyone you're just having sex with is not your lover, they are only your mutual masturbation partner. Regardless of the gender of your partner/lover, if you're not promoting life, you're not married as far as I'm concerned.
Getting to what a pro-life marriage is, it would begin with the principle of synergy. Synergy is when you get something that would not be possible with individual elements. It is not something that would come from merely increasing the numbers of the same thing. Pairing two men only gets you more men, just as pairing two women only gets you more women. But when you pair a man and a woman you get something different, not just more of the same. A man and a woman would bring different strengths to a relationship, and these strengths should be cherished and promoted, not diminished and rendered irrelevant.
This is what has been under assault for much longer than the gay marriage debate. For decades now, the notion that men and women are different and so approach issues differently has been seen as an anathema by feminist/liberal ideals. Feminists want people to believe that women are just as capable as men in everything, and so should be viewed as the same.
Feminism is a prime example of what is wrong with liberal ideals. When presented with the very real issue of what women have to offer as not being respected within our society, they respond in counter-productive ways whose end result only further dismisses what women have to offer. They are blinded by the real message they send to our society, which is that woman can be just as good at being men as men are, but that's nonsense. Women make lousy men just as men make lousy women. Expecting differently is not just living in denial of reality, it demeans both sexes and pits them against each other as to what is appropriate for both to do, so of course there is going to be a lot of hate and disrespect between them.
A pro-life marriage campaign is one way to take this very real issue of women not respected in our society from the feminists, and moving it in a positive direction, instead of an endless game of war. It's one that celebrates men as men and women as women and seeks to respect what each brings to a relationship. Irregardless of the gay marriage debate, this issue needs to be resolved, and resolving it will also will also end this debate.
In all honesty, I hope that one day we will be able to have government sanctioned gay marriage as a way of dealing with the problem of children who need parents. I've said it before, and I'll say it as many times as I have to in order to get my point across. I'm not against gay marriage. I'm against what it currently represents. It represents that men and women are interchangeable, and this attitude damns us as a society.
This may seem counter-intuitive, but the path that leads to gays getting the respect they want with their relationship is not down the path that the liberals want them to go. It actually begins by getting behind the principle of pro-life marriage. An unquestioned belief in our society that our children are best off with their mothers and fathers solidly in their life, does not prevent gays from being parents themselves. Just because every family unit cannot achieve the ideal, does not dismiss the ideal as something that should be promoted.
Liberals really don't get why most people object to gay marriage, and their steadfast denial of the real issues involved only makes what they want harder to achieve. Actually, their steadfast denial of reality in all of their ideals is what makes them liberal to begin with. A pro-life marriage, like all true conservative principles, is the best way to deal the problems both sides agree exists. Once our society no longer sees gay marriage as a threat to their ideals, it will come about as a matter of course. It's not conservatism that threatens the respect that gays want in their relationships, it's liberalism.
The debate on gay marriage has little to do with the relationships of gays, and everything to do with the liberal agenda of convincing us that men and women are interchangeable and that children do not need both a mother and a father in their lives. Since liberals have almost no chance of doing that, it means our society is destined to be in a never ending war with each other over these issues. More to the point, if they are successful in convincing enough of us that their ideals are what we should want, our destiny is oblivion.